Lotus Root (Renkon) Tofu Stir-Fry

This one is easy to make and eat (with or without rice).

Ingredients (all the measurements are guesstimates):
1 big lotus root/renkon (or 2 smaller ones), peeled, large dice
1/2 a medium onion, diced
1 package fried tofu, cubed
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp dried chili pepper (adjust according to taste)
salt, to taste
water
slivered almonds (optional)
Indonesian sweet soy sauce

1. Heat oil, add lotus root.
2. Add chili pepper, salt.
3. Saute for 10 minutes, until the lotus root has started to brown.
4. Add onion, saute a few minutes.
5. Add tofu, saute until cut sides of tofu start to brown.
6. Add water, a little bit at a time. This is to help cook the lotus root. There just needs to be enough to get a little bit of simmer going. Stir until the water is absorbed. Taste a piece of lotus root to check crunchiness-level. I like my lotus root still pretty crunchy, so I only do this water thing maybe two or three times. For softer lotus root, go through this water thing maybe three or four times.
   
7. Add Indonesian sweet soy sauce, stir.
8. Add almonds (could also be peanuts or cashews).
   
9. Saute maybe 2 more minutes to give the sauce a chance to be absorbed.
10. Serve and enjoy!
    

Clearly based on these photos, I do not have a future in food photography. But, trust me, it's yum and relatively healthy (esp. if you ditch the rice or have it with brown rice).

"Mexican" Bruschetta

Sorry, the name for the recipe is lame, but it's the best I could do (it's cuz of the garlic and avocado). Olé.

This one is easy and seriously, holy shize, OMG tasty.

"Mexican" Bruschetta

Ingredients:

Some good lookin' tomatoes (not too sweet), diced
Fresh basil, rinsed and roughly chopped
1 ripe avocado, diced
Fresh mozzarella (not the hard stuff), diced
Crushed garlic (I use the stuff from the tube or the jar... again, I'm anti-stinky fingers)
A couple glugs of olive oil
Salt and pepper

Note: This salad is best served with all ingredients at room temperature. Yes, the cheese, too. Trust me. It won't kill you. I think (this is my disclaimer).

Serve on top of (toasted) French bread rounds or homemade olive oil croutons (this is easy too, recipe below).

Total time: less than 10 mins
(i.e., good to make when you're starving and want food that isn't pizza or other junk fast, or if you're invited to a picnic and you don't want to cook something that involves fire)

1. Put diced tomatoes into a medium-sized bowl, add a little salt.
2. Add basil, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil, pepper.
3. Add avocado and gently mix into salad.
4. Eat with bread!

Olive oil croutons:
French bread, sliced into 1/4 inch rounds
(Garlic, optional)
Olive oil
Salt

Use your fingers or a paper towel (or a brush, if you're fancy) to lightly coat one side of French bread rounds. Rub with a little garlic if so inclined (or if you already have stinky fingers). Lightly sprinkle with salt. Toast on both sides (wet side up first). Eat. Done.

Root Vegetable Stew (with dumplings)

The other night, I happened to get home before the vegetable shop next door to my apartment building closed, so I decided to go over and see if anything interesting was on offer.

I immediately spotted a bundle of medium-sized カブ (turnips). I recognized the katakana as a veggie I had eaten and enjoyed at some restaurant in Japan at some point since I moved here (for the life of me, I can't remember when or where). I've never cooked with turnips before, but they've always sounded like something yummy that people in fairy tales eat (doesn't it seem like every soup in a parable contains turnips?), so I thought I'd give them a try. Anyway, my interest was piqued, so I decided to stock up on some other stuff (mostly root veggies).

I'm a "throw in whatever's lying around" kind of cook, so apologies in advance for the vagueness of the recipe--all measurements are guesstimates. This recipe could easily be modified to be vegan, just sub soymilk for the milk and up the olive oil amount or sub margarine. Total cooking time, including prep and simmering was probably an hour.

Ingredients:

5 medium-sized turnips, peeled, cubed, without greens

1 medium-sized onion

1 carrot, peeled, cubed

1/4 of a kabocha, unpeeled, cubed

2 fingerling sweet potatoes (or 1/2 a regular-sized sweet potato), peeled, cubed

glug of olive oil

2 tbsp butter

1 cube vegetable bouillon

1 tbsp french whole grain mustard (or any Dijon-type mustard)

3/4 c. milk

3/4 c. barley

3/4 c. fake meat flakes (I don't know a better way to describe this, but click here to see what I used).

Water

Seasonings:

Salt, pepper, turmeric, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, parsley, basil, agave (or any sweetener)-- use all of these to taste. I used a lot of the parsley and basil to balance out the heaviness of the stew. I've got a whole rack of spices that I've inherited from people who've left Japan, so I just pulled what I thought would be good in a "I think I might be getting a cold, so I want something hearty and warm" stew.

How to:

1. Saute onions in olive oil until they're just turning transparent.
   
2. Add butter, let melt.
3. Add turnips, carrot, kabocha, and sweet potatoes. Stir occasionally so that all of it gets a chance to cook through and brown.
   
