Thur: I miss Japanese food

I realized today that I have yet to post anything involving food. I'm not really sure what that's about. I'm not a food nut, or aficionado or anything, but still it's a huge part of everyone's life. What other activities have you done roughly 3 times a day your entire life? So to remedy the situation, and because the other day I had a "Hawaiian Roll" (California roll with yellow-fin tuna on top) that left me feeling less than excited to take on the rest of the day, I figured it was time to reminisce about the wonders of the Japanese culinary world.

Some Japanese food is magic. True story.

I'm not really someone who would be described as an "adventurous eater", but then again not everyone can be Andrew Zimmern. I spent a few months in Japan over the summer though and was definitely forced out my box of meat, potatoes and spanish rice. It's considered hugely improper to take food and not eat it over there, so whatever you grabbed going through the cafeteria was going to go inside of you. Because it all looked so foreign, or at times deceptively familiar (such as Eel disguised as BBQ pork) you end up trying some things that you would normally dismiss. Well that, and most of it smells so good; you don't really care what it is.

Let's start with breakfast, because I enjoy proper chronology. Breakfast in Japan is typically Miso soup (a cabbage and turnip kind of thing), Nato (fermented beans) and rice. They also have this thing called the "1000 fold omelete" that pops up every so often. I'm not really a breakfast person so to be honest I don't really miss most of this stuff. Except the rice. I cannot describe to you in words the difference of white rice in America and white rice in Japan. They take it seriously over there, everyone owns at least one rice cooker and it's safe to say they know how to use it. They take it as seriously as Americans take their coffee making. So my typical breakfast would've been a nest egg, rice, and some Charlie Brown cereal. Nothing real special, and the cereal just reminded me of home, so it’s disqualified from being missed.

The best lunches always involved a small restaurant near the place where I was staying called Bochan’s. It was the essence of a mom and pop restaurant. One couple operates the place every day, he works the grill, she chops the vegetables and works the register. They were so hospitable too, it was like eating lunch in their house. She would make small talk with all the regular customers (at least I think it was small talk, they only spoke Japanese) and he would cook amazing food. There wasn’t ever anything eaten at that restaurant that wasn’t amazing. Some of the highlights were yakiniku, which was grilled meat in a special BBQ kind of sauce, torii karage which was some juicy chicken nuggets, and katsu curry which was a pork cutlet in curry sauce (I believe these names are right, it’s been a couple a months). Also the helping sizes were ridiculous. Generally throughout Japan everything is smaller, smaller cups of water, smaller loafs of bread. But not at Bochan’s. They believe in Texas portions over there. If you have lunch at Bochan’s you’re not having dinner. It’s game over.

Assuming you didn’t have lunch at Bochan’s however they was a lot of cool things for dinner. First there was the Sushi on the merry-go-round. It a conveyor belt that just brings sushi past everyone’s table and you just grab it if it looks good. Or you can order a specific dish and they send it out to you on a little train. I wasn’t really sushi person before I went, but after giving it a shot over there it’s now one of my favorites. There’s also ramen, soba, and udon, which are different kinds of noodles that they put in soup. The udon noodles in particular are huge; it’s like slurping shoelaces off a pair of Van’s, size-wise anyway.

This was just a quick list of some of the foods that I can remember off hand. Mostly I remember because of the people I was eating those foods with. I mean I live near a place that serves great udon, and another place that has halfway decent sushi, but I’m starting to realize now that meals are only 45% food, and 55% the people you eat with. So yea, I miss Japanese meals.

Tuesday: I would change breakfast

Mornings and I don’t get along. I tell myself it some kind of genetic thing, that I’m pre-disposed to being a “night person”. I haven’t found any genetic studies yet that I can point to for validation, but it’s more pleasant than labeling myself as lazy. Morning really has very few activities to call it’s own, but the most prominent would have to be breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day, and some people even say it sets the tone for the day. I’m not one of those people. To me breakfast is a collection of unusual foods, eaten at what any objective outsider would agree, is an unusual time. Throwing back a plate of unfertilized-baby-chicken-kits after getting out of bed has always felt a little out of place to me. Now, I’m not against breakfast as a whole, just its current incarnation. The foods are too weird to be dealing with while you are still waking up, and the emphasis on the importance of the meal seems a little pompous. Like just because it’s the first meal, somehow it can take credit for more of what’s going to happen in your life that day.

All that being said however there are a lot of things I would hate to see go if we altogether abandoned breakfast. I’m a huge fan of the good people at General Mills, Post, and Kellogg’s. I would miss sitting and having a meal in the quietness of morning while people are still waking up, and you can either just munch and read or just munch and think. Most importantly though, I would just be hungry and have trouble focusing on school or work or whatever I’m supposed to be focusing on that morning. So here are a few changes I would make to the traditional, western view of the topic called breakfast.

Give up the title of most important to Lunch
Breakfast doesn’t really prepare you for the day so much as it really helps you recover from last night. Nobody is pointing at the spinach omelette as the key to their success. Food is food, no matter when you eat it. So breakfast needs to stop pretending like there’s some kind of magic going on with any food consumed before 10:30am (the window of time assigned to breakfast by Ronald Mcdonald and friends). Lunch needs to start getting some of the credit it deserves. Not because the food is better, but the whole idea of lunch has just been utilized better. People meet for lunch, they discuss things over lunch, business happens over lunch, pressure free dating happens over lunch, and lunch provides a needed retreat from being neck deep in work or school. Lunch is obviously the most important meal of the day.

Simplicity is bliss
In the spirit of the title of this paragraph, this will be short. Breakfast should be basically a snack; a yogurt, some cereal, a piece of fruit, whatever. All it really needs to be is a stop gap till lunch. Also all these foods are easy to understand even if you haven’t quite woken up yet. This is key to the successful restructuring of breakfast.

Everything else can return at a reasonable time like 9pm
I’m not against eggs, pancakes, and the rest of the IHOP menu. I just think all that has it has it’s place, and that place is around 9pm. By that time, the brain is awake and can fully appreciate the craziness of the omelette, the deliciousness of the bacon, or the fluffiness of the pancake. (that sentence feels weird to me for some reason). People usually get hungry around this time anyway; it’s the perfect stage for the unusual foods that used be part of “team breakfast”.

So in short, breakfast needs to be humbled. Somewhere along the line, someone spent some time stroking its ego and convincing it that people would lose sleep to enjoy it properly. I haven’t seen that to be true. Unless you’re one of those people who goes to bed at 9pm, wakes up at 5am and need something to fill that time for you. Then possibly I can see you being partial to your lone companion in the morning. But for the everybody else, normal people, I hope you see the logic in my argument for altering this bizarre meal.