The Little Toaster Oven That Could

Merry Christmas from Japan!

Mochi mo ii (desu ne)

Fresh mochi with real strawberries in 'em from the Koshoji temple fair near Keitorin's place. It was a cold, miserable, rainy December day, but these mochi definitely made it a little more bearable!

Ariel, on How To Drink Ramune

When Ariel and I were in Osaka, which is one of the weirdest places on the planet, we ended up in a bizarre, garish "marketplace" with a store selling strange flavours of ramune. (Pronounce: rah-moo-nay)

We had to try the tako-yaki flavoured ramune, because:

a) what the heck

and

b) Ariel had never eaten tako-yaki.

The first step: breaking the seal.

Wordless Wednesday

Shepherd's pie in the toaster oven

Basically this has been my lunch for the last week, and will be in the coming week as well!

Gluten-free persimmon bread

Well, more like cake, but I digress...

Persimmons have been in season here in Japan for the last month or so: the fruits section of the grocery store is full of what seem to be squashed, bright orange tomatoes... which is definitely what I thought they were on first sighting. Before coming to Japan, I'd never eaten a persimmon; they're not native to, or even common, where I'm from, so I confess that I actually Googled "how to eat persimmon" before tasting my first one.

Wordless Wednesday

More Mochi!

These recently appeared at my hyaku-en Lawson's. They're just plain little mochi balls, but the red bean inside is a tad sweeter, and the outside is covered in toasted sesame seeds.

They're small, but super-delicious. This is my current favourite after-work snack, although I have no idea of the calories, or even if it contains trace amounts of gluten. I suspect they're pretty clean, though.

Advanced Baked Apple!

Use exactly this kind of apple or your recipe will taste horrible and you will fail as a cook, for serious :|

Or rather, my attempt at making a sort of applesauce in my rice-cooker. It turned out a little less saucy and a little more stew-y, but it was delish nonetheless. This is for all you people who can't eat raw food and/or are on a liquid diet (like myself right now).

Rudimentary baked apple

What you can't see is the delicious steam rising from them, or the juice in the bottom.

Perfect for a cold fall night!

Ingredients:

-1 apple (or half of an apple the size of two fists combined, which is what I had)
-1 spoon brown sugar
-cinnamon
-tiny bit of water

Slice up your apple and core it. Mix together brown sugar and cinnamon. Make sure hte apple slices are thin, and arrange them in a tinfoil pan, sprinkling the brown sugar and cinnamon mixture on top of each layer. If your apple's not very juicy, add a tiny bit of water in the bottom of the pan. Pop that sucker in the toaster oven for about eight minutes.

Careful when you take it out: it's hot.

Gigantic veggies and the Mochi Experiment

Check it out. It's a sweet potato. AND IT'S ALL MINE.

Okay, this Mochi Experiment is because I loooooooooove mochi and I've unconsciously begun searching out and trying all the new ones I can. So... I've decided to document my search. First on the docket...

Brazilian cheese puffs

I have too much tapioca flour. I needed to use it. I found this recipe on Yahoo Answers and decided to try it out!

Hearty tomato-vegetable soup

Mmmmmmm...

 Today is a rainy, chilly fall day. I'm sleep-deprived, coming down with a cold, and the boots I ordered online are not my size. Today is not my day... so it's time for some hearty comfort food! I scraped this together with odds and ends of things that have been living in my fridge for a while or on my shelf, so it's a little impromptu, and also my pan turned out to be slightly too small for this, but oh well. It's delicious.

Men's Pudding

This is a new item in my 100-yen Lawson's. Looks dynamic, eh? I was curious, and picked it up to investigate further (checking, as always, for the kanji for wheat)...

Cinnamon/nutmeg pancakes

1/2 cup corn flour
1/2 cup rice flour
1/4 (generous) cup of corn starch
1 tbsp corn grits
1+1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cups soy milk
1 tbsp vegetable oil.
nutmeg or cinnamon

Mix dry ingredients together while heating up the pan. Mix in the wet and start making pancakes. Once you've poured a pancake into the pan, add the nutmeg or cinnamon on top.

