I am a native Japanese speaker who used to teach Japanese in a university somewhere on this planet. Currently I don't work but stayed in my house in Northern part of JAPAN. I hope that you could enjoy reading my posts and know what life in Japan is like.
The photo above is yesterday’s. I boiled sweet potato in the pan. Those were the potato that I planted in my garden last year.
Still the Ground is Covered with Snow in my Region
This is a photo of today. I wanted to take a picture of train running, but those local trains do not come so frequently.
Mackerel in the Package about 4 USD
Today I bought the fish Mackerel. That was not “Horse Mackerel”, but simply “Mackerel”. This is Japan, but we usually see on the supermarket shelves, “Mackerel from Norway”. The mackerel in the photo was not from Norway, but from an Island of Sado which is the major island of Niigata Prefecture.
Mackerel being Boiled with Miso
I boiled them with Miso which is salty soy bean paste for seasoning. Not only Miso, I used also a little bit of sugar, ginger slices, pieces of red pepper, and Japanese Sake for seasoning.
Boiled Mackerel on a Plate
The white slices accompanying with Mackerel is white part of green onion.
My Supper Tonight
Now it’s already the last third (we call it “Gejun”) of Februray. But this winter is cold and still going on. Since the spring semester will start from the coming week, I have been just making PPT slides all day for my classes.
I found them in the supermarket where I always go buy food. Many packages of small horse mackerels were left unsold on the shelve. They were 30 percent discounted from the original price. But the original price was already reasonable because it was less than Two USD. I think that the problem was that they were too small to cook and eat. It was obvious that soon a lot of small horse mackerels were going to be thrown to be waste. Feeling sorry for that, I decided buying them.
Horse Mackerels’ Hard Scale
When you cook horse mackerels, you need to cut the hard scales off from the body side from the tale.
Opened Body of Horse Mackerel
I wouldn’t show you the most cruel part of the cooking process.
Fishes Wrapped with Potato Starch
Put a lot of Potato Starch around the fishes. I didn’t use fresh egg between the fishes and the starch. I just put the starch directly to the fishes.
Fry in a Pan with Oil
Frying uses a lot of Oil. I usually use a good oil (a little expensive one), but for frying, I bought a cheap cooking oil.
The municipal government where I live has been collecting those cooking oils for recycling. I saw many bottles of dirty brown cooking oil were gathered at the entrance of the community center. Since there is a library in that building, I saw it every time I go to borrow books. But recently the city decided to stop collecting the oil. I don’t know why, because the city government doesn’t say anything about the reason explicitly to us. Recycling is good, so I think there must be a reason for stopping the recycling of used cooking oil.
Draining Excess Oil with Cooking Paper
Oil is not good for our health. I put fried fishes onto cooking paper in order to remove excess oil.
Fried Horse Mackerels with Lemon Slice
Actually this is not the completion of the frying horse mackerels with potato starch. But I didn’t have time to do the end process of the cooking because I wanted to serve this for the dinner soon.
We Japanese usually put the fried horse mackerels into a sour sauce and keep it at least one night. The sauce is made of soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar. Ginger and red pepper are used for seasoning. Plus, slices of Carrots, onions, and peppers are accompanied. Those sauce and slices are poured onto fried mackerels and they are kept in the refrigerator. A good things of that are not only good taste, but also the vinegar makes the fish bones softer. When you come to Japan, please try to eat this menu that is “Aji no Namban Dzuke”.
Only sugar was used; No chemical, no preservative, no artificial flavor/color.
They were boiled for tight sealing.
Actually I made five bottles of fig jam. I sent these four bottles to my sister.
So only one bottle was left. Fig jam on the toast in the photo above was the last portion from that bottle. But I still have many fig compote in my freezer.
It’s 2a.m. in Japan standard time. I have tried but I cannot fall asleep tonight.
This was the second time for me to cook fig compote in this autumn.
Beyond the rice fields I could see Mountain YAHIKO, whose hight was about 630 meter.
The left peak is the Mt. Yahiko, although the right peak looks higher.
