Just Soup

It's been a while since I've posted anything resembling a recipe, so I'm going to fit one more in before we finish out the year.

Before that, I would like to apologize for our lack of a Christmas post. I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas! Ours was really nice. Nat had to work during the day, but we hosted a potluck with our English conversation group for dinner. Nat made meatballs and her pizza bread. I made my tomato bisque, with some minor alterations (addition of some finely chopped mushrooms and substitution of one Japanese leafy vegetable for another). We still haven't sent out our Christmas gifts or cards yet, but know that they will be on their way...someday.

There was lots of good food at the potluck. As always, there were leftovers, which are just as delicious!

The next few days were mostly lazy, on our part. Yesterday, I walked to the local convenience store to pay the internet bill. You can pay your bills at the convenience store! Isn't that convenient? You can also pay for Amazon.com orders at certain convenience stores and have packages shipped there as well. Amazing! I ended up being lazy the rest of yesterday and buying dinner at the convenience store as well.

Today, though, I made soup. It's somewhat my generic soup, but we had some kumquats on hand and I decided to use a few to flavor the broth (mmmmm!). As long as you keep a regular stock of tomatoes, onions, garlic and keep your spice cabinet stocked like I do, all you should need to leave home for this are the kumquats and some sort of base. If you don't keep some sort of soup base on hand, that is. If you do, all you'll need are the kumquats.

The result is a delicious bowl of soup!

Just Soup
(Today's variation includes kumquats!)
(feeds 3 or 4)

Ingredients:

• 1 Tomato, peeled, diced and mashed
  
• 1/2 a medium onion, chopped fine
• 3 cloves of garlic, chopped up however you like to chop up garlic (I like the bell-shape you get from slicing it, but Nat likes to smash it for stronger flavor. I go back and forth between methods. If you like, you can too!)
  
• 5 Kumquats, washed (if you have extra, you can eat them whole - peel and all)
  
• Soup base (I used 2 chicken "consomme" cubes which are quite a bit like bouillon cubes, but you could easily replace it with a can of broth or some sort of vegetable soup base.)
• Olive oil
• Water
• Salt - to taste
• Pepper - to taste
• Ground sage - to taste, though I think I used about a teaspoon...I think
• 1/2 tsp. Turmeric
• Oregano - a couple dashes
• A good pasta for soup (smaller pastas like orzo or alphabet noodles are best, but spaghetti or angel hair can work if you break the noodles down into small pieces before adding them to the soup)

Directions:

1. Make sure you're thinking loving, happy thoughts. This soup needs to be made with love, even if it's not in the ingredients list.
   
2. Peel two of your kumquats, mash and remove the seeds. Add the kumquat juice and pulp to your mashed tomato and set aside.
3. Saute your onion and garlic in olive oil until they start turning brown (I usually do this in my soup pot to cut down on dirty dishes).
4. Add mashed tomato and kumquat to the pot, stir a few times and start adding water. I usually use the adding water step as an opportunity to clean out my ingredient bowls and not waste the last bits (get the last of that delicious mashed tomato off the sides and into the soup!). I just fill up my pot to a reasonable level, but since there are several types of cooking pots out there, I doubt that is going to help you much. This recipe should make three bowls of soup, so use as much water as would fill three and a half bowls (to allow for evaporation and pasta absorption). You can always add more if necessary. If you are using a liquid soup base, use that much less water.
   
5. Bring to a boil.
   
6. Slice two crosses into each of the three kumquats you have left. The cuts should be just deep enough to cut beyond the peel and each cross should be on opposite sides of the fruit. Add these to the soup.
7. Add salt, pepper, sage, turmeric and oregano and let cook for about five minutes and taste the broth to see if you need to add anything. (I keep a small sauce dish on hand for this purpose).
   
8. After you have the flavor right, add your noodles and continue cooking until the noodles are tender.
9. Remove the three whole kumquats.
   
