My another photo blog “LQ Laoshi’s Photo Gallery”(outside wordpress)
Most of dishes are circle, but some are oval. I think an oval dish is useful because it fits the shape of food in many cases. Recently in a morning, I found one of oval dishes was missing. I use it to put a half toast for my mom every morning. Yes, the oval dish fits very well for the shape of the toast cut in half. I was looking for it in the midst of busy preparation for breakfast. I couldn’t find it. So I put a half toast onto a small circle dish. Edges were out of the dish so it was unstable and slippery. I worried it might get out of the dish and fall down.
I found the oval dish after the breakfast. It was in front of the photograph of my dad who died last year. On top of the dish were the sweets “Ohagi”. My mom offered that two Ohagi(s) to my deceased dad. Let me explain a little about Ohagi. It looks like a ball. At the center is sticky rice. And the ball of sticky rice is wrapped with sweet soy beans paste. The soy is usually a brawn/purple one “Adzuki”. It is very common to offer the Ohagi to dead person in equinoctial week in Japan.
I think there are differences depending on culture and customs as to how to deal with those offerings to dead person. In our custom, the food offered is to be shared and eaten by the family who are still alive. Sometimes I see the colorful sweets for the purpose of offering to a dead person are being sold in the store. They are unnaturally colorful because of use of artificial color additives. We don’t eat them, but for other type of “usual” food and especially sweets, we will eat them after a period of offering on the altar. Because of this custom, I have been eating a lot of sweets for more than a year. I am a person with a spirit of “Mottainai” that means not to waste anything.
But an issue is that my mom does not care about what type of sweets to be offered to my dad. She very often buys and offers fresh and moist sweets. It would not be a problem during winter time because temperature is low. But now is the time of spring. Even in Niigata, located in northern part of Japan, the temperature is going up day by day. It means that fresh and moist sweets don’t last long. For my mom, it is not an issue as to eat or not to eat those offered sweets. She just wants to offer sweets to her husband who liked sweets. That’s it.
So the issue is on my side only: to eat or not to eat. When my mom brought down two Ohagi(s) from the Dad’s altar, the surface of them looked dry. No mold was observed. The taste was uncertain. Edible or not? I thought how I was going to do with them.
Two Ohagi(s) on an Oval Dish
While I was thinking what I was supposed to do with Ohagi, my mom threw them into plastic tank in the garden. The tank is to make compost by throwing fresh garbage. That was the end of Ohagi’s fate. I always tell my mom to buy and offer the long-life sweets with longer days of “best by”. But showing an early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, my mom cannot memorize what I say to her. So she buys and offer sweets without caring about expiry date.
When it comes to an oval dish, a sad thing had happened. I posted recently about butterbur. And in the post I uploaded a photo in which butterbur was put on another oval dish. The dish was broken. My mom dropped it. Actually there was a pair of the same two oval dishes. So it is not certain the broken one was in the photo, but it is certain that the pair reduced to be “a single”.
I hardly fry in the kitchen. The day before yesterday I found small horse mackerels were being sold very cheap in a supermarket. I thought that was a good chance to practice to cut and open the bodies of horse mackerels. I did that 12 to 14 fishes and fried them. Shall I call them “Freedom Mackerels”?
My blog has got no visitors, no views for these two days. I found that I haven’t posted these days, so I wrote down this one. I spent two hours for my training to write an English post. It’s tough to me.
Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning 