The Lazy Gaijin: Fairly Edible Meals Made With Ingredients From A Japanese Supermarket And A Minimum Of Fuss

Recipe No.1: Onion and sweet potato soup


8th November 2009


There are lots of things I'd like to do this lifetime. Some are one-off events, like seeing the Northern Lights, while others are more in the line of ongoing missions. This is one of the latter: making good soup without messing around with bones or resorting to stock cubes and powders.

I invented a fairly edible soup on Saturday which fulfils these two requirements. Here's the recipe. (The measurements will be approximate because life's an adventure and sometimes cooking is too.)


Makes 3 servings
Ingredients:

Water, 1 litre

Pasta water, around 250 cc (left over from cooking lunch. Probably doesn't make much difference if you leave it out)

Big onions, 3 (because they came in bags of 3)

Small Japanese sweet potatoes, 3 (ditto)

Konbu, 1 piece (Pronounced kombu but spelled konbu. I was aiming to use a 10 cm square piece but the one I pulled out of the bag was bigger and I couldn't be bothered to cut it so... I've been wondering why konbu is used so much in Japanese stocks. I believe it's added for umami. And perhaps for luck)

Tofu (however much you want to eat)

Chicken (As above. I got enough to cover my hand because a packet with that much was going for 30 per cent off at the supermarket)

Soya sauce or salt (I ended up using both)

Sake (Probably optional but I used it to marinade the chicken. You can also drink it if you get thirsty. No one will check if you're old enough to)


Here we go:

1. Wipe the konbu (pronounced kombu but spelled konbu) with a wet cloth. I'm not sure why this is necessary but Harumi Kurihara says to and I don't argue with her. At least, not very loudly).

2. Put the konbu in a pot with the water and pasta water that you may or may not be using. Leave for 10 minutes then light a fire under the lot. Harumi-sensei says to take the konbu out when the water becomes warm, whatever that means. I interpreted this to be that stage before serious bubbles appear in the water.

3. While the konbu was doing its 10 minutes in the pot, you should have cut the chicken up into pieces that will fit into your mouth and marinaded them with soya sauce and optional sake. I used however much came out when I poured in one circular motion over the bowl.

4. Cut up the onions. The smaller the pieces, the less boiling time but on the other hand, you'll suffer onion fumes for longer while dicing with death. If the water is boiling, dump in the onion as quickly as you can.

5. Cut up the sweet potatoes. Again, the smaller the better. And this time, there are no fumes, hurray!

6. Oh, and add the sweet potatoes to the pot.

7. Keep the boil going until the onions and sweet potatoes almost dissolve. If you've finished the washing-up and start to get bored, you can speed up the process by hitting them with a ladle or something.

8. When you add the chicken is up to you. I dumped it in when I couldn't stand the suspense any longer. And anyway, I wanted to wash the bowl it was in.

9. At some point, put in the tofu. You can dice it first or just toss it in and hit it with your ladle. Tofu rarely fights back.

10. The timing of the spinach addition - oh bugger, I forgot to put spinach in the ingredients list - is far more important. Spinach does not seem to be one of those things that take kindly to boiling so throw it in only when you're ready to serve.

11. When are you ready to serve? When the water level in the pot goes down, the onions and sweet potatoes have turned into a kind of sludge and your stomach starts to make socially unacceptable noises, it's time to add the spinach and wrap up this gig. First aid measures involving soya sauce or salt will probably be necessary. And a little prayer never hurts.


Verdict:

It doesn't taste half-bad. The yellowish-grey colour of the soup is regrettable but you can always close your eyes. It also explains why there are no photos in this post. The main thing is, the stuff is edible and the flavour didn't come from roasting bones or stuff that will make your hair fall out. This is an experiment I plan to repeat.



(I also posted this in the other blog but no one seems to go there. Which is fair enough, seeing as I hardly post in it.)

What I did during my vacation


Eve of All Hallows, 2009


I queued. I didn’t really mean to. When I packed to leave Kyoto for Singapore, I didn’t plan to do much more than catch up with people and books I hadn’t seen in months.