10. Serve and eat.
11. Do NOT spill all over the counter!

Okay, so you may spill it all over the counter if you really have to, but just remember that you're going to have to clean that mess up.

I didn't spill this soup, but last week's chicken noodle was almost a waste.

I shall leave you with a picture of Toshiko and me from our Christmas party. Toshiko's the one in Christmas socks.

Typical.

It's snowing in Iwataki!!

Not incredibly heavily, but there's big flakes blowing around and it's starting to stick. I'm really happy about this. I hate cold weather, but if it has to be cold, I'd rather it be cold and snowy than cold and just BROWN.

However, I also have Not-So-Angelic elementary school to go to today.

They insist I have lunch with the students (which is cool) but today the classes I'm teaching are both after lunch. Before, I thought this meant I could have lunch here and go to elementary afterwards.

Nope.

They're expecting me today at lunch, which is at 12:20. That's cool. The thing that gets me is that the students have like an hour of time between lunch and fifth period, which starts at around 2:20? So instead of leaving at 2, I'm leaving at 12, eating lunch with the kids, and sitting like a rock in the teachers' room for an hour. Awesome.

A little while ago, the administrator of the elementary school called. I perked up my ears, since, because of the snow, most people have been like, "You're riding your bike to Iwataki-sho today? That's kind of dangerous, isn't it?" and I'm like, "Well, it's quicker than walking.." so I thought it would be something along those lines. For a moment I was like, "Awh, they're worrying about me! That's so sweet."

Turns out it was just a reminder for me to bring money for all the school lunches they have me eat with the kids.

Typical. X3;

Snow!

So our first snow of the season fell yesterday morning. Our first slush fell the day before, but that doesn't count. There's not much of it out there, but it's still pretty.

It's also still falling (though it wasn't when I took that picture), so who knows how it will look later. I don't even know how it looks now. The windows are all fogged up.

Yup, snow.
We were told to expect the first snow sometime around mid-December to mid-January. We were also told that a high count of stinkbugs supposedly foretells a lot of snow for the following winter. We had a lot of stinkbugs. Do you remember those pictures of our pet spider? Well, all those lumps in her web were stinkbugs.

Speaking of our darling Nephila (yes, we named her), she's gone. She disappeared some time ago, leaving a lonely web behind. She may have been knocked down by the particularly strong winds we had the week she vanished and decided to rebuild where she landed...or she could have been eaten by a bird. Who knows. She's gone.

We sort-of miss her.

...

Sort-of.

Anyway, two days ago (the day of the first slush of the season), I woke up earlier than I normally do and headed to the grocery store without checking the clock. I knew when I had woken up, roughly, and realized partway there that the store was likely not open for another while. As I approached the store, I noticed that it was not blaring music and the lights didn't appear to be on, so I promptly took the next turn and began an adventure! Lucky for you, I took my camera along.

Okay, so it wasn't so much of an adventure as an "Alex walks up a hill along a road he's never been on before and back down it," but still, I have pictures.

We shall start with this: the closest Buddhist temple to our apartment (at least I think it's the closest). The picture isn't actually the temple itself (at least, not the main building). The structure directly behind the tall stone with writing carved into it is just the entrance gate. The buildings to the right appear to be part of the temple compound, but the main building is that rooftop to the right. It doesn't really look as impressive as this picture, though, so don't worry that I never took a picture of it. Do you see the pond on the right? It has a tree hanging over it, held up with crutches. I'm assuming that it is a flowering tree because it fits with the Japanese sense of aesthetics...that and it doesn't look like a maple. I'll have to check back in the spring.

I continued on the road and it was abruptly rural. This is not to say that we don't live in a rural town, but we live in the town part of the rural town and most of where I need to walk is also in the town part. So, it was quite startling to suddenly find I had wandered into the rural part. It was the walking into it that made it startling, not that it was there. We'd ride past several rural locations while being driven from one event to another, so I knew the rural was there...it just took some more active presence to make me realize it.

