Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning
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.
みなさん、こんばんは。
写真は「おだまき」の花です。授業中にもちょっと見せましたが、私の庭でたくさん咲いています。これは日本の「深山（みやま）おだまき」と言います。西洋オダマキはカラフルで面白い形ですが、私は日本のオダマキの花もきれいだと思います。
今日は腰痛がひどくて困りました。ウンウンうなりながら、みなさんへフィードバックをしました。今晩はこれで仕事を終えて、休みます。
この写真と文章は、私の学生たちとのコミュニケーションの一環として、Dingtalk上に掲示したものです。
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.
This is a photo of today. I wanted to take a picture of train running, but those local trains do not come so frequently.
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.
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.
The white slices accompanying with Mackerel is white part of green onion.
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.
When you cook horse mackerels, you need to cut the hard scales off from the body side from the tale.
I wouldn’t show you the most cruel part of the cooking process.
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.
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.
Oil is not good for our health. I put fried fishes onto cooking paper in order to remove excess oil.
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”.
They were the last figs in this fall.
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.
I am busy right now. No time to write any comments. I have to work.
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.
Gozu Ridge
Three pictures above were taken in the first week of September.
Mountain KAKUDA
These are the photos that I had taken while I was taking a walk on last Sunday.
