I think this is pork. The dish has wells for different sauces.

As you will see included with almost all Japanese meals, you can see the small dish of pickled vegetable in this photo, and in this case also a dish of cabbage for “cleansing the palate” between fried items.

You don’t have to go to a restaurant for your fried food on a stick, however. When we were in Osaka, the takoyaki that Keiko and I had were served with skewers, not chopsticks.  So I guess you could hold your octopus doughball on the stick and eat it that way.  I think it would have been easier to use chopsticks.

I used a couple skewers to dissect a doughball so you can see the little chunk of octopus.

What if you like food on a stick but are not a fan of deep frying? You can get that too. In Kyoto I passed by a shop with this display out front:

I don't think I could make myself eat one of these.

I have no idea if you are supposed to eat these octopuses as they are, or if maybe you buy a few to take home and fry up fresh for dinner. Or maybe you could do the other deep-frying: tempura.  Greg and I took a cooking lesson with a very nice woman named Emi, in her home in Kyoto.  She taught us to make tempura by combining half an egg (150 ml) and a combined 150 ml of flour and water, mixing it until combined but lumpy, and smearing the mixture by hand over whatever food you want to eat. While in Japan we tried tempura-style food of many different kinds (including nori and flowers and lotus root and pumpkin), but Emi introduced us to Japanese-style wheat gluten.  We were familiar with the seitan-style wheat gluten, but the Japanese style is more like a thick gel.  First, put the wheat gluten on a small stick.  Then coat in tempura batter and deep fry.

Wheat gluten before tempura. I don't know why it is green.

After tempura. Note the presentation has changed now that it is ready to eat.

My last food on a stick is not fried.  In Takayama, we went to a tofu restaurant.  Tofu served a lot of different ways, and listed on the menu as “tofu 3 ways”, “tofu 4 ways,” “tofu 5 ways,” and so on.  I think Greg had “tofu 7 ways” or maybe it was 8.  I went for fewer, thinking I wasn’t that hungry (having had a snack not much earlier).  I chose the option that included, you guessed it, tofu on sticks:

Tofu three ways. Plus soup with tofu skins, rice, and pickles (the pink things are pickles).

So much for not being very hungry.  I guess the fewer types of tofu in your order, the larger the portions.

Anyway, since being back in the USA I have stuck to only frozen treats on a stick. I am still finishing off last year’s watermelon-mint ice pops, and I recently made a large batch of fresh ones to take to the pool party on Labor Day.  Just watermelon, mint, lime juice, and sugar.

In less than three weeks’ time, I will be back in school with students. I have a tentative schedule and tentative class lists, though I am not printing any out since the class lists typically change up to and during the first week of classes. It looks like my planning period will be the last period of the day, which will be different, but my lunch period will still be 4th period, which is from 10:11 AM to 10:56 AM.  Since I eat breakfast at 5:30 AM, I will be hungry by then, but I will be hungry again at 4 PM as usual.

I have a lot of things to do and I keep putting them off. I need to use my watermelon for pickled watermelon rind and I need to do something with the inside part.  I have to (with my husband) move all the rest of the stuff that belongs in the kitchen out of the guest room, and put the guest room back to rights so we can have a houseguest.  I need to clean up my office so I can use it.  I need to write lesson plans, course standards, assignments, and blog posts, and I need to sort photos from Japan to put up on flickr.  I need to get the house neat enough to have a house cleaning person to come over and clean it.  I need to take the cat to the vet for his annual shots.

What have I been doing?  Well, in between traveling, I’ve been enjoying the opportunity of summer to READ. I really love reading!  Really!  I’ve read:

• A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
• The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper

I finished reading

• Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

I’ve RE-read:

• Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Forge of Heaven by C. J. Cherryh

I’ve STARTED but not finished reading:

• The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (one of the summer reading books for my school)

I’ve continued reading (but also not finished) these books I started some time ago:

• The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

And I have on Kindle but have yet to start reading:

• The Girl in the Garden by Kamala Nair
• Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• The Forgotten Genius by Stephen Inwood

So my mind has been in books lately, and today NPR posted a “top 100″ list of fantasy and science fiction books and series, as voted by online poll.  Each person answering the poll could select ten choices to vote for.  The poll was available for about a week, and I did make my selections, along with 60,000+ others. Or at least that many other ballots – I don’t know if it was possible to vote more than once.