Oh, right! Pictures!

So I did a terrible job of taking pictures of the actual farms, but I got some interesting pictures, nonetheless. Here's the edge of a bamboo grove near a farm and the farm's shed. Did you know that bamboo is actually a species of grass? Amazing! Just imagine mowing that every week! But, yes. Those trees which don't appear to be able to support their own weight are bamboo.






Next up, persimmons!

I apologize that the subject of the picture is so dark. I blame the lighting and the poor angle. But "up" was the only angle available to me (it was a tall tree on a hillside), so here it is. The persimmon tree is standing next to a palm tree. It's hard to tell, but they're waving hello. There are still a bunch of persimmons on the tree. They are much smaller than the persimmons we normally get in the grocery store, but you can sometimes buy small persimmons too.

Now, let's get a look at this hillside.

You can't really see it in the picture, but there's a dirt path (with the occasional bit of wooden stairway) zig-zagging its way up the hill. Most of the trees are cedars of one variety or another. There are some evergreens of other sorts mixed in as well. The hillside was rather pretty, though, so I just wanted to make sure that you had a chance to see it too.

I continued climbing until I came upon a road at the hill's crest. Across the road was one of the elementary schools Nat teaches at (she's teaching there today). I decided to turn around at this point and I saw the bay (if you look, you can see the Amanohashidate). Turns out it wasn't much of a walk, and the rural bit I had encountered was only a tiny bit of winding, hillside road that Nat bikes up every Friday, but I still enjoyed it. Seeing the bay, though, made me decide that I wanted to walk by the sea. So, I meandered back down the hill. By the time I was nearing the road to the sea, a fine mist of snow pieces (there was no way anyone could really call it "snow") began to fall. As I approached, I noticed that the road to the sea had a police barricade. I decided that it was a bad time to visit the sea when a fire truck joined the police. So, I wandered through some back streets for a while, noticed a few stores I had never seen before and eventually made my way to the clock-on-a-signpost to check the time. The grocery store had just opened! I bought my groceries and went home. Later that day, the mist of snow pieces turned into a downpour of slush...which Nat had to bike home in. Poor Nat!

A hilltop cemetery behind the Buddhist temple.


.

Of Christmas and Teeth

This temporary filling is weirding me out. It's kind of made of foam or something and I keep messing with it. rawr. I'll be glad when the real one is in after the 25th.

We had a party on Sunday night. Alex played Santa; a bunch of ALTs and Japanese people came. Toshiko gave us a ride (thank you Toshiko!) and it was a ton of fun. Alex made deviled (angeled?) eggs and I made pizza bread, my new favorite pizza-type recipe since pizza dip.

...I should make pizza dip.

Drooling aside.

I got the cutest Snoopy mug!! It comes with a little matching teaspoon! I almost wanted to send it home to Mom but I LOVE IT SO MUCH. MINE. Maybe I'll give it to her when I come home. :)

Our Christmas presents are going to be kind of late. In all honesty, it's really hard to buy presents sometimes, simply because we don't have a car and have to rely on other people to get to places like Mipple (our local department store) in order to do our shopping. I've got a few things for a few people, but I really want to finish out before we do our sending.

If anyone's got anything specific they want, please comment and we'll see what we can do!

I really want to take another trip to Kyoto for shopping and stuff since I think I'm pretty used to the city now, and there's a whole lot of cool things I can pick up there. But every weekend has had something pop up to make it impossible for us to go. Grrrrr.

Though maybe I can find some good stickers in Kyoto, too. I brought some awesome stickers from the dollar store for my classes when I first came here and now I'm almost out of them. They're really weird things like sparkly, strangely colored vegetables. (green carrots, blue pumpkins, purple mushrooms and the like.) The kids just adore them, and the ones here in Japan are cutesy and all but they lack that ridiculous American flavor. Oh well.

