I am not on holiday but just on the way to supermarket.

I am not on holiday but just on the way to supermarket., a photo by gezkaz on Flickr.

I took this pic not anywhere by the sea, but just in North London where I live. It was unusually nice lovely weather for London on the day and the white wall was very misleadingly located there.

Anyway, it looks like a holiday pic, doesn't it?

She waits, I Wait.

Fethiye 08, a photo by gezkaz on Flickr.

She waits for somebody to give her food. I wait she gets a bit still and shows her best expression.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

In English, 'Hot' can be temperature hot but can be spicy hot, too, whereas in Japanese those 2 words are different.

However, I once had a proper experience those 2 words really came together.

It was summer in 1997, when we had friends from Germany, Holland, Turkey and Canada, so it was a fairly international party at home.

Those people all had Turkish link, so I was trying to make 'Yogurtlu Kofte' from my Turkish cooking book. But I had never dealt with fresh chili peppers especially green ones before so I had no idea what they could do to me.

I was innocent and ignorant so I opened them one by one with my hands and got rid of seeds inside, yes, one by one with my hands.

My food was actually lovely, everybody complimented but by the time people started to say 'it's beautiful', 'really nice!!' etc. my hands started burning.

It was a real burn, at least that's what I felt. While people are enjoying the food in the living room I was in agony putting my hands in running water in the kitchen.

I thought, our Turkish friend may know how to cure because I got this through Turkish cooking. So I asked him what to do.

He told me that put good amount of yogurt around my hands. OK, so I did.

That seemed be working for the first 20 seconds but as soon as the yogurt gets a bit warmer, it was the same so I had to put more yogurt every 20 seconds.

In short, yogurt does only work as good as running water and you can not touch anything with this smelly white stuff on your hands. So basically, it's no good at all.

I still wonder how people deal with chili peppers? Is there better solution than yogurt or running water?

One is sorrow, two is joy...

My husband always looks for another magpie rather religiously if he finds one. 

It's a bit like kids in Japan hiding their thumbs when they see a funeral car, well at least when I was a kid, all my friends did it.

I know it sounds quite weird but it is/was believed if you do not hide your thumb when you see a funeral car, you will not be with your parents when they die.　Well, there are quite a lot of 'you can not be with your parents when they die' in Japanese superstitious and this one was one of those. I kind of understand the theory behind it. In Japanese, thumb is called 'parent finger (Oya-yubi)' so if you hide your parent fingers, they are not taken away by the funeral car...

As a kid you don't really know what it is like 'you can not be with your parents' thing, but all my friends religiously hide the thumbs.　

I guess 'one is sorrow, two is joy' seems to be rather simple and innocent.

It is not a holiday suites.

Following the Umeboshi story,　I am going to talk about rice.

When I'm going to buy rice, I usually take suitcase since I usually buy a packet of 10kg of rice and it is quite heavy to carry back hanging from your arm.

Japanese rice in UK are usually imported from California or very few of them are from Italy. They are not something you can buy at any supermarket and you really have to go to Oriental food store so I prefer buying a big packet rather than getting them every couple of days.

Japanese students in UK, who automatically believe that buying Japanese rice in UK is totally decadent, tend to buy pudding rice as substitute. I don't know where it has been started but by word of mouth pudding rice is the closest to Japanese rice among those you can buy in a normal supermarket.

Now I have to clarify to all Japanese students in UK.

Pudding rice is nowhere near Japanese rice. And rice ball made of pudding rice is pretty disgusting. Also pudding rice is quite expensive compare to proper Japanese rice you can get in oriental supermarkets.

So DO NOT buy pudding rice unless you are making rice-pudding, which I think generally is disgusting, too.

Packman Return

My love for Japanese food is sometimes too much and quite often too overwhelming.

Quite a many years, I made Japanese rice everyday with my Japanese rice cooker and ate it at least twice a day with a couple of 'Umeboshis'.

Umeboshi is authentic Japanese pickled plums. I was quite fussy about the quality so I always calculate the number of Umeboshi left in the fridge and try not to eat them all till next visit to Japan.

One day, a friend of mine brought a bucket of damsons from their garden, so I decided to make my own Umeboshi.

It is really a painstaking job and takes several months to complete the process.

Sometimes they need to be in special alcohol, juice or salt, and sometimes they need to do sunbath. If it rains, they need to be taken in the house. I wonder if it may be easier to have a cat.

Anyway, after all sorts of hassle, here you are, Umeboshis are done!

The taste...mmmm...it's just about OK.

I think I will go back to my old counting Umeboshi life, yeah, I think so.

Wat's cider?

I know what cider is now but I didn't know 16 years ago.

In Japan, 'cider' is lemonade and 'lemonade' is proper lemon juice.
So I didn't dream that cider is alcoholic drink.

Who and how people decided to call lemonade 'cider' in Japan but if you order 'cider' you will get sweetened sparkling water in Japan.

But at the same time, I wonder why English people decided to call the sweetened sparkling water 'lemonade'? It tastes million miles away from 'Lemon'.

OK, then you may ask what we call cider in Japan.

We call cider 'apple alcohol'!

Could it be any clearer? Perfect!