4. Add salt, pepper, bouillon cube. Saute mix for about 10 mins, until turnips are mostly cooked.
   
5. Stir in mushrooms, cook until mostly done.
   
6. Add barley and fake meat to get them started cooking so they cook faster after the water is added and they can take on the flavor of the veggies. Saute 2 mins.
7. Add water to cover plus an inch. You'll add water one or two more times as the barley and fake meat soak it up.
   
8. Add seasonings to taste.
9. Keep at a high simmer until barley is fully cooked, add water as needed.
10. Finally, when the barley is done and it seems like you'd need to add more water to make it all less thick, add milk. Let that simmer for a minute more.
11. Eat!

Here's the easy dumpling recipe I used: http://dinner-recipes.suite101.com/article.cfm/dumplings. The green stuff on the dumplings is the herbs from the stew.

I decided to see how this recipe would do as biscuits, so I dropped rounds of dough into a buttered muffin tin. The results:

They turned out too hard to really make good biscuits (though anything is improved with butter and gravy or butter and honey, right?). This recipe definitely needs the steam that comes from the stew/soup to make the dumplings light and tasty.

Summer Lovin'

My friends Bonnie, Marianne, and I have rented a summer house near the beach in Chigasaki, a beach town about an hour from where I live in Tokyo. This place has become my weekend haven, a place to escape the insanity of work, which keeps piling on, and the fast-paced, sadly lacking in that sea smell city that is Tokyo. You'd think a city that is technically built near the ocean would smell more of sea, but it doesn't. So, I need to take the train for an hour to get that lovely, familiar mix of ocean water and drying seaweed.

The sand here is volcanic, so it's dark and hot. It makes everything look a little dirty. But I like it, it's not the kind of sand to get too fancy schmancy on you. You've got to be okay with roughing it a bit to spend a day on these beaches 'cause all your clothes, towels, skin, hair, inside of your ears will get gritty and brown.

This past weekend marked the start of jellyfish season and, although there were several of us playing in the super calm water, I was the only one who got stung... and stung... and stung... and stung! I'll be swimming fully clothed from now until the middle of September.

On Sunday, I didn't get to the beach until late. I got in a few choice hours of swimming and sunning (and stinging). I finished two magazines. I listened to hours of Billie Holiday. I watched dogs kayak and people play fetch (frisbee). I saw ladies doing yoga on the beach when it got cooler (though it stayed that perfect summer night warm). And then I watched the sunset with Mount Fuji showing up at just the last moments of the day.

Facebook Export?

Facebook (FB) makes it sooo easy to share articles, thoughts, etc., that I wish I could set it to do a reverse of its blog/note import function: wouldn't it be great if, instead of weighing down my FB page (and, thus, my friends' newsfeeds) with all the articles I come across and want to remember or comment on, I could post them to FB and then set all that stuff to cross-post only to this blog? Often, I find myself reading articles that I want to either read later because I find them when I don't have time to stop to read them and want to save them for later, or that I want to comment on/start a discussion without taking over my friends' FB newsfeeds.

The collection of articles, rants, commentaries, etc., that would be birthed if I were completely unfettered by my fear of overloading people's FB feeds seems like it would be my own personal HuffPo/Jezebel/Google Reader. When I post articles (about half the time with some little comment), I usually do so for my own use--like I said, to read later. So, I'm always sort of surprised when I get a discussion going on FB prompted by other people seeing the article posting, finding it likewise interesting and chinwag-worthy, and dropping in their own comments/thoughts/rants on the topic. It's so rare that these kinds of discussions take place in real life, it seems, that sometimes it's like I have a more diverse menu of conversations in FB world than in the Real World (Truuuue storeeey! Okay, if you didn't watch MTV's the Real World religiously in the mid-90s, as I did, then you won't get that reference. Sorry. But here's a friendly clip to help you out. Rad.)

With the news that FB is getting set to launch its baby into the public sphere--and, by "its baby," I mean, of course, our entire personal lives and thoughts as shared on FB's servers--this could either present itself as an opportunity to make a thousand little, one-man HuffPos, or... kill the crack addiction that is FB that has taken over so many of our lives.

What do you think? Should I take my FB posting show on the road and try to convert this blog into something more inclusive? Or should I keep it as self-indulgent and self-(or Obama-) obsessed as it was originally intended? Is this asking questions of the ones of people out there reading this blog a stupid idea?

Cool Site: Crap Email from a Dude

The title of the blog, "Crap Email from a Dude," is pretty self-explanatory... and as hilarious and disturbing as you might expect it to be. Seriously, where do these guys get off and how can they actually be real?? The stories range from the guy who thought the girl had given him an STD after they made out a couple times (yes, seriously) (May I suggest giving the Savage Lovecast a listen?) to the guy who pleaded with the girl he had impregnated to consider how old she would look in her 30s after years as a single mom as encouragement to get an abortion. I'll give you a moment with that.





Basically, "Crap Email from a Dude" is enough to scare the straight right out of a girl if only we weren't born this way. Read these literary odes to crapdom here.

Image: A screen shot from the movie, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," a visual ode to crappy, creepy guys and staple of basic cable on Saturday afternoons.