We're going to be having another party on the night of the 25th for our English conversation members. The thing that stinks is...I HAVE TO WORK! T____T (that's a crying face). Because the school was closed for so long due to Swine Flu, it cuts into winter vacation. So...work for me. :(

Oh well, it won't be SO bad.

OH MAN

I broke my flippin' tooth!!

My mom sent me a package with some tootsie rolls in it, and I was like "Eh I haven't had a tootsie roll in forever" and tossed it in my mouth.

Then I was like "*crunch crunch crunch* ...Huh...did I hit a sugar deposit or something? Oh well."

Next thing I know there's this big GAP out of the side of my tooth.

Now, granted, it was a tooth (the ONLY tooth) that I had a cavity in a long time ago. A part of the side broke off, absorbed by the horrible goo monster that was the tootsie roll, and you could see the filling right down the middle and everything. I was like "welp."

This happened last night. Today I went to the dentist. Because you can do that in Japan.

The dentist cheerfully informed me that the filling was made of (either silver or mercury -- I'm hoping he meant silver because if it were mercury I'd be seeing wallbunnies and they'd be telling me to kill people with a teapot launcher) and that this was not good for my body or my teeth and wondered if I would rather they just take the filling out and replace it with the white one. I was like "sure."

So they --

-replaced my filling.
-fixed my tooth.
-cleaned my teeth.

Now, the way Japanese health insurance is, you have a 30% copay. I was all like "doom, doom, doom" because American health care is ...so...bloody...expensive...

I paid about 30 bucks.

For all that! I couldn't believe it. It blew my mind more than when we discovered the microwave could have metal in it without exploding.

I go back on the 26th for a follow-up, but for now I'm just amazed at how quickly and cheaply this worked out.

Kyoto And The Difference Between Schools

As Alex said, I've been SUPER busy last week. I've got a student who enjoys inviting himself over to play video games now, and this Sunday he proclaimed that he (and his younger brother, who I teach at elementary school) would be coming over every Sunday from now on. I was like, "Erm. I...might be busy...some weeks." Oi.

Last Tuesday and Thursday I went to Kyoto for an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher - basically we crazy foreigners teaching in Japan) conference with Ms. Matsuda, one of the English teachers here. We had a ton of fun - the conference was illuminating (though some of the speakers spoke TOO FAST for the Japanese teachers!! Holy cow, slow down!) and we got to hang out and shop in Kyoto after it was over.

Shijo-dori and Kawaramachi-dori, two of the huge shopping streets, are definitely places I want to take anyone who decides to visit us. The bus system of Kyoto is intensive as well, but you can get an all-day pass for 500 yen - a little more than five dollars. Kyoto is also one of the most historically significant cities in Japan, as it was the old capital before it was moved to Tokyo. So it has a ton of beautiful gardens and castles and pagodas. HINT HINT. COME VISIT US. I WILL SHOW YOU A GOOD TIME.

Also I found a shop that sells import goods, like.. (gasp) CHERRY COKE and tortillas!! I know tortillas are easy to make, but I haven't done it yet and when I saw them I freaked out. They also had feta there. I bought some for Alex. It was epic.

So on the train home I had Subway (another find -- I had a roasted chicken and avocado sub) and Cherry Coke for dinner. Mmmmmmm....I needed that.

Then, Thursday and Friday I had elementary school to go to. I go to the Angelic School every other Thursday and the Demonic School every Friday.

This particular Thursday and Friday I was given a very clear-cut example of the differences between the two schools. I was teaching both sets of students about Christmas. I'm not allowed to talk too much about Christian stuff, since they ARE public schools, but I focused on the family aspect of it instead of being like, "You get lots of cool stuff and it's awesome!"

Angelic School: A tiny first-grade girl approached me after the lesson and asked me in a sweet voice, "Natalie-sensei, do you know about Jesus? <3" I almost cried. It was the most precious thing in the world.

