Roses are red…and roses are blue?!

Sunday Damien and I finally checked out Kani City’s most famous attraction. Hana Festa Park. This park is a kind of theme park for flowers, esp. roses. They have 1000s of kinds of roses. The blooms were about 30% out I’d say which means that in June it should be even more spectacular. We got a year pass so we can come and go as we please and see all the different seasonal changes.

The park is within walking distance (about 45 min) through rice fields and vegetable patches and very old buildings nestled among recently built houses. There were many elderly farmers out getting the fields ready to plant rice. I took a bunch of pictures of them on my photo site (click here). We also ran across one of the scariest looking spiders I have even seen. He was rolling up something big in his web!

The park was really crowded and after seeing the long line of cars waiting to get in I was really glad we walked. Hana Festa is really hidden back in the hills and it is just beautiful. It is really big and there is much more to see than one day can allow. There is a famous “blue” rose which scientists have engineered but it is more white than blue if you ask me. There was a small flea market, lots of food stalls and local vegetables sellers. Of course you could buy roses too! We even had rose ice cream made with real roses. It tasted just like the smell of roses. Quite nice!

We ran into an older English gentlemen there who knows a bit about roses and was telling us about the history of them and showed us what a wild original rose looks like. A rose actually only has 5 small petals. Man has bred them over the years to develop so many petals.

As Damien’s blog mentions we saw lots of caterpillars! I thought there many the other day at Mitake no mori! Well, there were even more at Hana Festa. The park is known for butterflies so I guess it makes sense. There were all kinds of cocoons too. I saw some that were made with tiny sticks. I also saw one that was built inside a leaf and the leaf was rigged up to cover it. We also saw a couple of lizards and a poisonous snake called a mamushi. That was really exciting!! The swallows nesting and feeding their young was really neat too.

On a different note, we finally introduced ourselves to the fellows down below us who have a little used clothing shop. The place is a little local hangout for young alternative kids. The owner is 27 and super genki! He has never been to the US but was quite excited when he learned that’s where I am from. All of his used clothes are from America. He thinks America is super cool. He doesn’t speak much English so he started asking me in Japanese what different things said on the t-shirts and sweatshirts in the shop. It was good practice for my Japanese!! I found one that was from Indiana State University!! I said that was my state and he was quite excited. The hardest one was trying to explain what “Sun Country Cooler” meant on a t-shirt with a polar bear sitting in a swimming pool with sunglasses on. He also had a couple of old bowling shirts and he wanted to know if American’s still use bowling shirts. I am not sure. Does anyone know?

Forays into the homemade

I recently tried making pasta here in Japan. I was making it back in the US and it was working out pretty well. I have sourced some semolina flour so I decided to try it here. The flour made nice soft noodles and were easy to roll and cut. I made a fresh tomato sauce and lightly battered and fried some eggplant to go on top.

My co-worker mentioned the other day that she had made strawberry jam for the first time. She told me it was easy so I looked up recipes on the Internet. There are lots of tasty strawberries here right now. I didn't have any sugar so I used maple syrup. It came out pretty well and was pretty painless! Now I have fresh jam for my morning toast.

Kim chee (spicy fermented cabbage with other veggies) is a Korean food that the Japanese have gone gaga over the past decade or so. Damien and I too LOVE it! But unfortunately all of the kim chee in the supermarkets have MSG as an ingredient. so we made our own. After soaking cabbage, carrot and daikon in salt water for several hours, I mixed up the veggies with a paste I made from garlic, onions, red chilis, and ginger. I let it sit and ferment unrefridgerated for one week. We are eating it now! It is good but I think I put too much daikon in. It has a distinct radish flavour.

Our attempt at falafel wasn't so successful. I think we have a lot to learn about frying. Our chickpeas balls wouldn't hold together in the oil and most of them just fell apart. We managed to salvage some of them, which was good because the cucumber yogurt sauce and whole wheat tortillas were delicious! We will have to try again on this one.

Japanese Veggies

I am very excited that this Friday we will be getting our first shipment of fresh veggies from an organic farm in this area. We will be getting it all summer hopefully! We will be getting some different veggies, this being Japan, that we are excited to cook with. I will write about them when we find out what we are getting.