I was sincerely bothered that C.J. Cherryh did not make the list.  I was also annoyed that books that I had been unable to slog through as a teen (when I had even MORE time on my hands for reading) DID make the list.  Some of them had annoying protagonists.  Or dopey dialogue, or dry dialogue.  Or had no women characters, or had bad women characters – shallow, two-dimensional, dumb, whatever. My judgement of what makes a novel a GOOD novel specifically has to do with these things.

If I get lost in the world of the novel, if it seems real, if the dialogue is entertaining, if the protagonist is likeable, I will probably like it.  If the dialogue is dull or in a difficult dialect, if the characters do dumb things, if the world is unbelievable, or if the book is overtly sexist or worse, misogynistic, I probably won’t finish it.  I couldn’t finish the Salman Rushdie book I started – nothing ever happened in it.  I couldn’t force myself through Abbot’s Flatland because of the way women were portrayed.  And it was boring.  And forgive me my friends who love them, I cannot get into Jane Austen’s novels at all. I haven’t figured out if it is the language or the plots or the characters that I dislike, but I have never been able to read one all the way through.

Please don’t recommend any more books to me at the moment.  My slate is full enough.  But in a month or so you can start directing me towards next summer’s list!

• Stay in a ryokan
• Relax at an onsen
• See Mt. Fuji
• Eat takoyaki
• Eat taiyaki
• See the Akihabara district in Tokyo
• Get a Japanese ear-cleaner
• Ride the shinkansen
• Get a Daruma doll for Greg’s job search.

and I am glad to report that I did all of these things!

We stayed in ryokans every night, though the temple lodgings at Koya-san were technically a shubuku not a ryokan.  At Hakone, our ryokan was also an onsen, and on the women’s side at least there were 5 pools/tubs.  We saw Mt. Fuji from several vantages at Hakone, as well as from the shinkansen on the way to Nagoya to get to Takayama.  In Takayama I ate taiyaki, and in Osaka I tried takoyaki.  On our free day in Tokyo we visited a bunch of famous districts, including Harajuku, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Akihabara.  And at Nara, home of the largest Buddha statue in Japan, I got an ear-cleaner. I picked up the Daruma doll at a souvenir shop (not a temple) toward the end of our trip, but I can’t remember if it was in Nara or in Kyoto.

What the heck is all this?

The ryokan in Tokyo, with our futons ready for us

A ryokan is a Japanese inn, with tatami floors that you may not wear shoes on, futons that are stored away during the day and set out at night, and complimentary green tea in the room.

An onsen is a hot-springs bath, open to the public.  There is a space for putting your clothes, a place to wash yourself, and one or more pools for soaking.  There are lots of rules, like no clothing allowed and no towels allowed in the bathing pool, and you must rinse off all soapsuds before entering the pool, and at the Hakone onsen they didn’t allow any metals in, by which I think they meant take off all your jewelry.  I guess the minerals in the water might have reacted with it.

Leave your clothing in a basket

Wash yourself all over

Enjoy a hot soak with a pretty garden view

I know you know what Mt. Fuji is.  The most important and revered mountain in Japan.  We did not climb it, we just posed for photos with it.

We were lucky that the clouds retreated for our photo opportunity

Takoyaki is dough balls with a bit of octopus inside, cooked on a griddle with lots of hemispherical depressions in it so the dough balls come out round.  Taiyaki are fish-shaped snacks filled with red bean paste (or other fillings) and cooked on a griddle with fish-shaped depressions in it.  If a Japanese word ends in -yaki, it is probably yummy, like sukiyaki (usually beef and vegetables in a sweet sauce), or okonomiyaki (a pancake-ish dish with egg and meat and vegetables in it).

Keiko took this photo when we shared takoyaki. We got them "wit" (as we say in Philly) everything - brown sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes

Taiyaki-the kind with red bean paste

In Tokyo, there are many neighborhoods with their own distinct characters, like in many large cities around the world.  Akihabara (also known as Akiba) is “electric town” where you can buy almost anything relating to electronics, video games, anime and manga. There are girls in costumes on the street corners (they won’t let you take a photo), giant gaming arcades, the nerdiest-looking guys (also known as “otaku”) who you will never see in the fashionable districts like Harajuku, and shops devoted to single types of item, like fluorescent light bulbs, or wire!

