Sorry-ology

  I had kept this mattress cover for about fifteen or sixteen years. It was acquired in a traditional market near my maiden home, when I returned to Taiwan for the first time after my partner and I purchased our house in the current place.  My mother and I went grocery shopping in the traditional market as we would do usually, if I was in Taichung. Traditional markets are wondrous places where one can get everything for his/her everyday life. It was a place where my mother would shower her love on me by answering whatever needs I had; it was also the only place where I could express my affection to her by accompanying her in the lonely journey that she made everyday.  After my partner and I were able to settle down in a house, it was the first time for us to have a double bed. My mother and I went into the market and searched for some bedding fabric to furnish the marriage bed. My mother loves exuberant colors, and we agreed to get this set of a mattress cover, a pair of ...

  Spring in Japan is the most dreadful season to me. I have been suffering from serious hay fever since I started living in the country. If the symptoms are combined with a cold, a situation that usually occurs, it simply turns into an unescapable hell in my case. Whenever I have a cold, I will develop a persistent cough that might last as long as 3 weeks. A cold induced by hay fever, as pollen is also full of germs, makes me sick of life, especially the spring break is usually the longest vacation I can have in a year when kids still go to school and kindergarten regularly and I can finally work on research. However, coughs just prevent everything from happening.  What is worse this year is that, there has been an unbelievable shortage of cough medicine across Tokyo since last year due to the spread of COVID and influenza. Last November, I visited three pharmacies to finally get some cough pills, but it was still a substitute medicine and was only half of the amount that was ...

A chef friend had a post about a new item on the menu in her café: toad in the hole, a traditional pub food in England. That gave inspiration to a wife who has to think of three meals to cook every day. I didn’t drink at all and was only a rare customer to pubs when I was in England. Even when I went to pubs, among friends, I was notorious for ordering hot tea. Eating out was a rare option because of cost and feeling timid  before new things. Toad in the hole, a typical English dish, was alien to me until this time I made it myself in Japan and almost thirteen years after I left England. Since the authentic taste was unknown to me, I could not give a fair judgment on the quality of my own cooking. However, the fully grown Yorkshire puddings was a satisfying seven to see. Somehow I came to know more about English life after I left there.

Lunchboxes continued in the summer vacation.

 A new lunch box today for T. A pie of coconut milk curry plus veggies.

Fried potato salad (コロッケ), shallow fried bell peppers, rice with tuna and corn, fruit, broccoli. 24 April 2018.

Baby-size rice ball It has been quite a task to put T to bed. Even if he is obviously sleepy, he always shows this urge to stay awake. He does everything to distract my attention from putting him to bed and everything to keep himself busy and therefore sober. He would explore every corner in the bedroom, such as taking diapers piece by piece from one place to another. He would bring me as many books as he wants to ask me to read and simply wander away to find another task to keep himself occupied without a single intention to listen. We are quite amused by his persistence and wonder why he is so eager to not to fall asleep.

Spring is indeed the prime time of everything exciting, le printemps.  The tulips in the garden did very well in April. Cups of solid colours waved in their small circles in the garden. They would have lasted much longer if it had not been for an overwhelmingly windy day on which I harvested an armful of them and secured them in the house. They served as wonderful companions indoors especially when the last bit of wintry chill still lingered around. With the heater on, they would bloom as wide as the size of a palm; however, such artificial warmth had stretched these darling creatures too much that their lives were unfortunately shortened.  As a gardener, I guess I am not mentally strong enough to bear the thoughts that it is in the end more than natural for plants to sprout, to grow, to bloom, to wither and to die out in its natural surroundings.  Tulips in April, 2013 Since the first year we moved into the house, one of my keen anticipation for the gard...

I did not learn to appreciate the taste of perilla, or shiso, until I came to Japan. In my childhood, my grandmother would add shiso to homemade pickled plums, I remember, and those wrinkled leaves having soaked up plum juice were merely amazing. However, it was probably more to do with my passion for the thick sugary liquid rather than the herb itself, and embarrassingly I had remained quite ignorant about its usage in cooking.   In Japan, shiso can be tempura-ed (deep-fried), consumed raw with raw fish or rice balls. Fresh shiso is not cheap. 5 shiso leaves would cost roughly about 100 yen, 30 NTD, 79 pence, or 1 USD.  Given my fascination with its fresh and minty taste, the herb was invited to live in my garden. This summer, we had a nice shrub of shiso, despite that almost half of the harvest was nibbled away by gourmet caterpillars.  In addition to other experiments I did with the harvest, I also made shiso paste, which is simply a fine blend with extr...

K is infected with a cold. Before he changes his mind to go to see a doctor, some herbal tea might help to reduce symptoms, I have decided. Thyme has a medicinal effect on coughs and sore throat as I heard. Therefore, I picked some thyme in the garden and brewed it with black tea. Thyme is characterized with a strong and unique aroma itself, but it does not really change the taste of the tea. Herbal therapies of this sort are becoming more and more interesting to me, probably because I am getting more and more secluded in my life and becoming a witch, or because there is a very practical need to consume the herbal produce in the garden. It is a romantic idea to me anyway though to make use of what is available in the garden in order to maintain a regular pace of life. Perhaps while I am growing taller and older, I also learn better the benefit of reaching down to harvest the wisdom of the earth.

One of my recent favorites: Japanese egg rolls. This is a variation of traditional egg rolls in Japanese cuisine: stuff boiled asparagus into chikuwa (竹輪 made of fish), and cook it as one does in traditional style.

A couple of weeks ago in an agricultural fair in Takashimaya department store in Shinjuku, we found a gem for Japanese cuisine - seaweed. I cannot quite recall whether I ever tried this type of seaweed before, but it definitely was never an ingredient on my shopping list for grocery. However, at the moment when the stall clerk opened a pack, I knew I would not want to miss it anymore. It has the most mesmerising aroma that I have ever encountered; the taste is amazingly distinct with its bitterness subdued.  At that moment I had an illusion that I suddenly became a gourmet capable of tasting good food!  We sprinkled it on meatballs made of of burdock roots and pork last night. It effectively reduced the greasy taste of pork .  For lunch today, I mixed two kinds of seaweed: sushi seaweed (commonly available every where) and this green hairy seaweed, on top of finely chopped bluefin tuna. The dish was only simply seasoned with soy sauce and spicy sauce, bu...

My Domestic Goddess Project: Light Eats and the Rainy Season We had a short break from the non-stop rain of the season yesterday. It was breezy and sunny. Shadows of laundry trotted across the curtain like running horses. It provided a wonderful atmosphere for light and simple eats in this suffocating season of humidity. We had tomato flower cum plum pickles and cold plain noodle for lunch. Both were refreshing and very appetizing! I love beautiful presentation of food than the food itself, to be frank. The tomato was cut in a vertical direction so that it was able to bloom. Plain noodle dipped in dashi (だし) sauce (1 dashi: 2 water) was simply tasty. It tasted clam, cold, and pleasant. It felt as if pores, eyes and ears were temporarily immue from the heat and humidity in the air. The Japanese vocabulary that I just picked up, 素直な, might describe the taste well, or perhaps 'rustic'. I admit that the description sounds rather pretentious or exaggerating, but I really liked ...

My Domestic Goddess Project: Pork steak and Komatsuna (こまつな（小松菜）) Ever since I started cooking Japanese food, the Chinese characters of Komatsuna, 小松菜, has intrigued me. The characters, according to Wanchen's dictionary of free translation, were literally interpreted as "the vegetable of Little Pine". Of course, it was partly because I didn't know how to pronounce it in Japanese. Yet, the pastoral image that my literal translation projected, 'the vegetable of Little Pine', had been quite satisfactory to me. I imagined that it was a kind of vegetable that was initially grown by a little boy called Little Pine. Every morning, he would jump out of the bed and hurry to his small allotment in order to see how the little veggies had been. Dews on the leafy komatsuna were shining like pearls and mirroring Little Pine's happy face. Then I found an easy recipe to try komatsuna. (Imagine how I was excited in the supermarket when I picked up a bag of this romantic ve...

My Domestic Goddess Project: Putting the sun in the pocket! French Crepe, I think, for today's breakfast. It is quite substantial for a breakfast but absolutely yummy. Well, I enjoyed making it as I felt I was doing an artwork when I tried to locate ingredients to their right positions on the canvas of the crepe. A slice of yellow cheese as the background, a slice of pink ham as a cloud at dawn, and finally golden egg sitting at the center of the picture as the sun. A morning full of energy! お元気で！ The recipe is here .

My Domestic Goddess Project I have been exploring the beautiful cookbooks that I found on K's bookshelf. Tofu in Pizza Style is a very easy-to-make appetizer! Basically, you just pile up bacon, sliced pepper, cheese and ketchup on the top of tofu and bake it! We don't have oven in the house, but it proved that toaster also worked! The tofu chunks taste chewy and denty ! It is called はんぺんのピザ風, on p. 78 in ひとり暮らしの簡単ごはん：Let's Enjoy Cooking. (オレンジペ−ジ) I love the tips and recipes of small vegetable dishes that this book offers.