These are not figs in my garden. I just took a photo of other’s fig tree.
Persimmon tree and its fruits. I also have several persimmon trees in my garden, but they are still young to have fruits.
A local JR train on Shin’etsu-line.
The main dish of tonight’s supper.
I am going to bed again soon after I post this one. Now rain is falling down outside. Weather report is saying that a cold front is passing through my region now. Once the cold front is gone, it will be cold and temperature is going down. I expect that the high mountains get the first snow fall. I will check it on Monday.
I am a person who wants to make data small. So I usually resize my digital photos to be 640 by 480. I think the size 640 is good for smartphone. But this time I resized photos to be 960 by 720. Just let me see how they are fine in resolution as a trial basis this time, and if it is worth doing with bigger data sizes of picture file.
Okay, this is the end of this post. I have to make a lot of PPT slides from now to prepare for online teaching in the coming week. I have no time to take a rest.
These pictures look like all the same as what I had already uploaded here. I can not go far from my house under the restriction due to corona virus pandemic. I go out only for shopping food or just walked around my house in rural town in northern part of Japan, Niigata.
A tree is standing on the slope of river bank. And it is also in front of a Japanese Shinto Shrine. It is not that big tree. But I guess this tree has seen many village people for 2 to 3 hundred years or so.
The hall of worship of the Shinto Shrine. Actually, this was not the shrine that I played with my friends when I was a kid. My “playing ground shrine” is even smaller than this.
Flowers of crape myrtle are blooming in the shrine area. Since I have spent all my hours to make Power Point slides for online teaching, I think I have missed the best time of crape myrtle flowers in this summer.
I kept walking on a path of river bank.
I found a convolvulus flower. This is also a summer flower. I saw that the season for this flower was also about to end. We Japanese call the flowers of “morning glory” as “morning face (Asa-gao)” and call the flowers of “convolvulus” as “daytime face (Hiru-gao)”.
This is a view of my hometown, where I live now.
Far behind the river, I saw the ridge of Gozu Mountain whose highest point is 972 meters (3200ft).
I wanted to take a picture of trains running on the bridge. I waited for the trains’ coming. But that didn’t come. I knew that I could not take a good picture because of reverse light of sunshine. So, I stopped waiting and gave up the idea to take a picture of trains. I just came back home.
I don’t know the name of what I cooked. I steamed small apples with sugar.
There are several apple trees in my garden. One of apple trees “Ourin” has got some apples. My mom is happy with that and she had taken some fruits from the tree. She just wanted to take them, didn’t care about the apples were ripe or not. To eat, or not to eat, that was not a question to her. Although she said she might offer those apples in front of the photograph of Dad who died last year, she just left the apples on the table.
My dad had been a poor boy when he was a kid. His dad, my father’s side grandpa, died of tuberculosis when he was a kid. Also that was when all the Japanese suffered from lack of food after the WWII. So my dad had never wasted food. I feel like I inherited his DNA that does not waste any food. This evening, just before I started cooking supper, I found the apples were still left on the table. They were three. I tasted one, which was hard and sour, too early to harvest. I gave up eating it. There were still two left. I decided to heat those immature apples by steam in the pan.
At first, I tried digging a hole on the top of apple because I wanted to get rid of seeds. But it is small apple. In order to do that, my smallest spoon was still too large. So I did that with the end part of the spoon (haft?). The purpose of the hole on apple is not only for removing seeds. After getting rid of seeds, I filled the hole with sugar. I put two small apples with sugar in a bowl and covered the bowl with aluminum foil. And then l poured water a half inch depth into a deep pan, put the bowl in the pan, heated the pan 15 minutes.
This is what I got. I put this in refrigerator tonight. I will eat the sweet and chilled apple as a desert for a breakfast tomorrow morning.
I ate it this morning. It was hard. 15 minutes boiling could not make it soft. Taste was so-so. And there’s one thing I forgot to write yesterday. I don’t have a microwave. If I had a microwave, heating time could have been shortened.
Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning 