maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

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2. Pretzels!

It is not a secret that I love food. When I was asked what I wanted to do for my 23rd birthday this year I could not think of anything better than eating very many kinds of stinky cheeses, but I imagined no one else wanted to do that with me, so we went to karaoke. So aren’t I lucky that I get to live in Tokyo, where there are more five star restaurants than Paris?

Kind of.

The thing is, I’m on a student budget. The second thing is I don’t have an oven. This wouldn’t be a problem if most grocery stores in Japan sold something resembling normal bread. They do not. My local supa sells 6 slices of large square shaped dry cake they call bread for 500 yen. This is not a good value.

So I have been longing to make my own bread. Then it hit me! Pretzels are just bread that gets half of the cooking done by boiling them! Tah da, I have bread.

Delicious delicious salty bread.

I followed this recipe from Dinner with Julie.

Pretzel Rolls

2 tsp. active dry yeast
3/4 cup lukewarm water
3/4 cup lukewarm milk
2 Tbsp. olive oil
4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
plus extra salt for the top

Boiling solution:
2 L water
1 Tbsp. salt
4 Tbsp. baking soda ( added a lot more than this because I wasn’t sure it was enough)

Stir the yeast into the water in a large bowl until frothy. Stir in the milk and oil , and then 2 cups of flour and  salt. Mix, slowly adding in more flour until you cannot mix anymore.

Kneading time! Knead, adding the excess flour, until it is smooth. Cover in a greased bowl and let rise for an hour.

Cut the dough into 10 pieces and either roll or make little pretzels. Let rest 15 minutes while you turn on your toaster oven to preheat it and bring the water, baking soda, and salt to a boil.

Once boiling, turn down the temperature of the water. Boil 3 pieces or so at a time, about a minute for each side. When done, place on a plate, dust with salt, and put into your toaster oven for about 15 minutes.

Bake for 20 minutes, until golden. Makes 10 pretzels or pretzel buns.

Enjoy!

Pretty easy, and it makes enough bread for me for a week. Success!

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1. I <3 Yogurt
2. いわて牛 Iwate Beef- “Meat Icecream”

When I was little I hated yogurt. Now, what I mean is that I hated those little Dannon things with the fruit on the bottom that they used to give kinds for lunch. Even then I had a distaste for things that did not taste like they should, like “all natural fruit flavours” and yogurt should not resemble jello should it?

I remember the first moment I stopped hating yogurt. It was when I was eating dinner with my French host family for the first time and they had plain yogurt with sugar on top for dessert. I remembered the Dannon cups and might have even wrinkled my nose, but I was determined to take advantage of local food customs (which on one occasion caused me severe stomach pains from a semi-cooked egg) and I ate it.

It was tart! Not jiggly! Creamy!

Since then I’ve eaten yogurt nearly every day if I could get my hands on the good kind, but now I can make my own!

For Christmas I got a yogurt maker from Williams and Sonoma and I finally got to eat some of the yogurt I made. There are only two ingredients, milk and yogurt starter, and it is delicious, thick, and tangy! Plus way cheaper (at the cost of a bottle of milk) than fancy Whole Foods yogurt.

Another win for the student budget!

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A little too true: “My wallet is full of pointcards instead of cash.”

The video is of Japan’s complaint choir. These choirs are part of a sort of global project to turn all the energy spent by people complaining into something positive. They are all pretty amusing, but  this is the first one I really understood, since I have been living in Tokyo for a little while now.
You can read more about them here.

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So recently on a fluke I picked up a pack of Iwate beef at my local supa (grocery). It was pretty expensive, 1000 yen for a few pieces of beef weighing less than a pound. I also picked up some regular beef for about 300 yen. I only picked up the Iwate beef because I’d heard of the name before and I thought I might treat myself after a hard week at Waseda.

You’ve probably heard about Kobe beef, but there are several different regions in Japan that have these Wagyu, including Iwate. What is so special about Iwate beef, and all Wagyu, is the marbling that permeates every inch of the meat. These cows were specially bred to produce this marbling, and there are rumors that some cows are even massaged and fed beer and sake to improve the taste of the meat.

Obviously, I’m a poor grad student, so I didn’t want to waste my money. What else is there to do but look on the forums about how to cook the meat and how it should taste? Everyone kept saying it was the texture of foi gras or ice cream, which seemed not to be the ideal texture for meat in my mind.

I read about how to cook the meat, and I’m glad I did because I would have slathered it in yaki-niku sauce, like with the normal beef, otherwise. Instead I heated up a pan for a while, salted the beef, threw it on for a few seconds and took it off. I was so excited about it I took a bite before it had even had a chance to cool down.

I have had steaks at five star restaurants that weren’t as good as this.

It really was meat ice cream.

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According to the Japan times, 191 kanji may be added to the official joyo kanji list next year, which is of course music to the ears of Japanese learners everywhere!

On the other hand, there are also five kanji slated to be taken off of the list, including 勺 (shaku) to the dismay of shakuhachi lovers and players throughout the world.

The good news is that the new kanji are probably ones you need to know if you ever plan on living in Japan. It’s probably good to know the kanji for chopsticks 箸 (hashi,) and several prefectures like Nara (奈良) which are not currently on the joyo list. The revisions, the first since 1981, were prompted by the multiplication of kanji in Japanese everyday life caused by new technological terms. Several semi-vulgar words, like lewd (淫 in) will also be joining the list.

In total there probably will be 2,131 kanji once the revisions take place in the fall. Luckily for those of us who are using Heisig’s Remember the Kanji approach, book three probably covers all of the new ones.

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