A Heart's a Heavy Burden

I get into these moods where I’m obsessed with certain cultural foods for weeks or months at a time, and I go back and forth most often between Japanese, Mexican, and Indian (though Naf Naf is Middle Eastern, and they have the best hummus and falafel, I don’t make that at home). I love very specific things about each of the basic flavors, but I feel like I can’t be focusing in both at the same time because they are just *so* different.

For the last couple months before school got out, I was on a Mexican kick. Black beans, avocado, tomatoes and cumin were my main staples. Now I’m back to wanting rice and noodles, seaweed, light soups and *gasp* eggs. I haven’t eaten eggs since I was traumatized watching “What the Health?” I live mostly a vegan lifestyle anyway, so to stop eating eggs wasn’t that big of a leap when I wasn’t consuming them that often. I’ve noticed that I don’t really miss anything anymore after I stop eating it.

The thing I consume that makes me not vegan is cheese - usually sheep or goat but occasionally cow, especially if I’m eating out. I used to be obsessed with cheese; living just a 10-minute drive from Wisconsin, I have access to a lot of high-quality cheese. However, once I stopped eating it regularly, the cravings for it diminished after a few months. Even now when I eat it am I rarely dying for it. It adds a nice texture or flavor to certain dishes, but otherwise I prefer it plain, like a snack. Dairy is in most foods if you’re eating at a restaurant, and I go out enough that it makes sense to just call me vegetarian vs vegan.

I digress.

I spent the day reading through a book I have with Japanese recipes, “Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat,” just because I enjoy the book, and gathering ideas for recipes I wanted to make. Of course I skipped the recipes with meat and fish, and found a vegetarian Dashi recipe online (though when I eat at any Asian restaurant I assume the soup base has fish stock and that’s okay with me).

Then I spent the entire afternoon meandering through grocery stores - Whole Foods, my local co-op, and a local Asian market (“Ha Tien”) that I’ve never actually been in. Most of the food there was Vietnamese or Laotian, but there were sections for Japanese and Korean foods too (though mostly junk food). I finally was able to get enoki mushrooms, which are often out of stock at the co-ops, whole daikon, a cute soup bowl, some various seaweed types, dragon fruit, and decent rice. Ha Tien also had a surprisingly robust selection of “vegan seafood” in the frozen section. I couldn’t read any of the ingredients so I don’t actually know what any of them were comprised of. Having never developed a taste for seafood, I wasn’t willing to try any out, but that was pretty fascinating.

Shopping took forever because in the Asian market I had to move very slowly to determine each section’s wares and look closely at the labels, and I was constantly in the way of a man trying to vacuum the floor. Literally wherever I set my cart, he would mysteriously appear. Maybe he was following me, lol. All the cashiers could have been students of mine, but I didn’t see anyone I knew - I would guess most of my Hmong families shop at Hmong village (a huge indoor market with homemade clothing stalls, beauty supplies, various electronics services and hot food stands) because it has a much much larger selection of fresh produce, but I don’t think it has much in the way of noodles, spices and meat.

Things I wanted but did not find:
-shiso
-Kiriboshi

My Japanese-food (or Korean or other Asian food) consuming friends, some questions out of curiosity:
1. What are your Japanese food go-tos? What do you make most often at home? What is your daily food routine?
2. How do you make your tea?I drink a lot of tea, and I use a metal electric kettle, but I have very hard water so mineral build-up happens quickly. I’m curious how others deal with these annoyances. Also, what IS your favorite tea (anyone answer! I’m curious)?
3. For how long do you store rice, and how do you keep it from getting hard (or how do you rehydrate it)? In the book, the woman adds green tea to her leftover rice. I’m curious if that’s common or not.
4. What are your favorite noodles and why?
5. What are your favorite spices or accoutrements that you add to your cooking to make it flavorful?
6. There’s that Japanese trope of eating toast while in the go, what kind of bread do you consume? I don’t eat that much bread, but when I do it’s a sprouted kind with nuts and it’s amazing.
7. Do you cook rice on the stove or in a rice cooker? If you have a rice cooker, what kind? Do you rinse your rice even when the directions say you don’t have to? Do you soak your rice? I currently use a Zojirushi 3-cup simple rice cooker, but I’ve always been really interested in the more expensive, high-tech rice cookers. I almost always rinse my rice no matter what, so the starches don’t get everywhere. I only soak specific short-grain rice, overnight.

