Gluten-free lemon blueberry bread

This stuff is most excellent. Tangy, sweet, and not too dry... try not to eat it all at once! Of course, it doesn't keep very well, so that may be excuse enough to eat half the loaf right out of the cooker ;)

Sweets Circus

There's a store in the bottom of one of the department stores near where I work, and it's a giant, pink cafeteria called "Sweets Circus". It's made up of all different little stores selling all kinds of delicious, dessert-y things. They have two chocolate fountains near the cashiers. Needless to say, I do so like to spend time there.

Behold, deliciousness! Gluten-free, too.

Hoarding in Nagoya

Rumours of widespread panic and exodus are definitely overstated, but one rumour isn't: hoarding. Even in Nagoya, hundreds of kilometers from Tokyo, hundreds more from Fukushima, and even further from the epicentre of Friday's quake, people are hoarding like crazy.

Here are some pics:

Canned food and pasta is nearly gone. A few sticks of soba and the more expensive canned fish is left.
Canned fruit is all gone except pineapple (no one likes pineapple?) and the giant cans you need a can-opener for (this is pretty rare in Japan). There are also some plastic packs of aloe. No mikan! And that's what I wanted to eat tonight. D:

This was flashlights and batteries. 
You're set for batteries if you need small ones, but all D batteries are gone.

Rice. Wow. Now, for context, there are hundreds of kilos of rice behind me and to my right - so many that when I was walking into Jusco, I thought "whatever, there's loads of rice left, people are so exaggerating". Then I saw this shelf. I've never seen it this empty.
It's mostly the mid-sized 1-5kg bags that are going. Loads of 10kg bags left.

Instant noodle aisle. It's normally a little thin at night with all the university students grabbing cheap meals, but usually at most there will be one row out. This is really crazy - I stopped dead for a second when I saw it.
Dunno why people are stockpiling these though - they take up a lot of space in your kit, have very few calories, and are high in sodium. Three no-nos for a survival kit. Plus you have to cook them.

Onigiri knock-off!

I don't actually know what this is called, besides delicious. It is a variation on onigiri, and I posit that it in fact tastes different because of the different assembly method. You shall have to try it yourself to find out for sure!

First, you take your onigiri knock-off in hand. Read the directions very carefully!

Korea, Part I

I went to Korea last month, but I'm very behind on blogging and haven't put up any of the pictures or anything. So, without further ado, here are some pictures and commentary from my time in Seoul!

It was snowing - snowing! - in Nagoya when I left, so I left early in case everyone freaked out and the trains ran late. As it turned out they were fine, so I left Nagoya on schedule. The first thing I saw out the window of my plane was this:

Yes, the Koreans are every bit as crazy about Starcraft as you have heard.

It was late by the time I made it to my hostel near Hongik University, so I went out to find some food.

Hongik university station area is completely covered in stalls selling all kinds of street food. If it were Japan, I'd have assumed that a festival was going on, but it looks like Hongik just looks like this all the time.

This stall was selling fried food on sticks. The big plastic cover keeps the heat in; on the right you can see people under the cover eating their snack. It was cold outside, but it stays pretty warm in those stalls.

This vendor was selling toppogi, deep fried chicken... and tater tots. I got a paper cup of the lot for 1000 won - food is so cheap in Korea! I became immediately addicted to toppogi. It's spicy and sweet and chewy all at once.

Oh, and Koreans are every bit as crazy about cell phones as you have heard, too.

And on the subject of cheap, there were trucks everywhere selling whole crates of strawberries for 6000 won. I couldn't believe it. Japanese people love to tell you that everything in Japan is expensive because it's an island, and small (I'm pretty sure they believe it wholeheartedly, too), but everything in Korea is cheap... and it's an island too. And smaller than Japan.

Korea is really big on communal eating - Korean barbecue is cooked up to share at your table, and bulgogi restaurants will only seat two or more people at once. A lot of the places offering street food would only do a huge plate of it to share with other people. Food is big entertainment - most of the restaurants around Hongik were packed, long after restaurants in Japan would have closed. I began to wonder if anyone ever sleeps in Seoul, and went into a restaurant serving tteok stew.

They had a really charming "menu for only foreigner", which had things hilariously translated into weird "English". I ordered a stew with tteok, egg, negi, nori, and meat.

The stew came, of course, with kimchi (in the back), and a metal bowl of rice. The chopsticks are metal, too. (They gave me a cute paper card with outlines of chopsticks and a spoon on it, as a utensil rest...) I'm sure metal chopsticks are better for the environment, easier to clean, and so on, but I have to say, it's a lot easier to eat when you get wooden chopsticks and you're allowed to pick up your rice bowl. Sorry Korea.

The drink you see is barley tea - just like the Japanese stuff, except warm. Which is weird as hell once you're used to drinking barley tea as a cold drink in izakaya, especially in the summer. (Sorry again, Korea.) One thing I wish Japan had is kimchi, though. You always get pickles when you order at a Japanese restaurant, but they're just... not so good. (Sorry Japan.) I really liked kimchi though. Unfortunately for me, this place had the best kimchi of everywhere I ate on the trip, so I spent the rest of my time being disappointed.

The stew itself was really delicious, and really filling. I barely managed to make a dent in it. After that, I went back to the hostel to digest.

Wordless Wednesday

Kirimochi

I've realized that because I don't want to post recipes unless I know they're perfect, I don't post basic things like "what I ate today" or "here is a Japanese food I eat all the time". So, to begin to remedy that, here's a post about kirimochi, which is something I eat several times a week.




You can buy kirimochi (切り餅) dried at any grocery store in Japan. They are absurdly overpackaged small white blocks. Once you open the large bag (complete with silica packet), your mochi is individually wrapped, and it looks like this:

To eat them, you'll have to cook them, but beyond that it's pretty flexible. They're great in soup - the mochi melts a little, but stays block-shaped, and becomes very chewy and stretchy. I like to put them in miso soup. You can also fry them, or bake them in a toaster oven.




When you bake them in a toaster oven, they puff up enormously (or explode). The outside becomes crispy, but the inside melts and gets chewy and delicious. (Also, really really hot.) This is what they look like after a few minutes in the toaster oven:

They make a great snack just like this. Japanese toaster ovens even have a mochi icon on the bottom that tells you for how long and at what temperature to bake them.


You can also buy fresh kirimochi, but it's not as ubiquitous as the dried kind. Fresh kirimochi tends to be more interesting, though - you can get matcha, azuki, or black bean flavours. I get mine from the local temple fair. The same rules for cooking apply - gnawing on them raw isn't a great idea.