Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

02 November 2011

pig day


When this is the promotional poster for a festival, you know it's going to be awesome.

A few photos from yesterday's Festival Del Lechon, or roast suckling pig festival. Awamaki chartered a van out to the town of Huarocando, where the entire Plaza de Armas was filled with makeshift kitchens serving identical piglets and sweet tamales. 





This is the lady we bought pig from. I'm not much of a pork eater, but it was pretty good. Not recommended if you can't handle your food looking at you with its teeth bared. 




Even were it not for the pork, it was nice to walk around the pretty town...


... check out the communal ovens, where people were roasting their piglets... 


... ask this nice lady with her awesome red flower if I could take her photo (she seemed surprised but happy enough to oblige)...


So that was Pig Day! Today is the Day of the Dead, where people eat and get drunk in the cemetery, and that winds up the last week of festivities. Photos of the remaining festivities from the weekend to follow, hopefully! 


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14 April 2011

ode to monkey sticks


above: yakitori at the Ishioka matsuri last fall

Entirely unrelated to all and any earlier posts about Lucky the monkey, I swear: I love all kinds of Japanese food, but yakitori - grilled chicken skewers - may be my all time favorite. They're cheap, decidedly un-fussy, and easy to order - which make me love them all the more in expensive, culinarily-intimidating Japan - and they fill the gaping void left in my heart by Hanoi's amazing, food-poisoning-logic-defying chicken street. Or maybe I just love them because they make awesome bar food, so I just associate them with beer, friends, and having a nice evening out? In any case, this post is my ode to our favorite yakitori haunt in Numazu, which Iain and I referred to rather unoriginally as Monkey Sticks: 


above: guess why.

Yuka introduced us to Monkey Sticks our first month in Numazu, and she was also the one to break the news that Monkey Sticks' days are limited: with imminent remodeling happening at nearbye Numazu Station, Monkey Sticks is closing down with no new location yet in sight. Fortunately, it stayed open throughout the end of our stay in Numazu.


Two of my favorite yakitori sticks: liver (リバ) and kashira (okay, I am not entirely sure what part of what animal that came from, but it was delicious). 


above: a sign of a successful meal




Maggie also approved.

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19 February 2011

Gujo Hachiman food!


The awesome thing about traveling to Gujo Hachiman with Yuka and her friends was that everything we ate was *amazing*...


Even the snacks (above, tofu with some sort of miso paste, which we ate in the freezing cold street outside the sake shop at about 11 am) were awesome.





above: tiny individual portions of wild boar nabe.



Iain bit the head off a fish.


Mochi filled with matcha green tea paste. (Iain didn't like his, so I got to have two! Bonus!) 


Breakfast was almost too pretty to eat. (Almost).


 For lunch on the second day, we all had huge bowls of soba...


... the biggest being the "Everest" sized portions that Satoshi and several other men ordered (and finished).


There was also a larger than usual proportion of fake food available - Gujo Hachiman is home to a factory that makes the wax food that restaurants keep in their windows. The highlight was undoubtedly this:


 True story. 

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11 December 2010

too pretty to eat


One of my students brought these back from Kyoto the other week. I kept trying not to eat them till I could take a photo to preserve their prettiness, but as you can see, I wasn't totally successful... 

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25 November 2010

happy thanksgiving!


Though it came a few days early this year, I got to do something I haven't done since I moved out of New York, and eat a real Thanksgiving dinner at the ALS Thanksgiving party, with turkey and cranberry sauce (the canned kind; sorry Mom, but the canned kind is just better) and it. was. amazing. I encouraged my entire table of Japanese students to try the cranberry sauce on their turkey (they politely tried and then just as politely demurred: it's, um, okay) though fortunately the amazingness that is turkey + gravy + cranberry sauce won over Iain, at least.

At any rate, a very happy Thanksgiving to everyone back home - miss you all like crazy, and hope that you're too busy eating too much to actually be reading this right now.

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06 August 2010

early morning at the port


Early morning at the Numazu fish market.




