Food

The grocery store is probably the biggest challenge I’ve faced yet since being in Japan.  First of all, there is the obvious language barrier.  Everything is written in Japanese, usually in kanji (meaning that even if I know how to pronounce a food in Japanese, I won’t be able to read it).  And even when there is some kana that I can try to interpret, Japanese advertising specialists love to use stylized fonts which are all but beyond my abilities to decipher.  And the best thing of all: packaging.  If all else fails, most packages have pictures on the outside showing the contents.  This only helps sometimes though.  For example, some instant miso soup (pictured right).  Looks just like the package.  On the other hand, I thought this package might contain some dried tofu:

Bouillion cubes, not tofu

Inside the dashi box.

Outside the box of dashi.

But the language barrier isn’t the only hard thing about groceries.  No more American ingredients.  At least, they aren’t nearly as common or prevalent here as they are back home.  Not only am I shopping in a foreign language, I am shopping for foods that I don’t know how to cook.  Even if I could read the labels, I wouldn’t know what to do with most of it.  Sure, there’s simple stuff like eggs and vegies and stuff that cook the same all over the world, but that gets boring pretty quick.  And there are a lot of fun flavors here that I want to experiment with.  Lucky for me there’s this thing called the internet and it has things called cooking blogs.  I found this one last week and made some Kitsune Udon. MMM.  But that meant an extra trip to the grocery store to find some mystery ingredients: negi (long onion), dashi (soup stock), narutomaki (just google it), and inariage (sweet fried tofu pouch).  The dashi proved the most difficult.  The blog describes dashi as coming in small teabag-like pouches.  You steep the dashi in boiling water for a few minutes, remove the pouch, and you have some stock ready for soup.  Well, at the grocery store I eventually had an employee show me where to find dashi.  I found what looked like the best deal there, and bought a kilo of the stuff.  Once I got back to the house I opened it up and found not a box full of teabag-like pouches, but a bag of powder.  Hmm.  After some more research, I found out that I had bought instant dashi; just mix it in with some boiling water and pow, soup stock.  Apparently it isn’t as great as the other type, but it does basically the same thing.  The udon turned out pretty good, I think, and it was really easy to make.   

I’m sure I will have many more food adventures over here.  And I’m starting to get familiar with the grocery store down the street too.  Any good (easy) Japanese recipes will be much appreciated.