I got home pretty late, and Steve just had a new TV delivered for us. We bought a 47” back in like 2010, which we used for quite some time. Eventually it broke, and we used a hand-me-down plain tv of similar size for the next several years. Steve’s gotten to the point of wanting to play his state-of-the-art games on a state-of-the-art tv, and I don’t blame him. He did a lot of research because we haven’t owned a new TV in almost a decade, and he settled on a TCL 65” that is considered the best value for its quality and size. The TV is really nice, about $750USD, and it’s of course huge. The picture is beautiful, but we noticed like... dark patches, when you pan side to side. Steve did some research, and it turns out this is called “dirty screen” phenomenon, and is very common on these TVs. Most people don’t care because it’s not a huge issue, but it’s very noticeable once you see it. Steve and I debated the merits of using the warranty to get a replacement or get it fixed, but at this point I think we’re actually going to trade it out for a more expensive Sony that’s the same size and is more reliable, albeit more expensive.

For some reason, I got a jumpstart into practicing Japanese again. I think it had to do with the fact that after we got Black/White, Steve and I got into a discussion of the required mechanics to play the games.

On the back of the games, there's a rather long explanation of the requirements in order to be able to play Pokemon, and the rules about transferring Pokemon between games, and other generational topics relevant. This then led to a discussion of how old one must be in order to play Pokemon. It says "Basic Reading Ability." Was that true? I mean, I started the Pokemon games at like age 10 or something, which would then make Bethany 6, and she also started the games then. Adam started younger I'm sure. I don't know if a kindergartener/1st grader qualifies as being able to read whole conversations, or at least, understand them. With the original games especially, I think that you can get through without having to ACTUALLY be told where to go, though it obviously helps.

Children are incredibly determined, and haven't developed that impatience and adult sense of instant gratification. I remember playing Yellow without Flash, every time. Fuck flash! I can get through the cave ON MY OWN! XD When we were waiting in line to pick up our pre-ordered copies, a teenage boy between 13 and 15 struck up a conversation with me about Pokemon. Steve and I had brought our DSes so we could get Celebi via wireless. This boy had brought his DS too. Now, a normal teenage boy, with a fair amount of acne and a slightly deep voice would usually have a hard time striking up a conversation with a strange female, especially one who's standing next to a much more approachable-looking boy. After showing me his game time (211 hours), Pokemon caught (246), his current levels (At least 3 were level 100), and telling me a step-by-step approach to his battle system and how he likes to complete as much as possible when he plays games, I determined he HAD to be autistic. Which of course made him welcome kin instead of weird kid (I am sooo socially awkward and I hate small talk), and I enjoyed his lack of social cues until we left. The funny part was that I didn't say ANYTHING or make faces or any sort of hints to Steve - normally when strange people talk to me I'll give him "looks", whether exasperated or uncomfortable or awwwwkwarrrrd - and he went, "That kid? SOOOOO autistic!" XD He reminded me A LOT of one of my former students.

Aaaanyway, after our discussion of the level of reading skill required from Pokemon, Steve was like, "Why didn't we just import your version? That would have been so cool and you'd have been able to read SOME of it!" Which is true! Not a lot, though... I can't remember kanji for CRAP but I've started sentence structure and particles, as well as some vocab. I ordered a few cheap books (seriously, shipping was more than the cost of the books) off of Amazon, and I'm super excited to use them. I'll post what they are when I get them.

I'm starting to get subject-object-verb down okay, but it's hard when I don't even remember how English sentence structure goes. At least, not formally. Obviously I know how to write, but I feel like we can write however the hell we want. Some ways make less sense than others but fucking context helps you figure it out. Context in Japanese is like whaaaaaaat? Wait, in the sentence たろがりんごをたべた, if you think that the context in implied, you only have to write "ate"?! Omguhhhhh. So confusing. XD I know I'm ahead of myself here, but it's still mind-boggling.

I'm thinking about that email Athena wrote me where she included a small bit of talk in Japanese, and I pretty much died from being lost.

I FINALLY was able to figure out/take the time to/add Japanese keyboard typing on my computer! 三井～！I'm so happy I can't even tell you! To be fair, it looks like the Japanese editor is smart enough to realize I just wrote a nonsense word in hiragana (which I know fairly well, though I'm ridiculously frustrated because all the practice sites I can find, and even MyJapanese Coach for the DS, require romaji for practice/translation even though they all obviously insist to step away from it) and made it into katakana, which I don't know at all yet T_T So don't go thinking I'm good yet. At anything :P

My zest and desire for Japanese has come back, especially so when I heard chochajin PASSED THE N2~!!! YAYYYYY! Congrats again ;) It actually sparked when I was sitting at my desk looking at the tag from my Hello Kitty phone charm, and I realized that I had sounded out the hiragana without thinking and that it read HAROU KITEYU (or something, I can't remember what the last character was, but I planned on taking a picture of it. I think it was ゆ) XDDDDD OMG YES. So good. So funny. So great.

Another huge problem I have though is that I know basically no rules, no application, no words. Bleh!

ふ in script needs to DIE.

I hate it. I hate writing it. It is stupid.

D:


On the other hand, I quite like ねand す.

But goddamn that ふ!!!