But avoiding crowds was high on my list of things to do. So was staying out of any kind of queue because there are only so many people you can go on holiday with.

Then it was announced that Neil Gaiman would be appearing at the Singapore Writers Festival at the end of October.

Are introductions in order? Neil Gaiman: author of The Sandman, a fantasy series that has become so much of a hit that the comic books are now called graphic novels, and writer of short stories, novels, poems, film scripts and children’s books. Of these, The Graveyard Book has spent over a year on the children’s best-seller list of the New York Times though everyone I know who loves the work is old enough to drive.

It’s a reimagining of The Jungle Book; instead of a boy being brought up in a jungle by animals, he’s brought up in a cemetery by dead people. And a vampire.

The novel may well turn out to be one of those books you keep returning to and measuring yourself against, like standing beside a mark scratched on a wall to show how tall you were at nine because you want to see how much you’ve grown.

So great that the author would be coming to town, yes? There was only one snag: all the tickets for his three events were gone on the first day of distribution, even though it was announced only via Twitter.

To accommodate the demand from everyone not on the Twitter feed, the festival staff increased the venue capacity and announced that they would release a ‘VERY VERY LIMITED number of tickets’ on Sept 26.

When I read this on the festival website, I began to see visions of queues. There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned about Mr Gaiman. Yes, he’s versatile, yes, he’s prolific and yes, he wins all those awards but what he really is, is a queue-maker (like a rain dancer but more horizontal).

The mere hint of his presence is enough to draw previously unconnected people out of the great mass of humanity and assemble them into a line. This happens all over the world – at literary festivals, bookstores and conventions – and I knew it would happen on Sept 26 at The Arts House because of the promise of tickets to see He Who Brings Queues.

The question was, how early would I have to turn up before the distribution time of 11am if I wanted to be sure of a pair of those VERY VERY LIMITED tickets?

It didn’t help that I work late and go to bed even later. But after crashing out for five hours and hitting the alarm clock’s snooze button for half an hour more, I stumbled into the kitchen at 7.30am.

My mother was there. ‘You mean you haven’t gone to bed yet?’ she said.

Then again, she might not have been my mother. Since I’m technically not awake between the hours of 6am and 9am, anyone I see then must be a figment of my imagination.

The taxi-driver looked pretty real though. I asked him to take me to Parliament House – near The Arts House but not in the area closed off for the F1 races that weekend. He frowned. I held my breath: was he going to refuse to go anywhere near the barricades?

It turned out that he just didn’t know where Parliament was.

But between the both of us, we got there. It was almost 9.30am – one and a half hours before the box office’s opening time – when I made my way past the F1 barricades and security personnel to The Arts House.

Two girls in short shorts were approaching from the venue. ‘…queuing since 6.40!’ said one of them as she went past.

I stopped. What if the line had reached such epic proportions that those two had given up and were on their way home?

I kept on walking. Even if I didn’t get the tickets, there might be a story in it. To be a writer is to slink up to life with a scavenger’s optimism.

The queue began at the locked front door and snaked out of the portico. Since each person was eligible for two tickets, the line was actually twice as long as it appeared. Was I too late?

I left my bag at the end of the queue to stake a spot in that fine Singaporean tradition of chopeing and went to talk to the people up ahead. The first person in the line said she’d been there since 6.40am. She beamed at me, her smile and light green tudung unwilted despite the heat. No. 2 clocked in ‘just past 7’ and No.3 and No.4, at around 7.30am.

Humbled, I went back to do some proper queuing. I’d brought two books but a conversation was starting up in my neck of the queue, mainly about the tickets. One woman confessed that she was hoping that the F1 road closures would deter fans from coming. I had the same thought; devious minds think alike.

To pass the time, we reminisced about other occasions when Singaporeans had gotten into line and stayed there for hours. But the girl behind me was from the Philippines and knew nothing about the Great Hello Kitty Scuffles of 2000.

