Bagel sandwich

I did not know bagel is one of New Yorker foods like pizza (other than Chicago).
It seems to me that even in the state of New York, people prefer donuts, which
unbelievablely sweet!

Here, I cooked spinach, mushroom, and egg for lunch and
put it in the plain bagel.
My lunch often looks like that. This type of sandwich has bread or bagel,
some vegetables like spinach, peas, carrot,corn and cheese.
In terms of nutrition, it is not perfect, but ok, I think.



bagel

Japanese style Pasta

Spaghetti is of course one of the most popular pasta in Italian foods.
Change the taste of spaghetti itself is not easy, but the pasta sauce can be.

here, I cooked a little bit chicken, mushroom, onion, spinach, and grated daikon radish on top.
The taste of the sorce is seasoned with soy sauce.

Other than Teriyaki chicken, I think "Japanese style " indicates the dish seasoned with soy sauce. But it is not good enough to call it "Japanese ~~". The Chinese use soy sauce, Taiwanese use soy sauce. People use soy sauce!
So, in order to call my dish as a "Japanese style" one, I put daikon radish on top the spaghetti.
This type of daikon is often eaten in Japan.
Daikon helps digestion so that in old days it is treated like drag.

If you get tired of tomato pasta sauce, try this japanese style!


Pasta - Oriental taste

All nutritions from Potatos?

Potato is one of vegetables eaten a lots in all over the world.
However, it does not contain every nutrition that human body needs for its activity.
So does other vegetables. One species of vegetables can not be like a multi-vitamin tablet.
I thought that this concept is obvious, but it seems not.

In the movie,"Super size me", there is a interview to a high school student at the cafeteria.
She grabed fries and said, "This is my vegetable!".
If this is the only case that somebody said, I would not care so much, but
I had another chanse to hear the same opinion.
It was in the making film of the movie "School of Rock" starred by Jack Black.
When he grabbed a burger and fries, he said the same thing to the camera man.

It could be only in my family in Japan, but when I was a kid,
my mother told me that necessary nutritions for human body in a day are equivalent to
ones from 30 verious ingridients.
It is very difficult to use and cook 30 ingridients in a meal.

I guess there is no or little education about nutritions in junior high and high schools.

For a dinner, only cheese pizza? C'mon!

Soda is the one

Appalently, these are not Japanese foods.

I often send postcards to friends in Japan. Currently the stamp for a postcard to Japan is 80 cents. There is a pack of 80 cents stamps sold at the counter or vending machines in postfixes.
When you buy stamps at a vending machine, all the changes are coins, even 1 dollar.
I do not want to carry even a few dollar coins so I just leave coins in my car.

Today, I happened to find the coins at lunch time. I did not feel like cooking for lunch
so the picture is the result. I drove through Wendy's to have a bacon cheeseburger, medium fries, and small chili. I like this combination. It costs $3.22.

here in america, people like fastfoods very much. At lunch time, people make a long line to order "comb meals". Fastfood is not only main reason for obesity problems, but I think some of the ingredients that really affects people' health must be in this meal,
which I suspect is soda.

Coke, diet coke, sprite, whatever carbonated water sold contain awfully lots of sugar.
It is not about calorie, or fat. It's the amount of SUGAR.
Excising is necessary for diet, but also stop drinking soda.


a burger, fries, and chili

Oden

From my old picture album, the dish here is "Oden".
It is a vegetable pot in konbu stock with soy source.
This pot remids japanese people of winter coming.
The ingredients in the pot is called "Oden-dane", which literally means seeds of Oden.
Each person has favorite Oden-dane, which could be a good topic to talk.
It's got another name, which is "Kanto-daki". People living in Kansai or eastern part of Japan
use that name.

In this picture, I put daikon radish, fried tofu, white potatoes and konnyaku in the soup.
I think I served it at a student party. There were a couple of vegetarian and vegan among us so that there was no meat or eggs in the pot.
Also, I could not find some ingredients for Oden or other ones are expensive.

It is very subtle differene in Konbu kelp and katsuo(bonito) stock, which is used for miso soup, but konbu kelp is necessary for Oden.

Tofu is widely known now, so do eda-mame, I guess.
As a next healthy food from Japan,
I would like people to try Konnyaku. It is potato starch product.
It looks like jello. It could be substitute of meats in stir fries.
(here What is Konnyaku? in detail).




oden

Japanese style dinner

I think the meal like in the picture is a typical japanese home-style dinner.
We have almost always rice in a bowl at every meals.
Rice often comes with miso soup because sticky rice makes you thirsty.
Miso soup will be a kind of drink not to choke your throat with a chunk of rice.

Here, I cooked one stew and fried vegetable with rice and miso soup.
In the stew, there is sliced carrots, chicken and freeze-dried tofu (ko-ya) .
This type of stews is cooked in a soy sorse base soup(soy sorce, cooking sake, and sugar).
The stir fried vegetables in the center have green bell pepper, leek, bok choy, bean sprout, and the brown thing is a piece of fish cake that I found in a Korean market.

This picture shows another feature of japanese supper other than meals, which is the number of dishes. If a family has 4 or 5 people, doing the dishes is a quite work.
I think people like to separete meals in each bowl so that they keep thier own taste from mixing other souse even though mother spend more time in washing the dishes.

It took 30 mins for this meal.


Japanese style dinner

Roll Sushi (maki-sushi)

At the farewell party for a friend of mine who left Rochester,
we got together in my dorm room and brought some foods with them.

Sushi in the picture is "maki sushi (or maki-zushi)".
Here in the U.S., I often see roll sushi lapped with rice and a sheet of seaweed in.
That is not the sushi seen in Japan. Well, I am just saying it, and certainly do not mean
what is right or wrong.
I think maki-sushi rolled with seaweed is like a hotdog. It just makes easy to grab and eat without chopsticks. In old days sushi was not supposed to be eaten with chopsticks.
or I should say, the style in eating sushi with chopsticks was not considered a cool way.

Two kinds of roll sushi in the pic are
eel and cucumber (upper left), and
crab meat and avogado(lower right).




maki sushi!!

Oyako-don

It's a new start for me.
This blog is just a place to post whatever I want to write about japanese foods I cook and
some other stuff.
Since I am just a studnet who is NOT majoring in curlinary, the blogs I will write are going to be
very simple, not technical. I'm just a food enthusiast.

I have kept pics of my dinner for a while.
Today, as the first picture of this blog, I post a pic of Oyako-don.

"Oyako" means that parents and kids in Japanese.
In this meal, "Oyako" means chiken as parents and eggs as children.
"don" stands for "don buri", which originally means the bowl. But
nowadays, it means a rice bowl, meal on rice.
For example, a beef bowl served at "Yoshino-ya", a chain beef bowl restaurant
is called "Gyu-don" in Japanese.

The Oyako-don I cooked looks like too much ingridients.
If you go to japanese restaurant, a much more simple Oyako-don will served.

I just put more vegetables that have no strong flavor not to change original taste of Oyako-don.
It looks good, huh?




Oyako-don