One of the wire shops in Akihabara, Tokyo

We rode the shinkansen (bullet train) numerous times as we traveled between cities.  They are pretty slick.

A shinkansen arrives at a station. Or maybe it departs - they look the same at both ends

A Daruma doll (Dharma) represents the founder of Zen Buddhism.  It is used to represent a wish or goal, and one draws in the right eye when making the wish and one draws in the left eye when the wish is fulfilled.  I wanted one for my husband who is hoping to make a career change this fall, as a fun representation of his goal.  We are not Buddhists.  This morning I drew in the right eye, and when Greg gets his new job I will fill in the left eye.  Traditionally Daruma dolls are burned at temples at the end of the year, but I think we will keep this one.

Japanese ear-cleaners are not q-tips.  They certainly have cotton swabs on sticks in Japan, but the ear cleaners are usually bamboo and you use them to carefully scrape the wax out of your ears.  My mother-in-law says they are very effective!  You can get them shaped like samurai swords or like light sabers, but I chose a more traditional style.

Can you tell which is the ear cleaner and which is the Daruma? Daruma dolls are weighted so if you knock them over they turn upright again

I’ve got a lot more Japan-related topics to write about, so be patient!

We (well, Keiko) booked a tour with Samurai Tours, and owner Mike Roberts helped us customize it so that we had some days with the guide and tour group and other days on our own.  Ours was a “Best of Japan” trip, and started in Tokyo.

Shibuya crossing in Tokyo

From there, we went to places west and south of Tokyo, avoiding the north.  This was the tour route anyway, but as a result we were never anywhere near Fukushima and we didn’t see any earthquake or tsunami damage.  There had been a tour option for the town of Nikko, but that was changed due to the loss of tourist traffic there.  Apparently many of the restaurants and shops are closed due to lack of tourism.

Our tour included travel on trains, subways, and public buses.  Samurai tours arranged our Japan Rail Passes which were useful in many places as a free pass for travel.  Only foreign tourists can get these passes, and they are good on shinkansens (bullet trains) and ferries and local train lines.  If you want a reserved seat on a shinkansen, you need an additional ticket for that reserved seat, but you get on the train by just showing your pass as you walk through the turnstile area.

Throughout our tour, we stayed in Japanese inns, or ryokans.  These are very traditional, and you must take off your shoes (either when you enter the ryokan or when you enter your room).  The floors are tatami and the beds are futons on the floor.  And the futons are not American-style fat futons, but thin Japanese futons that are at most 3 inches thick and are easily folded up and put away in a closet.  They provide yukatas (thin cotton bathrobes) for hanging out in, and slippers for entering the toilet room, and toothbrushes.  I will show you my toothbrush collection in a later post.

So, the overview.  Our tour started in Tokyo, as I said, and then we went to Hakone.  Hakone is a resort town in a volcanic caldera.  There are hot spring-fed public baths (including the bath at our ryokan), a caldera lake with regular touristy boats crossing it, and hot-spring-cooked “black eggs” which we ate.  Hakone is where we saw Mt. Fuji from!

The tour group wears yukatas for kaiseki dinner at our Takayama ryokan

Then we went to the pretty town of Takayama, famous for their festival floats and a style of lacquerware that emphasizes the grain of the wood.  We enjoyed the farmer’s markets and the old municipal building, the Takayama-jinya.  There are very few such 17th-century buildings left in Japan, as they were all made of wood and are very susceptible to fire, despite the ornamental fish on the roofs.

Koya-san was next, the world headquarters of the Shingon School of Esoteric Buddhism.  We stayed in a temple, ate only vegetables, and learned that we are all Buddha.  We also had a meditation lesson and attended a morning prayer service.

Halfway through our trip we reached Osaka.  Our stay was brief, and it was very crowded despite the rain. Osaka was our only really rainy day.

Then we went to Miyajima Island, where we weathered the edge of a typhoon (mostly a wind event for us, with little rain).  Unfortunately, the high winds closed the ferry and the ropeway to the mountain top.  As a result of the ferry closing, there were few tourists so most of the shops and restaurants didn’t open.  We would have stuffed ourselves on maple-leaf-shaped stuffed cakes if the shops had been open.  That’s the local specialty.  That and rice scoops.