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16 May 2010

this morning in the garden


Peas! I love picking peas - when we were kids, my mom used to grow armfuls of them for us; it was probably the first plant that made me realize you could grow enough food to actually eat or that you didn't have to buy. Even now, buying peas feels like a waste of money when I grew up eating baskets-full in our backyard. Probably not the case with these peas, though - after a month of producing only vines and creepers, there are only two actual pods at the moment. Next time I plant peas, it'll be in a place with more light. 

A few photos from the garden this morning - I know I say this all the time, but, I love our garden! Today I started experimenting with natural pesticides to combat the bugs that have been eating all my basil. Though there's a garlic and pepper recipe I'm going to cook later tonight, I figured I'd start with something simpler, and just used some soapy water in a spray bottle. I read on the internet that the soap can paralyze harmful insects, and I've already managed to freeze a few of them (they really do freeze - I'd feel bad if they weren't decimating my plants) while misting the leaves this morning, so, fingers crossed that it'll work. 


My attempts to make the garden Iain-friendly, since he isn't as obsessive about it as I am. The herbs are one of my favorite things in our tiny garden. It's not like we'll ever grow enough vegetables in such a tiny patch to feed ourselves, but there's always enough for a handful of herbs when I'm cooking.

I love lavender! It's one of the only flowers doing well, and they remind me of California.

Tiny proto-tomato flowers.

Cucumber flowers! 

Radish sprouts from the first batch of seedlings. 

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26 January 2010

tastes way better than it sounds

In Aberdeenshire! I wish I had a picture to go with this, but, since it's not like haggis is particularly photogenic anyway: last night, in honor of Burn's Night, Iain's sister cooked a haggis and everyone took turns reciting stanzas from Robert Burn's indecipherable ode to Scotland's most famous sausage. I'd never had haggis before, having felt too self-conscious and touristy to ever order it when I was here on my own, but was surprised by how delicious it was - spicy, smoky, earthy. I highly recommend it, though it goes without saying that squeamish people (myself included) are probably better off not reading the list of ingredients beforehand.

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09 November 2009

fuchu shrine


DSC_9489


The shrine near our apartment in Fuchu, whose name I don't know yet. It gets dark early and the weekends go by too fast here; while Iain was off playing guitar with some of the other teachers on Sunday, I went for a walk around the shrine, past festival-style booths selling okonomiyaki, garish chocolate-and-sprinkle covered bananas, and a strange savory pancake that, when opened, turned out to be filled with an unidentifiable mince of vegetables and meat. 

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11 October 2009

ohayo!

bamboo

Things I love about being in Tokyo: the food, having our own tiny little apartment after six months of living out of suitcases, the food, my awesome, friendly students, the stationary shops, the bottles of water on the street that supposedly keep the cats away (?), the weather (for now), the way I can just wave my wallet containing my train pass over the gate to make it open, finding copies of a rare Haruki Murakami book in English, and, in case I haven't mentioned it, the food - all of it: the cheap ramen and don restaurants near my apartment, the rotating sushi bars, the grocery stores. Really there isn't much I don't love, except maybe the insane, impossible crush of bodies that is my daily subway commute, and even that is surprisingly less hostile, if more crowded, than my daily rides on the R back in Brooklyn. 

At any rate, we were whisked away by our employers the minute we set foot in Narita, and have had very little free time since (nine-plus hour days + two-plus hours on the train + most recently, Japanese lessons!) so, apologies for the radio silence; I love being here but most days I'm so exhausted by these twelve hour days that I haven't been able to keep in touch as much as I'd like. Today's a school holiday, however, which means I'm going to try and catch up on some e-mails, study Japanese, and explore our neighborhood a bit (finally). More soon! 

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16 June 2009

Mikka's wagon has reached Los Angeles


On the Scenic Byway #12, in Utah.

We've made it to Los Angeles, which I'm somewhat unreasonably proud of - despite living here for six years, I never drove in this city until this April, and never on any of its fantastically hostile freeways until about three days ago, which means my geography of the city I used to call home is limited to two or three bus routes and the odd mall directory. When I'm not scandalizing my family with my total ignorance ("You mean there's a second Santa Monica Boulevard?!"), we're having a nice time exploring Little Ethiopia, teaching my precocious cousins to play Risk, and getting the living daylights beaten out of us by my four year old stepbrother, who is so cute that I might actually eat him. 

Anyway, things to follow: plans (no, really, plans!) and photos of all that other amazing stuff we saw along the way, including the Grand Canyon and not one but TWO Chimney Rocks. No wonder so many people got lost on the Oregon Trail.

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13 July 2008

minnow-cruelty and other july things




Tuan, Ha and Thahn and the catch of the day (the minnow in the beer glass).

Nhat: See this fish? He's somewhere between life and death.
Me: I think he wants to go home. Can't we let him go?
Ha: No, I want to eat him.
Thahn: (drops leftovers from lunch into beer stein).



If the hotpot looks familiar to anyone back home, it's because apparently it's "American Chicken," according to all of my students.

Hanoi in July is oppressively hot and humid, prone to amazing lightening storms that go on for hours and pyrotechnically bright sunsets that have the power to make even my jaded teenage class stop talking and stare out the window. I've been too busy with work to do anything much these last few weeks, though Lenora came to visit two weeks ago (!) and she very patiently put up with my run of strangely bad luck (falling down the stairs while carrying my computer, two exhaust pipe burns in a span of 2 days, about $450 being stolen from my U.S. bank account, various and sundry apartment woes) and she even used the phrase "not wanting to die anymore" to talk about being on the back of my motorbike, which means I totally did not traumatize her with my driving at ALL. At any rate, Lenora pictures to follow hopefully, and more about teaching, but I'm late for work now so, lots of love, and I miss everyone back home as always.

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15 March 2008

CELTA training - halfway mark!


 
 


 








Friday was our last day practicing on the volunteer Elementary-level students, and I'm really going to miss them; I didn't get a chance to take photos of every single student of the seventeen who were nice enough to let us practice on them, but working with all of them has been the high point of life in Vietnam so far, and even if the CELTA class itself is extremely challenging, I really, really enjoyed getting the chance to hang out with the students in a less rigid setting for a bit. For the last hour of class, everyone broke out their cameras or cell phones, and there was a mad flurry of photo-taking and peace-sign-flashing, along with cake and some random party games (have you ever seen a roomful of adults play musical chairs? They do not mess around). Anyway, goodbye practice students! Thank you for making my first two weeks of practice-teaching so much fun.

Anyway, I'm taking a slight break from the intense pace of constant studying/practice teaching, and am going on a daytrip somewhere south tomorrow to see ruins and caves and possibly a river; I'm sorry not to be posting more (I had it in my head that I was going to post a photo a day. A new photo! Every day! Hahaha) but I'm literally at school from around morning till night and am too tired to do anything except crawl into bed and watch iTunes episodes of Jericho, which I have gotten weirdly addicted to lately. Which probably doesn't make me sound quite as much like the intrepid jet-setting free spirit I wish I was, but oh, well. While I'm at it, I'm going to blame the fact that I look haggard and disheveled in all of these photos on the fact that I'm going on about fours of sleep and still not used to the heat and humidity here (though you'll notice the students all look bright and sparkly and are wearing jackets.)

So anyway, that's here, more or less; I haven't had the chance to just hang out in Hanoi as much as I would like, but I am trying to venture out at least a little every evening and explore the streets around my guesthouse; it was also my goal this week to stop relying on restaurants and try some of the street kitchens around here, which has been a lot of fun; I think I found my new favorite pho place yesterday morning around 6:30 am when the xe om guy randomly dropped me off a block away from my school - it's actually good enough to make me consider waking up ridiculously early more often.

Anyway; I will try to post more soon, though I think the photo-a-day thing may have to wait till I actually have the time to do things other than shower, which I think everyone can agree is a good thing.

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