This makes a light, not-to-sweet pancake with a unique flavour. They're a little stiffer than regular pancakes, so eating them like pseudo-cookies is quite good. A nice breakfast for a cloudy day!

Birchirmuesli!

In my classy faux-tupperware, no less

One of my favourite summer foods of all time when I was a child was birchirmuesli - it's pronounced "beer-cher-moozly" ("ch" as in "Bach"). I don't even really know what language that is off the the top of my head, but the word's pretty much synonymous with "delicious". The best thing about birchirmuesli, though, is that, in addition to being super-healthy and tasty is that it's quite easy to make!

Wordless Wednesday

Alright, for those of you who can't cheat wordless and read the Japanese, you're looking at: curry ramune, eggplant ramune, onion ramune, and tako-yaki ramune. No, I am not making that up.

Buckwheat Sweet Potato Bread

Sweet potatoes are cheap this time of year! Make the most of it with this delicious and hearty bread, taken from this recipe on Gluten-Free Mommy. I obviously had to make some changes, not having xanthan gum, half the flours, or even nutmeg - which I should invest in, seeing as how it's a very autumnal spice and I'm sure I'll be wanting it for other things.

Reasons why I am a dunce, #112

Protip: don't ever microwave soft tofu in a bowl with saran wrap as a cover. When the saran wrap collapses, so does your tofu.

Wordless Wednesday

Sweet potato cake

While riding around on my new bicycle (!!) last weekend, I chanced across a small fruit-and-vegetable stand selling what I assume are farm-fresh vegetables. I can't tell, of course, since there's no way I could read this information even if it was advertised, or even ask, but I went in anyway and came out with numerous healthy treats, among them some sweet potatoes, which I just discovered on my top shelf this evening!

Sweet potato cakes are a traditional Japanese treat, naturally gluten-free, and healthy for you, so I figured I'd try my hand at them, since I'm actually not quite sure what else to do with Japanese sweet potatoes. Herein lies the recipe:

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

I have committed a Cooking Sin...

...I baked first and now I just want to eat that. And not make dinner. Even though dinner is going to be delicious, I can't stop eating it.

"It" being a not-particularly-photogenic banana bread.

Told you.

Recipe follows...

Wordless Wednesday

Pumpkin lasagne stew

People in Japan love their pumpkins - it's delicious barbequed, pan-fried, or baked: the other day, I decided to try baked! This recipe is modified from one that Skittles sent me from her mother's cookbook; apparently the original uses butternut squash, but I have yet to find one of those in Japan, and pumpkin turned out to be a delicious (and cheap!) substitute.

Wordless Wednesday

Quest For Bacon - Part 1

One of the main reasons why I chose Japan as a place to come and teach English: the food.

Unfortunately, no matter how much you love niku jaga, sushi, tempura, or okonomiyaki, there are some things that Japanese food just can't do. And one of those, sadly, is bacon.

American hot dogs, which I cannot seem to find in a regular grocery store, are, strangely, common at shrines, festivals, and convenience stores. Hamburgers you can make yourself, with absurdly expensive ground meat. But bacon? Not so easy.

For one thing, no one ever told the Japanese that bacon is supposed to be cured and smoked. ("Bacon is smoked?" one of my co-workers asked. "It usually is." "Really? No. Not in Japan." "That's because you don't have bacon in Japan." "Yes we do! That is bacon. On your salad." "This is ham." "We call it bacon." "That doesn't mean it is bacon.") No one told them it's supposed to be fatty and salty, either.

I picked up a tray of meat at the store once - it looked, at least, like it was the right cut of meat, although the slices weren't as thick - and found that, while it was fatty, it was not salty, cured, or smoked. When it cooked it turned brown, not red, and it didn't taste like much at all.

And so. A Quest For Bacon began.

Today's bacon does not look very much like bacon, but it does say bacon on the label. (I can hear my coworker now: "See? It says bacon, right there." "Putting something in a package and writing 'be-kon' on it doesn't make it bacon.")

See? It even says bacon on the label!

It doesn't look much like bacon, but hey. It does say so on the label. I'll give it a try.

I open the package: smells like ham. Sigh. Well, what does it look like when you cook it?

Banana-buckwheat pancakes

Gooey and delicious!

I'm still having problems adjusting to working until 9 almost every night and not getting home until at least quarter to ten... it makes dinner an endless question, since I always am hungry for something, but I don't want to eat a giant meal. Pancakes is one way to solve this; I can have two or three to keep my tummy happy, and then throw the rest in the fridge for breakfast or snacks the next day.

Wordless Wednesday

Leftover Rice Okayu

 I love having okayu (rice porridge) for breakfast these days; my rice maker has a button that will make it automatically if I put in the right amounts of rice and water, and it's warm and filling in the mornings. I prefer my okayu to be sweet, rather than savoury, as in my opinion that is how all breakfast food should be. Except perhaps bacon and eggs.

In any case, today I had some rice left over from a batch I made the other day, and I came across this recipe for how to translate it from stale fridge-rice to delicious okayu.

Inspired by Delicious Coma; here's the recipe:

1 cup cooked rice
2 cups water or stock
toppings (for me, frozen blueberries, honey, and cinnamon)

In a pot, heat rice and one cup water or stock over medium heat, stirring to break up any lumps. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until the water looks starchy and the grains begin to lose their shape. Add the salt and remaining water and simmer until desired consistency - this took a bit longer for me, since I don't like much water in my okayu, so it was on there for a good fifteen minutes. I should have added less water, and will do so next time.

Serve in a bowl with toppings and eat with a spoon. Good stuff!

Gluten-free banana walnut bread

Sorry, I ate most of it before getting around to taking a picture like, two seconds ago.

 50-en bananas at the grocery store? Well, I know what to do with those! Modified from a recipe at HubPages.

Peanut butter, miso, and cinnamon cookies

Made in my tiny toaster oven!

EDITED AS OF 08/14: These cookies are actually incredibly nasty. I'm not sure what I was thinking, or perhaps I was just incredibly hungry after making them, but they are for all intents and purposes totally inedible now, and the very act of biting into one triggers an instant spit-it-out-now reflex. For the love of Pete, don't put the miso in these cookies. Just... keep them peanutbuttery. I will experiment further sometime down the line, I'm sure.


It's a rainy day in Nagoya, and after walking home from the gym at noon in a torrential downpour, complete with thunder, I abandoned previous plans to bum around downtown shopping, and decided to make it a lazy afternoon at home. And what's more rainy-day than making some cookies? These are modified from a recipe I found at Pattycake.

Gluten-free snacks

Pizza without the wheat! Who'd have suspected a gf
product from Doritos? And they don't taste too bad, either.

No recipes here - this is stuff you can just buy in the store. It's definitely harder to figure out what's gluten-free and what's not around here, especially since I've only memorized the kanji for wheat, and not barley or rye, although wheat is what I really have to be most careful of.

After much searching, I was able to find not one, but two gluten-free cereals today!

Buckwheat Pancakes

Ever since I found buckwheat flour at my local grocery store, I've been wanting to try these pancakes out - though buckwheat isn't my absolute favourite type of pancake, I can see it swiftly moving to the top of my pancake rankings due to this recipe!

Rice-cooker frittata

So, I took this recipe from Just Bento's frittata recipe, and modified it a teensy bit because I don't have the veggies she uses. I'm definitely going to have this for lunch tomorrow! Eggy goodness...

Walnut and cinnamon-swirl cornbread

Lately, I've been craving baked goods. Probably because for me, baked goods are comfort food to ward away the stresses of life (of which there are many when one is a clueless gaijin), but being gluten-free makes it a little difficult to get my fix. Add to that the fact that I don't have an oven, and things get more complicated - thank goodness for rice cookers! This recipe is modified from one I found at Gluten-Free Mommy.

Cooked banana candy

Careful - they're super hot!

Considering the abundance and cheapitude of bananas at this time of year, I've been eating at least one banana a day, and getting increasingly more creative with how I consume them. This afternoon, my sweet tooth was acting up, so I decided to make myself this snack - it's quick, easy, and delicious!