Kinkaju-ji, the Golden Pavilion, in Kyoto

We had a sobering visit to Hiroshima on our way to Kyoto, where we spent the last three days of our tour.  There is a ton of stuff to do in Kyoto.  We skipped a lot of it.  There are shrines and temples all over the place, thousands of restaurants, palaces, gardens, and Monkey Mountain!  Of course we went to Monkey Mountain!

So, more posts to follow on specific aspect of the trip, with more photos!

The key thing making the kitchen finally functional is the sink.  I picked out a stainless steel double-bowl sink with a lower-than usual center divider.  When I washed the dishes tonight I was thrilled that our largest skillet fits entirely inside the sink!  The handle of the skillet would have stuck out if the center divider went all the way up.

Check out the spiffy faucet!

Anyway, the end bit of the faucet, where the water comes out, pulls out to be used as a flexible sprayer, and can be used for spraying or streaming water, and you can pause the water with the upper black button.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  If you come to visit us, your first view of the kitchen will be as you enter the dining room from the living room, and as you turn you will see the wide opening into the kitchen like this:

What you see first

Open and inviting, I think!  We will probably get some sort of curtain thing to go on the window in the back door, but we need to think about what we want.

Ok, so in the sink photo, you can just see the edge of my tea kettle.  Here is the full view of the “sink wall” with the tea kettle, since I made my tea IN THE KITCHEN this morning instead of in the dining room!

At the lower right corner you can see where the missing piece will go.

I imagine that Greg’s coffee maker will go on the right like it was before.  I think I will get some shelves to go on the left, under the cabinet, for my tea tins and infusers and stuff.  Hmm, IKEA?  Also, we will probably put a curtain on this window to match the one on the door window.  And Greg suggested some sort of stencil or mural across the soffit, which could continue onto the stove wall.  Well, we will see.

So as you look around to the right, you will see the “stove wall”:

I've closed the basement door for the photo

We plan to put pots and pans in the drawers to the right of the stove.  To the left of the stove, as you may recall, is where the garbage and recycling go.  Somewhere along here we will put the spices, and the utensil bin on the counter, and you may notice that the under-counter lighting has been turned on.  When I cooked dinner tonight, I used the vent and light on the microwave oven!  It was so nice!  But again, I am getting ahead.

Continuing around to the right…

Fridge!

I took this photo kind of high so I could show the mini-fan again (see previous post) and our LED lights.  We’ll eventually put magnets back on our fridge, but for now we have only a timer and a beer-opener.

OK, so the final view is this:

Looking into the dining room and living room

Here you can see the back of the peninsula, and the phone, which we plan to replace.  The dining room table has been temporarily squished into a corner but will be moved back to the center of the room soon.  Where you see blank wall in the dining room, we’ll put the chest of drawers that contains the table linens and the wine opener, and we’ll hang the large Chinese painting.  We definitely have to do some thinking about where things will go, and maybe also about what things we don’t actually need.

The cutlery drawer!

I have already decided that our flatware goes in the top drawer nearest the dining room.  Greg hasn’t disagreed (yet) so maybe it will stay there!  I got one of those “expands-to-fit-the-space” organizer things from Bed Bath & Beyond.   But I didn’t stop there, I made dinner!  I made tofu and vegetable stir-fry, with the first of Greg’s beans from the garden!  Which reminds me I have to do a blog post on this year’s garden.  Greg has done a lot of planning and a lot of work on it.

Cooking!

Oh yeah, the other thing that happened today was I got a haircut.  The stylist blow-dried it straight, but once I wash it again it will be wavy again.  I like it, and I hope I like the salon enough I can keep going back there.  It made a good first impression, and was very inexpensive, so that’s a good sign!

As I was saying, however, here I am cooking, with a handful of beans that Greg just brought in from the garden.  And wearing an apron my mom made, and drinking red wine, of course. I am really happy now!

First, some details:

New ball valves

The kitchen sink now has new ball valves instead of the kind with the round knob that you have to turn a bunch of times to open or close all the way.  Of course, I had to test these out when they were first put in, so I leaned over to get a good close view and I turned the knob…and immediately sprayed myself, the ceiling, the inside of the cabinet, and the window with water. DUH!  If anyone else had been there they would have gotten a very good laugh, but I was alone so I had to laugh at myself.