Somewhat Less Angelic School: The kids got into two seperate fistfights while making Christmas cards. Before lunch, a tiny first-grade girl approached me and asked me in a sweet voice, "Natalie-sensei, why are you so fat?"

Gotta love teaching.

Something Strange, Something New...

For starters, we both apologize for not posting last week. Nat was busy and I was lazy. We do have some photos of a couple odd things we found in the stores, so I shall share our experiences with you.

First up, chocolate-covered potato chips.
I saw these while in the check-out lane at the grocery store. I was amused. The potato chips are Pringles-style and are coated on one side with chocolate. The same sort of chocolate you'd coat a pretzel with. In a way, they did taste like chocolate covered pretzels with a lingering hint of "WHAT ON EARTH DID YOU DO TO MY PRINGLES?"

Nevertheless, we found it difficult to stop eating them (until they were gone and by then we no longer had a choice). I believe Potattcho is the brand of chips (to rival Pringles). I'm not sure I would suggest these, but they were definitely different.

I Love Vegi is really most remarkable because of its name. At least it is to me. We have mixed fruit/vegetable juices in America, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise. Some Japanese brands even show up in the US sometimes. If you ever see Kagome vegetable juices in your grocery store, those are Japanese.

So far, we've only been able to get this brand from vending machines. It's fairly sweet but, from what we've been able to read, it is only sweetened by the fruit juices in it. What's in it, do you ask? Why, I shall tell you!




I numbered the ingredients on the can so that you can see the ingredient list yourself and follow along.

1. Orange
2. Apple
3. Grape
4. Banana
5. Peach
6. Lemon
7. Carrot
8. Tomato
9. Spinach
10. Moroheiya (also known as Jute...not well known in the USA either way)
11. Cabbage
12. Celery
13. Lettuce
14. Broccoli Sprouts

Next up is our blueberry-grape dessert vinegar...to drink.

When I first bought this, I thought, "Oh! How novel! Vinegar made from blueberries! Well, I've seen vinegar made from champagne, roses, violets, pomegranates, raspberries and, well, lots of things. This shouldn't be any different! I shall make a vinaigrette!"

I did, in fact, make a vinaigrette and a small salad for my lunch on the day I bought this. It was a mistake. It was far too sweet for a normal vinegar, so I realized that this had some sort of special purpose.

After some research, I found that blueberry-grape vinegar was one of several sweet, fruity vinegars that are a current beverage fad in Japan. The vinegar is mixed with water (our particular vinegar-water ratio is one part vinegar to four parts water) and imbibed. I tried it and it actually tasted pretty good. It tastes like juice with a pleasant tang. I'm not entirely certain it's healthy to be consuming too much of this too often, though. It is still vinegar, after all. So, one drink every few days...and not along with a salad dressed with a vinaigrette.

Last, we have a picture from our Thanksgiving meal.

This is Peter Corn. It is pre-cooked cob corn in a vacuum-sealed bag. It is named Peter. We ate him. He was delicious.

The majority of corn in Japan comes from the northern island, Hokkaido. Wheat, dairy and beef also tend to come from Hokkaido. That's because these things just grow better there. However, since Hokkaido tends to have weather patterns similar to Michigan, the growing season is really short, so corn is more and more difficult to come by in the winter and spring. There will always be some corn coming in from some mystery location that is always sunny (which is sometimes Australia), just not as much.

The growing season here...I'm not sure. Some of the crops look like they just planted new rice plants last month, but I'm not sure. The camellias (Camellia sasanqua) did just start blooming around the beginning of November and are still going, though. They're very pretty. I've been told that one house (or maybe it was a shrine) has a camellia festival in the spring, though those camellias are a different kind (Camellia japonica). The two types of camellias are considered completely different flowers by the Japanese. The autumn camellias are known as "sazanka" and the spring camellias are known as "tsubaki".