happylife

What to eat?

When I was living in Vancouver I usually cooked by myself to save money and to keep up health. Eating out in Vancouver often meant spending a lot of money for some greasy menu items and poor services. On the other hand in Obihiro, there are so many good restaurants that I don't need to cook by myself. It's more reasonable and of course delicious to eat out than my original menu items. This picture is the entrance of my favorite restaurant. If you can read Japanese, you would be happy to see this menu list; all the dinner set menu items including fish, meat, fries and noodles are less than 500 yen! Can you believe all the dinner set comes with vegetables, appetizer, miso soup and rice? I know we can't buy even two slices of pizza at this price in Vancouver. It's very enjoyable to think about what to eat for every lunch and dinner.

Hinomaru Bento

Hinomaru Bento is a traditional Japanese lunch box which is made of only steamed rice and a pickled plum. The red plum at the center of the white rice field symbolizes Japanese flag "The Rising Sun." It used to be a very popular menu item when Japan was not so rich after the World War II, but it is too simple to satisfy the rich Japanese people now. A few days ago we had a heavy rain caused by the typhoon and I found I had nothing to eat in my refrigerator. Unfortunately, I didn't have an umbrella either. I was hungry and what I did was boiling the rice and putting two pickled plums on it. It is almost a Hinomaru Bento, but this one is a little bit more gorgeous because there are more than one plum. What I learned was that I need an umbrella and I am lucky because I can every day eat whatever I like.

What is curry?

We Japanese like "curry" very much. We usually enjoy it on steamed rice. It is almost our soul food. However, what we imagine on our tongue from the word "curry" is different from any other curry in other countries including India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Thai and so on. I think each curry in each country is quite different each other and they seem to have nothing in common. Wikipedia defines that curry is the English description of any of a general variety of spiced dishes. This definition is very obscure and chaotic. What do they mean by spiced dishes? There is no common spice used in all kinds of curry in the world. I don't understand why butter chicken is categorized in curry while demiglace or borscht is not. Wikipedia also says that curry's roots come from India which is known as the most chaotic country. It might be the reason why curry is so obscure. It might be that we don't need a clear definition of curry if it is delicious and we can recognize the dish as curry. The Indian curry I had for today's lunch was excellent.

At McDonald's in Downtown

It was after 4 AM at a 24 hour open McDonald's restaurant in Downtown, I was eating a hamburger alone. It is very rare for me to visit this restaurant because I don't like McDonald's. I don't like its taste, smell and atmosphere. It is both unhealthy and cheesy. However, I had been staying up overnight in my room and longed for a hamburger without any reason. As far as I knew, it was the only place I could get a hamburger in that early morning. While I was eating a hamburger in the restaurant, I felt myself to be out of place. The restaurant was full of bums and young poor travelers who were all sleeping in the sofa escaping from the cold rain outside. There were dozens of such guys and only one little woman was working as a sales person. When I almost finished my early breakfast, she suddenly shouted something tapping around the table with a plastic tray so that all the sleepers wake up and get out of the restaurant. Some of the guys were complaining and an old bum was staying on his seat for a while, but she was the last winner of the fight and I became the only customer in the restaurant. Though I had a proper right to stay there for a while, I got out as soon as I finished my breakfast. It was my first visit to McDonald's this year and it will also be the last visit in 2007 or in my life.

Vietnamese menu item

As I was bored with cooking by myself, I visited a Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsway. It was my first visit to the restaurant and I ordered my favorite menu item which is so popular that every Vietnamese restaurant serves. I have forgotten what it is called in Vietnamese, but the English name is "BBQ pork and spring rolls on rice noodles." The most popular Vietnamese cuisine might be "Pho," which is thick and flat rice noodles and is mostly served in soup, but I don't like it so much because it isn't firm as Japanese white noodles. The one I ordered has no soup and we enjoy it pouring special sweet and sour dressing instead. It looks healthy with a lot of vegetables including sprout, leek, carrot and some herbs. I didn't like herbs such as cilantro and lemon grass, but I love them now. Sure, there are lots of Vietnamese restaurants in Tokyo, but it's difficult to enjoy such menu items with a lot of herbs because most Japanese people, including me until four years ago, do not like herbs. I'm thinking about enjoying such menu items some more times before I go back to Japan.

Fish and chips

Fish and chips is probably the most popular menu item served in seafood restaurants in North America and maybe in Europe though I have never been there. This English original cuisine is surely good and I sometimes long for tasting it, but we Japanese cannot be satisfied with only this one type of cooking seafood. When I visit a harbor town in Canada or the U.S. I often have a feeling of wasting fresh seafood. I don't think that fish and chips is the best cooking way for fresh seafood. It ruins the freshness of the fish fresh from the sea. I'm not talking only about Sushi. I think there are a lot of cooking way for the fresh sea ingredients including simmering, BBQing, vinegaring and so on. Why don't they try these cooking possibilities and always insist on fish and chips? In terms of how to eat seafood, Japanese has great variations and therefore I feel happy to be Japanese. Anyway, to tell the truth, I didn't like seafood so much when I was young; I preferred hamburgers and beef stakes when I was a teenager. It was after I became twenty years old when I got found of seafood. It might require kind of a maturity to enjoy seafood.

Seafood in San Francisco

Ever since I entered the U.S. a few days ago, my everyday diet had been terrible -- continental breakfast at motels, hamburgers, fish and chips and so on. All these typical American foods were apparently bad to my health and worst of it was that they are not tasty. I decided to visit the most popular oyster bar in Downtown in San Francisco. The restaurant had a long floor with a long counter which was similar to the typical sushi bar in Japan. I ordered a half dozens of fresh oysters and a cup of clam chowder with a loaf of bread. The thick soup was great with a rich flavor of clam, but the oysters were not so fresh as the ones which I picked up on the beach of Gulf Islands. I thought they were at the pull date of eating without cooking. Fresh clams were sold there, but I didn't have the courage to order them because I knew raw clams have a lot of parasites as well as sands. As far as I know, there is only one sushi restaurant in Japan which serves fresh clams. It is so difficult and requires the greatest care before eating clams in raw. With this thing and that, the restaurant was not bad, but not so good as I had hoped. It might be the difference of culture or taste, and I realized that I have to go back to Japan to get really satisfied with seafood.

Portion

When I visited Granville Island the other day, I felt a little bit hungry and bought a piece of burrito in the food court to eat in the public market. I was thinking about eating it as a snack before supper, but it was so large that I couldn't have the supper at that night. Food portion is generally very large in Canada whether in restaurants, food courts or whatever place we can dine. It is at least time and a half as large as Japan and sometimes it becomes the double or triple sized compared to the average portion in Japan. I would always order a large serving in any restaurants when I was in Japan, but here in Canada, the regular size is literally my size and large is too large for me. The cost for eating out in Vancouver is more expensive than in Tokyo when thinking about the tax and the tip, but it isn't so expensive when taking its portion into account. If you are satisfied with the portion in restaurants in Japan, you need to know how to dogie-bag the left-over in Canada or you will waste the food.

Coke & Pork

A terrible short movie has taken away my appetite. It was a simple movie in which a piece of pork was soaked in Coke. As you might know, a pork pig has a lot of worms in it and all of them came out of the flesh one after another stimulated by Coke. I got goose bumps and regretted to have watched such a horrible movie. I don't like to have pork any more as well as Coke, but what should I eat then? Chicken is notorious for the flu, beef is still in danger of BSE and salmon has more bugs than pork. It's kind of an ultimate decision. I know we have to ignore such small problems in order to survive. We can't perfectly get rid of bugs or any other poisonous materials from our daily food. It is a compromise we need to have as a human being standing on the top of the food chains. I understand that in my brain, but my emotion does not accept it yet. It seems to take a time until I forget the shocking images, but I don't blame for the movie because I can diet. It might be the most effective dieting method to watch shocking movies like this coke & pork.

Supermarkets in Vancouver

I would often go to a convenience store when I was in Tokyo. It was literally convenient for me and I would often enjoy shopping there. On the other hand in Vancouver, we have few convenience stores, but I rarely feel inconvenient thanks to supermarkets scattered all over the city. When I need daily foods or something else, I visit Safeway or Save on Foods, both of which are the most popular supermarket brands. Safeway originates from the U.S. and is distributed all over the North America including Vancouver, while Save on Foods is limited in the Western Canada. The selection, the quality and the prices of the items in each supermarket is similar, however, I prefer Save on Foods. I can't explain the reason for that, but I prefer the atmosphere of Save on Foods. It might be the layout of items or the lighting way in the store. I feel happier when I go into the store of Save on Foods any way. Safeway is not bad and actually I often visit there, but I don't have the happy feeling just like in Save on Foods. There would be a secret method which attracts me effectively. I'm almost a Save on Foods buff and driving around my unvisited branches is my recent enjoyment.