Hidden trash receptacle

Next to the stove is where we will keep the trash.  There really isn’t a place to put a trash bin in the kitchen, so this is a good compromise.  It is near enough to the peninsula where we will be doing food prep, and we can put recycling into the second bin.

They open ALL THE WAY!

Apparently, this is how they make drawers these days.  They open all the way so you can see what is in the back instead of having to feel around for items.  What you can’t see here is that you can’t slam the drawers shut.  Old drawers wouldn’t have that problem because they are too high-friction (I’m thinking of the ones in my parents’ kitchen) but modern drawers have bearings and tracks and slide super-easily.  So when the drawer is almost all the way in, a mechanism engages that slows the drawer and closes it gently and quietly.  I have stood in the kitchen and opened and closed the drawers multiple times because I find this fascinating.

"Pantry"

To me, a pantry will always be the pantry in my parents’ house, which has tall glass-fronted cabinets where all the plates, glasses, bowls, stemware, fancy china, etcetera are stored.  There is a giant flour bin that tilts out from under the counter, cabinets and drawers full of linens, paper plates, candles, plastic wrap, cereal, liquor, and sometimes cookies, and it provides passage between the dining room and the kitchen.  However, our new “pantry” is a tall and deep cabinet with these handy pull-out shelves (which also pull out all the way) where we will keep our rice and flour and sugar and other supplies.

Under the sink

Under the sink we have a place to put sponges and dish soap, and shelves for more cleaning supplies. It looks so nice!

Also in the sink photo you get a good glimpse of the new flooring.  It is environmentally-friendly “marmoleum” from Forbo which is basically linoleum (linseed oil and pine sawdust from renewable forests) on MDF HDF and with a cork backing.  It will gradually get less yellow over the next few weeks as it is exposed to light, and will finally settle on a color that Will selected for us (the Footprint Architecture guy) which is called “Carribbean.” It is mostly kindof sand-colored with swirls of darker sand and also blue that matches the trim color.  We like it!

So anyway, the kitchen now has all the appliances back in and we are waiting on a few pieces to be delivered:

• A replacement filler strip to go over the fridge-and-pantry, since the original strip was the wrong color
• A wider filler for between the dishwasher and the wall, since that space is too large for a regular filler strip and too small to put anything useful into
• The butcher block slab for the peninsula
• The manufactured quartz counters for everywhere else

However, here are several views of the nearly finished kitchen:

The "sink" wall, with dishwasher in place

The "stove" wall

Over the peninsula, into the dining room

One of two cute mini-fans, and two of four LED ceiling lights

We have not made any decisions about window treatments for the window or the door to the deck, but that may happen later this summer.

so you can see the paint job and the handles on the drawers.

The flooring was put in today and the microwave oven is in place, and the counter top people came and took all the appropriate measurements, but it will be another two weeks for the counters to be done.  I think the electrician is coming this week to put in the fans and the LED lights and I have no idea when the plumbing will be done and the stove hooked up again.

I’d go into more detail but this is the last week of school, as I said.  I have work to do!

Oh look, it's the bathtub drain!

Then some cabinetry was placed, and today the electricians were here all day installing outlets, moving outlets, moving the phone, moving light switches, and making sure there was wiring for the under-cabinet lighting.  They were here longer than expected and didn’t quite finish.  They’ll be back–particularly since they are also upgrading our service to the level of “most modern homes,” or 200-Amp service.  This raises the total cost, of course.

Drawer unit with flooring sample

Cabinets on the "stove" wall, with space for microwave

Cabinets on "sink" wall

New phone location: next to pass-through

Meanwhile, we have acquired the new microwave, the counters have been ordered (though we haven’t go all the cabinets in yet so they are not templated or anything like that), the natural linoleum-on-cork flooring should be in early next week, the new sink has been delivered, we’ve been to Ikea once, Sears twice, and Home Depot over and over again.

Dinner has been a daily adventure as well.  We’ve discovered a Mexican restaurant we really like, we’ve been to the local diner, we’ve been to our local Bertucci’s, we’ve had several nights of sandwiches, and we attended a potluck Memorial Day picnic which we contributed snacks and veggie burgers to.

A note on photos—I will be uploading a more complete set to flickr at some time in the near future.  Also, I will certainly continue keeping you updated here!