Persimmony Rice Pudding

It worked! I made some persimmon and rice pudding, adapted from some stove-top rice pudding recipe I discovered somewhere on the vast internet sea. This means it's time for another recipe post!

Persimmony Rice Pudding
(Adapted from some recipe somewhere else
that had no persimmons in it at all)

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup White Rice, uncooked (If you can get your hands on it, I highly suggest mochi rice, as it's texture lends itself best to rice pudding)
• 1 1/2 cup Water
• 2-3 ripe Persimmons (Note that if the persimmon is somewhat dark inside and has a lot of grainy-looking dark spots, this is actually a good thing. This is actually an indicator that it is ripe.) *Edit: After a second go at this, I would say that three normal-sized persimmons or four small-sized persimmons are good, plus an extra persimmon for garnish.
  
• 2 cups of milk (You will use 1 1/2 cup and 1/2 cup separately)
• 1/3 cup Granulated sugar
• 1/4 tsp Salt
• 1 Egg, beaten
• 1 Tbsp Butter (I'm tempted to say that butter is optional, but I haven't tried it without, so I can't say for certain)
  

Optional Ingredients (I do not recommending using these all together, they are each their own variation):

• 1/2 tsp Vanilla (optional)
• 1/2 tsp Ginger root (optional)
• Nutmeg
• 1/4-1/3 cup Raisins

Directions:

1. Peel, deseed and cut one or two persimmons into small cubes. Whether you use one or two depends on how strong you want the flavor to be. Either way should taste good.
2. Mash the persimmon. You may use whichever method to do this you prefer. I use a mortar and pestil, but I realize that this is a long and tedious process that many people do not have the time or patience for. That, and many people don't own a mortar and pestil. You can also use a food processor or a blender. Whatever makes it look like orange slime works. *Optional step: If you are adding ginger to this recipe and you are using fresh ginger root, add it here and get it all properly mashed up along with the persimmon.
3. In a pot or saucepan that you think can handle 4 or more cups of this stuff, bring the water to a boil. Add the rice and mashed persimmon. Reduce the heat and allow it all to simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Stir up the rice mixture. Add 1 1/2 cups of milk, salt and sugar. Stir and cook over medium heat until it is thick and creamy. This may take another 20 minutes, it may not. It all depends on how cooperative your mixture feels. *Optional step: If using raisins, add them here. I abhor cooked raisins, so I will never be using this step. But some people like them, so this step is for those people. If you are using powdered ginger, add that here as well.
   
5. Slowly stir in the leftover 1/2 cup of milk and the beaten egg. This is more important for the egg than for the milk, as the egg will start cooking immediately and you want to get it as evenly mixed into the pudding as possible. Also, you may wish to turn down the heat a little at this point, so as to keep the pudding from popping out at you.
6. Continue cooking for another two minutes while you STIR CONTINUOUSLY. Don't stop. Really.
7. Remove from heat and stir in the butter. *Optional step: If you are using vanilla, now is the time to add it.
8. Dish the pudding up. Peel, seed and cut up your second (or third) persimmon into small pieces (strips, cubes, little hearts...you choose!) and place them on top as garnish or put them in a bowl for people to add as much or as little as they want to their own pudding. Heck, do both! *Optional step: If you are using nutmeg, sprinkle it sparingly over the top of each serving before adding the persimmon garnish.

That's it! This recipe should feed at least five people. Unless you eat a whole, freaking lot. In which case, shame on you! You should have saved some for the others!

Dinner itself was a mishap (a delicious mishap, but a mishap nonetheless), but that was due to my being distracted by the pudding when I should have taken some noodles off the burner, resulting in some very mushy yakisoba. Mmmm...mushy yakisoba.....

Mai Hasubando

Alex made me a hamburger for dinner with avocado on it, and his spinach and rice on the side.

After how insanely busy I've been all week, I was like "AI LOVE YU"

I love him. ;_;

Kawaii Girl met up with What's Up girl and the two of them and I hung out before class today. (What's Up girl is a very enthusiastic third grader who likes going "what's up!" and knocking knucks. She's hilarious.) Apparently I'm cute because I'm short and look like Harry Potter (to the Japanese student mind). Also, it has been noticed that I smell good (!?!?). I was like, "Kay...I ..need a shower...?" Weirdness.

I don't have much substance for a post right now, I just wanted to hop on and tell everyone how awesome Alex is. ^_^

Okay, back on topic.

So here we are in Japan.

Alex and I left the U.S. on August 1st. I spent a three day orientation in Tokyo before heading to my assigned area - Iwataki. Iwataki is actually one-third of a larger town called 'Yosano'. But Iwataki, Nodagawa, and Kaya (the two towns to the south) were all three so incredibly tiny that they merged into Yosano a few years ago.

Lots of interesting things have happened that I wanted to write about but just didn't have the time. Hopefully now I'll be able to keep track of everything more easily, and therefore be able to have this blog to remember upstairs.

This morning I asked the music teacher, Ms. Fujimura, where I could buy a violin. I have a violin at home, but it'd be cheaper to just buy a cheap school-grade violin than have my regular one shipped carefully over to me by air-mail. She got all excited. She asked if I could sing, too. The English teacher informed me that she wants to play a duet, piano/violin, at the Culture Festival coming up next month. When she asked me if I can sing, I said I could, but my range was kind of weird....I'm sure it came out in Japanese as "My singing stovetop is unusual." (The Japanese word for stovetop is ガスレンジ (gasurenji - "Gas Range") and the word for microwave is 電気レンジ (denkirenji - "Electric Range") - of course the word for an electric stovetop is 電気ガスレンジ　(denkigasurenji - "Electric Gas Range" - classic) so when I talked about my singing range and used the word 'renji' I'm sure it wasn't the right choice!

The last couple days have been ...buggy. Even before the bee-eating incident. The previous day, I had to save the brass band from a marauding bee (Not just any bee, but a legendary Japanese suzumebachi - check it out on Wikipedia for the full horror. This is also the kind of bee that I ate) and had the unique opportunity to gently hold a Japanese emerald swallowtail butterfly after it kept smacking against the classroom window and let the gorgeous little moron outside. Those emerald swallowtails are absolutely everywhere. I love it. And they're about the size of my hand.

We also have some pretty massive spiders around. The garden spiders are actually kind of pretty, but the ones that hang out outside our apartment are pretty nasty. I'd freak out if one of them just popped up anywhere, since, they're still spiders and they're still huge. But I'll see if I can't get some pictures.

Alex and I got a gorgeous camera for our wedding - an Olympus SP-510UZ. The problem is, most of our camera memory cards were SD cards and this took an XD card - until recently I had my own little digital camera, and we used the old one usually because it could use SD cards. But after we sold it at the garage sale, we discovered that our awesome new camera only had capacity for 16 pictures without any sort of card.

So last night Toshiko, one of the ladies from the eikaiwa (English Conversation) group - an adult group of friends who gets together at a local izakaya (a sort of restaurant that just brings a bunch of group dishes and alchohol. It's a restaurant perfectly suited for getting together and hanging out) and talks and gossips and laughs in English - took us to an electronics store. Toshiko is absolutely hilarious. The store is called KS-Denki (Denki = 電気 - Electric Power) but when people say it it sounds like they're saying K-Stanky. We bought a 2 gig memory card for the camera and now have capacity for about 1100 pictures. Woowoo!

What else, what else. Alex made a really good dish last night with tofu, egg, and goya (Japanese 'bitter melon' - Wikipedia it, it looks freakish!). It was a great experiment. It was a little...bitter...but goya is always bitter, and next time we'll just cook it for longer. It's really good for you though, so that's fun.

Today I'm ordering a bento lunch. This school doesn't actually have a school lunch, so most of the teachers order one from a nearby restaurant. The restaurant employs mentally handicapped people, so that's pretty cool. I'll try to take a picture of the bento to show everybody. Yesterday's was pretty cool.

I think that's pretty much all for now. One of the students keeps screaming "KAWAIIIIIIII" when she sees me, following up with "SO CUTE" or "SO PRET-TY" in adorable middle-school English. She'll be fun in class when it starts.

I think I'm going to keep track of the stuff I talk about in the tags. Like posts with Japanese words and stuff in them I'll tag 'Japanese vocab' and cooking posts I'll tag as 'Japanese Food' or something. <3