In the January of that year, McDonald’s launched a promotion offering customers Hello Kitty toys with each Extra Value Meal they bought. Lines sprang up, tempers grew short, fights broke out and people were arrested. At one outlet, a glass door broke against the press of the crowd, injuring seven.

You can think of a queue as a social microcosm. In one line, you’re told what a society values, how much it wants it, how much trust there is in the system to provide it and whether people will resist the urge to jump the queue.

Almost 10 years on from the Hello Kitty Scuffles, how was Singapore doing? The line outside The Arts House that Saturday morning presented the country as orderly and international.

But the nature of the queue might have had something to do with the fact that it was there for Neil Gaiman. For a start, more people were reading than fiddling with their phones.



Still, there was no guarantee of what would happen if there weren’t enough tickets to go round. Some of the books people were holding looked pretty heavy. If the situation turned Hello Kitty, things could get ugly.

For now though, everything was calm. A trio went past, wheeling a trolley of equipment – probably for an F1 event. They seemed surprised to see so many people sitting in a line on the ground and reading.

10.05am – an hour to go and the sun was weighing down. Anybody want to share life stories?

So I talked to the five people around me in the queue. There was Kim, a student from the Philippines, Xuemei, a civil servant, Eldred, who draws, Wanida, who works for Apple and had come with a laptop, and Pat, who handles administration at a polytechnic, has five children aged three to 14, takes all of them on holiday, teaches women to give birth and is on the fast track to a medal.

She said that if she got a pair of tickets, one would go to her 13-year-old son, also a fan.

‘And where is he?’ I asked.

‘At home,’ she said and laughed. ‘Sleeping.’

There was a collective intake of breath as we considered the likelihood of our mothers queuing up for Neil Gaiman tickets for us while we stayed in bed.

‘I don’t think my mother even knows who Neil Gaiman is,’ said one woman who will remain anonymous in case her parents read this.

On his blog, he describes himself as the ‘guy you’ve never heard of’ who ‘gets more people in his book-signing line than anyone else’. This line has been known to stretch to about 600 people.

Our queue was nothing along those lines but everyone in it was competing for a fixed number of tickets. The conversation flowed, snagging at times on the uneasiness underneath.

Two people ahead in the line stood up and shook out their groundsheet. ‘Do you think they’re giving up?’ someone asked hopefully.

‘They came with a mat – they’re not going to give up,’ someone else growled.

Sure enough, the two rearranged their sheet and sat down again.

I looked away to see an old man staring at us. A cap of flashing pink sequins on his head, he shuffled past, a smile crinkling his face. ‘Ni men hao!’ he bellowed. Hello to you too. Perhaps it takes a lunatic to acknowledge a whole line of them.

People were still arriving. They would do a double-take at the queue which now stretched along the front of the building and onto the grass at the other side. Then they would go to the end, their shoulders slumped.

11am – my queue buddies and I stood up. We paused only to get each other’s contact details then faced forward as if we could see through the bodies to the number of tickets left. Were people still talking? I don’t know; I couldn’t hear them any more.

And then I finally reached the table where the festival staff were handing out tickets from three dwindling stacks.

Maybe I was sunstroked out but I couldn’t quite believe it, not even when two tickets were in my (newly tanned) hand. The five who queued with me had their tickets too and all of us had picked the same event. ‘Let’s meet for lunch or something before that,’ said Kim.

Outside the portico, a burly, long-haired man in black was taking a photo of his tickets.

But not everyone was happy – about 20 people had to go away empty-handed. Amid the cries of disappointment, one young girl looked stricken. A few people exchanged words with the festival staff but as far as I could tell, they were polite. Perhaps we’d come out from under the shadow of Hello Kitty.

I couldn’t leave without seeing how it all ended because the conditions that give rise to a queue are also those that create a community: people with the same purpose come together, demanding attention through presence. But there is also envy of those ahead and a gnawing anxiety that you won’t get what they will. The factors are always the same yet the manner in which similar desires are balanced against competing interests is different each time.

So I stayed because I wanted to see what kind of queue, what kind of community we’d made. And when I left at last, I took more than tickets away with me.

When I got home, I headed straight for the shower, relieved that for this at least, I didn’t have to line up.

Because you know what I said about queues and community-building and all that stuff? When it comes to the bathroom, none of it applies.

Egmont and the seventh


20th October 2009


A concert again after so long away and the NY Philharmonic after even longer. This time, Beethoven was the one singing in the dark.

The brass was a little...startling but the strings alone were worth the (nosebleed) price of admission.

I'd have heard more of them if the audience hadn't been so quick to clap. An orchestra doesn't stop playing even after the fingers lift away and the bow leaves the strings. When the sound is gone, sound remains - an echo encore drifting in a space where no wind blows.

But applause slaps the sound away.

Wait, won't you wait a little longer? Only the first of the snowflake sound has fallen on my tongue.

Undead 101


13th October 2009


So I was working on a column today and for reasons I'll make up later, it suddenly veered off into the subject of zombie killing.

At which point I realised that I had no idea what to do if a zombie came through the door. I didn't think that the Internet, wide and Wikified as it is, would have any information on it either but I typed "zombie kill" into the Google search field anyway and hit enter.

Oh me of little faith.

Pages and pages of information. Whether the suggestions have been field-tested is another question but at least they're there - with brain diagrams and everything. There's even a game where you can kill zombie squirrels.

I wonder if virtual undead rodents come under the SPCA's purview.

The blue havens of summer


2nd October 2009


The goldfish couldn't fit into the published column so I'm posting the original version to make it up to them.

...

Summer burns the brain.

Air that crackled with static in winter and stayed crisp through spring finally sags into cling film that wraps like a second skin. Encased in sticky air, the body traps heat inside, building and building it up until the brain starts to cook. When this happens, smoke can sometimes be observed escaping from the ears.

It’s worse on days when the clouds have been scorched out of the sky. With nothing between sun and skin, the rays sear the brain straight into well-done without stopping by rare or medium.

The Japanese try to beat the heat through methods both physical and psychological. One of these is the colour blue. Come summer, clothes, store decorations and wrappings will appear in shades from aquamarine to indigo. They lie like a cold compress over the eyes, soothing the heat rash inside.

It’s a case of fighting fire with sapphire.

One August afternoon, I duck out of the broil and into a wagashi shop in my neighbourhood. There’s just one glass case in the shop; it sells only about five kinds of Japanese sweets and, anyway, customers usually know what they want before they arrive.

Under a shelf of manju buns and long slabs of red bean jelly, a powdery blue cloth winds like a stream at the bottom of the case. A turquoise bowl holds one end down as light and dark blue glass pebbles lie scattered around.

The pressure gauge in my mind, vibrating in the red danger range, subsides into orange then settles in green.

Also in the glass case is a cobalt bowl holding two pale green golf balls. Darker green markings stripe down the surface – not golf balls after all but baby watermelons, picked before they can reach full size and the jaw-dropping prices they fetch in Japanese supermarkets.

Watermelons aren’t just fruit – hideously expensive fruit – they are signposts to the season. Goldfish are another signal of summer though this one needs some explaining.

While festivals take place all year round in Japan, the ones in summer seem larger, noisier and more…festive. It makes sense in a way – once your brain is toast, there’s not much you can do except party.

There are a number of stalls you’d expect at a summer festival and the goldfish scooping tent is one of them. If you see children squatting beside a low plastic pool with a little net in one hand and a bowl in the other, goldfish scooping is in progress.

The point of the game is to move as many fish as you can from the pool into your bowl. To add to the challenge, you’re given an easily broken net.

And that’s how goldfish have come to be in the Japanese summer lexicon.

As the sticky Kyoto summer clogs the air, paper goldfish mobiles go up in front of the shops lining Kawaramachi avenue in the centre of the city. The fish come in three colours: red, yellow – and blue.

Apart from these genetic modification lab escapees, there is plenty of blue at a festival beside the Kamo river nearby.

Much of it is in the yukata, the single-layer kimono worn in the hot months. Turquoise, navy, ultramarine – visitors and stall-holders have put on pieces of the sky and sea. Many of the yukata are printed with morning glories, fireworks and other symbols of the season. So what if summer has set your brain on fire, they say. Here, have some blue.

One way to tell if your brain is fried: when you think that people’s clothes are talking to you.

But we do not chat long because it’s almost dinner time and happy grilling smells are wafting from the stalls further down. Whether by accident or intention, the Japanese festival menu is dominated by carbohydrates: fried noodles (starch in strings), takoyaki dumplings (starch in balls) and corn on the cob (starch on a stick).

I get a packet of mitarashi dango – rice flour balls skewered then grilled (starch in balls and on a stick).

Fuelling up on carbs may leave you sluggish but when heat rage is building behind your eyes, sluggishness feels a lot like calm. Starch – just one more strategy to help you survive summer.


Another is water. At the festival is a stall dedicated to getting visitors to take their shoes off, slip on a pair of waiting slippers and into the canal beside the river. While the point of this is supposedly to study tadpoles, shrimp and whatever else you can find, dunking your feet in water helps to keep the rest of your body cool.


But if you can’t whip off your shoes and get your feet wet, even the suggestion of water seems to bring relief. Perhaps this explains the colour of the Japanese summer: blue reminds most people of water.*

Over in the river, six men dressed in light blue are wading out to floating bamboo poles. They each tie one end of a roll of cloth to a pole then fling the bolts like fishermen casting nets. The bolts unfurl as they fall, splashing into the water where they lie, coloured ribbons in the current.



This is yuzen-nagashi – washing kimono cloth in a river to get rid of excess dye and the paste used to stop colours running in the dyeing technique called yuzen.

Rivers have changed since the early days of yuzen, said to have been invented in Kyoto in the 17th century by fan painter and kimono designer Miyazaki Yuzensai. The industrial age has left rivers so dirty that most can no longer be used to wash material and besides, the dye and paste add to the problem.

But once a year, the process is re-enacted in the Kamo river, where so many kimono silk tongues once lapped at the water. The six men before me ignore the crowds and the cameras, scrubbing at the cloths in a river darkening as the day fades out.

Stretching my neck, I glance up – and stare. Right above the craftsmen, the sky is also washing cloth. Streamer-like clouds lie neatly racked to each other as if they have been tied to some great, invisible pole. But the sky, bright with the last of the daylight, must be a more vigorous laundryman for the clouds have been scrubbed white.

I stand with a river at my feet and another above me. Between the azure and the indigo, the dried sweat sticky on my skin washes off like paste from kimono silks. Now is the summer of our discomfort made glorious winter by this sum of blue.

But no, it’s not winter no matter how cool it has become. In winter, the sky is different and the colours we wrap around ourselves are different too.

This ocean of blue exists only because summer does. For some pleasures, you have to sweat.




*Though they probably wouldn’t touch a glass of water if it actually looked blue.













Have I ever mentioned how good men in kimono look? No? Well, consider it mentioned.

Paths we have not known


21st September 2009


Sometimes, it is the road more travelled that haunts us.

'Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension...

'Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating...

'Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.'

- Tim Kreider, The New York Times' Happy Days blog


Then there is novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, writing in Tigana: 'There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.'

A comforting belief but one which - and I know this from long years of trying - takes work.

Sinking roots into a typhoon


12th Sept 2009


Time passes faster in a morning glory. The flower packs an entire day into the hours between dawn and noon, then fades and closes in the afternoon.

So when the Kyoto Botanical Garden holds its annual morning glory exhibition, it opens its grounds earlier – at 6.30am – and if you want to see the flowers at their best, you have to go before 10am.

This is not good news for someone who usually wakes up just in time for lunch. But by heroic effort and cunning use of alarm clocks, I make it to the exhibition at around 9.30am.


The flowers – trumpets of ice blue, navy and purple – are morning glorious. Sleepy and sweaty in the August burn, I am rather less so. But I take photos anyway, as automatic as my camera.

Imported from China in the early 8th century because their seeds were used as laxatives, morning glories – asagao, or morning face, in Japanese – boomed in the 19th century, when they were grown as ornamental plants. (Presumably, other laxatives had been found by then.)

Many varieties have been cultivated, some of which look nothing like the blue petal wheels that have become one of the symbols of summer in Japan.

A staff member leading a tour group through the exhibition holds up one of the stranger versions. Wizened purple flowers writhe above curled up leaves; it looks like a plant SOS.

‘You may think that the leaves have shrivelled because the plant didn’t get enough water,’ he says. ‘But it was made to look like this.’

He begins walking again and the group – of teachers, apparently – follows him. I slip into their ranks, hoping for more morning glory stories.

But his next stop is a dead sakura tree. When it was alive, its boughs filled every spring with pink flowers so pale they are almost white. While other trees in the garden were brought low by things like typhoons, it managed to survive for about 80 years before it fell ill.

‘It seemed a shame to just cut it down and throw it away though so we dug it up and preserved it here,’ says our guide. He lays a hand on the tree. ‘How often do people get to see a tree’s roots, right?’



Looking faintly embarrassed, he adds, ‘If we have schoolchildren visiting, we tell them something like, “As you grow older, typhoons will sweep through your life so make sure you have strong roots like these or you’ll fall over”.’ He waits a beat. ‘If the tour group is full of adults, we just say the tree got cancer and died.’

The world may treat you differently as you get older but that’s not the only thing that changes.

The guide takes us to an avenue lined on both sides with tall kusunoki trees that lean over to make a green tunnel. He tells us to pick up any leaf from the ground, crush it and smell.

All it takes is one whiff and I am a child again, and ill. An oil has been rubbed on me, its smell so strong it goes through the airways like a flamethrower.

Then the pieces of the puzzle click into place. Kusunoki – camphor, one of the ingredients in Axe Brand oil, a mainstay of the Singaporean home pharmacy.

‘Does it smell good?’ asks the guide. A chorus of ‘mmm’ goes up.

‘If I ask kids that, over half of the group will say it stinks,’ he says. ‘From that we can tell…’ He trails off, grinning.

Yes, yes, none of us are getting any younger.

I hold up the half-brown camphor leaf and draw another deep breath. The ice-knife scent carves out a cool space from the sticky summer air. Some things are worth growing up for.

Our guide, smiling at the world with a lined, weathered face, seems like he's made good use of his years.

A lean figure in light green coveralls, he keeps diving into the undergrowth to bring back leaves and twigs, showing us things city eyes would miss.

He takes us off the path and into thick bushes, past a woman on a folding stool painting lilies, until we reach a plant that looks much like the others around. He asks if anyone can identify it.

The group hesitates then a few women venture, ‘Hydrangea?’

‘That’s right. Reference books tend to show plants only at their most beautiful, like when they’re in full bloom. But there’s more to them than that.’

It’s a point he makes again while under a pine tree that barely stirs in the sluggish wind. ‘There’s a movement in plants but it’s not the movement of animals. Plants aren’t the same as they were yesterday and they won’t be the same tomorrow. That’s what I’d like you to show your students – to keep looking for the differences from day to day.’

But those differences are also in us and as we change, our relationship with plants changes too. A leaf that stinks today may turn into one that refreshes years from now and a flower cultivated for medicine may later be grown for no reason other than that we want to see its face in the morning.

Equipped sometimes with little more than good intentions, we prune, train, transplant and force.

We bombard plants with motion even as they deal with all the shifting inside. And that’s something the reference books don’t say – that plants are in themselves a guide. Tossed into a typhoon, they lead textbook lives on surviving change with roots entrenched and without going anywhere, still go places.