In the meantime I thought I would briefly write about some of the foods that we have been using that are not familiar back home.
We really love Japanese eggplant (nasu in Japanese). They are smaller and longer and thinner than American eggplants. They are much more tender and absorb sauces and oils well. They have a great flavor and don't get as rubbery as other eggplants.
We also use Japanese sweet potato a lot. They are also usually smaller than the sweet potatoes back home. The outside is purple-ly red and the inside is yellow. They are very sweet for a vegetable. They are a bit softer and don't take as long to cook as the American style sweet potatoes.
We often use pumpkin (kabocha). The pumpkins here are small and the rind is dark green. The flesh looks similar to pumpkin flesh in the States but they are more like baking pumpkins without the large hollow inside. We usually just cook the pieces with the rind and all. It gets very soft and you can just eat it. It is easier than cutting off the peel beforehand and is probably healthy. They don't use pumpkins here to make pumpkin pie or other sweet desserts. It is a vegetable like all other squashes.
We love beets but the Japanese don't use them. We have been able to find them however, at the Brazillian supermarkets! It must be a part of Brazillian cooking. They are expensive though so they will be for special occasions.
We have been using a Japanese mushroom called nameko. They are small and bright orange. They are also covered in a natural slime that give the mushroom a great texture for soups. The taste is very nice and woody. There are many other mushrooms but we haven't tried them all.
We have been cooking with fish lately too. The seafood area of the supermarket is very intimidating. In the fresh fish area there are loads of whole fish (some of them are gigantic), clams, shrimp and other things I can't even identify. We watched an older man the other day look and look and look at all of the fish and he finally chose a flounder that was still breathing!! We looked closer and saw that all of the flounder were still breathing. I guess that is pretty fresh. But what would we do with a live flounder when we got home??
We have stuck to the already dried and already filleted fish so far. Oh, and also squid rings. Soon we want to buy the whole squids and learn how to clean them ourselves. It is much cheaper.
We have been eating a lot of noodles too. Kishimen are my favorite. It is a regional noodle in this area. Flat and wide like a fettuccine, but softer. We cook up a stock of seaweed and fish flakes (dashi) with soy sauce, and sweet rice wine (mirin) and add the cooked noodles, long spring onions (negi), mushrooms, wakame seaweed and a boiled egg. Sometimes we add some miso as well. Sprinkle some spicy red pepper powder on top and what a dinner!!!
As a matter of fact that's what I am cooking tonight for our 2nd wedding anniversary dinner!
So, gotta get cooking!

Mystery Solved

Well, I think we have figured out that the aquatic mammal we saw in the river was not an otter. I asked some of my students and they said it was probably a nutria. These were farmed for their fur in the early 1900s but then when the fur industry stopped being lucrative the farmers released many of them. The pictures look like what we saw and they are known to be in the area. I guess they are pretty much considered to be pests. It is interesting that they are vegetarians. I thought since they were in the river they were eating fish but actually they only eat plants.
On a different note, I was craving pizza the other night and so we tried out an Italian restaurant about a 10 minute drive from our apartment that the other teachers said was pretty good. It was a Saturday night and it was packed! I usually have apprehensions about Italian food in Japan as it tends to be "Japan-ified" and gross. And this restaurant was a family style chain-looking place, not a good sign. Well, this place was great! The noodles were homemade and the pizza hit the spot!!! One dish looked really interesting. We saw the waiter roll over a cart with a GIANT half wheel of parmesean cheese. It was a bit hollowed on the inside and they started scrapping the inside even more. Then they dumped a whole load of hot noodles inside and mixed it around! What came out was a wonderful cheesy mass of noodles! We might have to get that next time.
It was strange today because Indiana was in the Japanese news all day because of the primary. I kept hearing reference to "In-di-a-na-shu" (shu means state) abd seeing a map of the US with Indiana highlighted!

Animals in Japan (1)

One thing that Damien and I love to do on our days off is to locate a mountain on the map and drive there. Inevitably there will be a small parking area and many “hiking courses”. Each hike usually affords a lovely panoramic view, a chance to visit small mountain shrines and temples, and new wildlife to wonder over.
We went today to a nearby town and found some wonderful hiking trails. They were littered with caterpillars! They were hanging from the trees like ornaments on very long strings. There were all kinds: black, grey, white, red, yellow, furry, smooth, big, small, many-legged, few-legged, round, bumpy, normal and weird. We even saw a stand of strange trees with the strangest bark I have ever seen, that were covered with old cocoons. They were huge and at first we thought that the pupae was still inside. But we figured out that the butterflies had already emerged.
Here is a list of some of the strange animals we have encountered so far in this area:

· Cocoon (notice the bugs having sex in the background! I didn’t realize that until I got home and saw the picture!)
· Striped caterpillar rolling up its ball of thread
· Red caterpillar that looks like a sea horse
· A fuzzy caterpillar and a smooth one
· A yellow caterpillar that looks like a sea horse
· Yellow and white bird with a beautiful song
· Spider in a web near waterfall
· Blue bird in the mountains
· Big ugly spider near Kani river
· Giant bumblebee near Kani river
· Big bug on a flower
· Swimming mammal in Kani river (see Damien’s blog)
· Small cute armored bug on our balcony
· Bird of prey
· Turtles
· Red-headed duck
· Heron-like small fishing bird
· Lizard
· White egret
· Grey heron
· Comorant

I will keep blogging about different animals that we see!
I have heard that there are monkeys in the hills! Hopefully one day I will have a blog about them!