Just like every cowboy sings his sad song

Last time we were here, John made an infusion of Jim Beam, Aperol and sansho from my mom's backyard.  It sat untouched for the past nearly two years, and when John got here one of the first things he did was to pull it out and filter it.  The Jim Beam bottle was literally covered in dust which tells you how much of a drinker my mother is.  "I didn't even know that was HERE!" my mom exclaimed. 

Sansho leaves are something I've found nearly impossible to procure in the US, even at Japanese or other specialty grocers.  When I was living here in 2007/8, I made a very delicious panna cotta using the leaves as an edible, slightly lemony, slightly peppery garnish.  

As a side story, when I'd made this dessert, my mom was astonished at the lightness of the flavor.  "Let's eat this every day!" she said.  

"Do you know how much heavy cream goes in to each serving?" I asked her.  Then I told her.  

"Well, maybe let's not eat this every day," she sighed.

But back to my story.  We are considering taking some of my mom's sansho back to the US.  "It's a very strong bush," she told us as we looked out in the yard.  "It's the one right there, with the thons."

I love it.  As cute as tish.  She's been out of the US for 15 years now and it's taking its toll on her English.  Much to my glee. 

I'm married to a man with nerves (and a gut) of steel

This is our second trip to Tokyo together.  Last time for their first lunch together, my mom fed John the benign-from-a-Japanese-perspective lunch tororo soba.  If you've never had it, look it up.  There are worse descriptions one might think of, but John was generous and described the experience like 'eating a bunch of booger-covered noodles.'  I've been eating tororo since I was a kid and its disgustingness would have never occurred to me, but I see where he is coming from (and appreciate his discretion in not going further with the description - bukkakesoba was never more aptly named, unfortunately).

On that first trip John ate so many weird things, like the obligatory natto as well as barbequed skewers of chicken hearts, skin, livers and whatnot.  I can't remember if he ate chicken fetus, but if he didn't it would have only been because the yakitori place was out and not for lack of courage.  Needless to say, on this second trip to Japan John's motto remains: Bring it on.

We arrived in Tokyo in the late afternoon, surviving a particularly turbulent final 1/2 hour and landing.  A combination of the motion sickness and the 'meals' served to us on the flight (including such combinations as undercooked rice pilaf with some weird beef sauce as a main, with a side of salad and a roll.  And two pieces of sushi) made the nausea upon landing very hard to shake.  Of course the three hour car ride from the airport paired with my mom's driving and navigation ('Oops, I just made a wrong turn') left us with churning stomachs even after we'd arrived safely home.

Luckily, dinner was gentle enough - pork and veggie nabe cooked at the table kind of like a hot pot.  It looked good, smelled good and I started to feel more human.  That was before my mom brought out Ogura-san's 'specialty.'

"You should try it!" she said as I dubiously poked at the dish of slimy pink pieces.

"What is it?" I ask doubtfully.

"Ogura-san made it.  It's my favorite!  It's squid in its own sauce."

"You mean, ink?"

"No, sauce from its..." (she gestures around her abdomen).

"Guts?" I shudder.

"Yes.  It's squid in innards sauce."

John, bless him, ate three pieces and declared them delicious.  

I graciously passed.

Living in a vacuum

Today is Jun chan's birthday so my mom made osekihan which is an extra sticky pink rice and azuki bean dish. She was tasting the finished product and had this to say:
You know, this dish calls for 10% beans to rice used, and every time it seems like such a small amount, I always add a little extra. But then, when it's finished, I guess there are a lot of beans and it probably would have been fine with that small amount.

So I suggested putting a note on her recipe to remind her next time that she should only use the 10% even if it seems too small. Here is what she said to that:
Oh, I remember every time. But it still seems small and so I still add more beans.

In incredulous tones I can't help but voice my disbelief: So you're saying that you know from previous experience that if you add more beans that it will be too many, but you do it anyway.

Her answer was, resoundingly: Yes.

It occurs to me that she is living in a logic vacuum. As in a real vacuum, it makes sense that a feather and a bowling ball will fall at the same rate of 9.81 meters per second. It also makes sense that what looks like too few beans will one day actually be too few beans.

The results are in: Couscous ≠ Panko crumbs

She was going to make fried pork cutlets à la tonkatsu tonight. I just went down to check it out because it was smelling pretty good and she informed me that she didn't have any panko bread crumbs, so these are more like schnitzel or whatever. But the flour batter was a second attempt. The first time, she tried covering the meat with dried couscous. "But it was too hard," she told me. I immediately started having a conniption and had to run away. Who in their right mind thinks to substitute panko crumbs with couscous? It's like putting cornstarch in a bread maker instead of flour just because they are both white and powdery. It just doesn't make sense to me. "At least I only made one," she said in her own defense, "because I had my doubts about it, too." Well, that does show at least a little bit of foresight on her part. In any case, it's an improvement.

One from the archives

My mom had never watched any reality TV before. I introduced her to Top Chef since I had found a place to watch it illegally on the web (shh, don't tell). She was addicted just as I was. It was season 4 and I had already seen a few episodes before we started to watch them together, again from the beginning, so she knew I already knew who was going to be eliminated at each round. We're all old hands at reality shows, us Americans, and while the dramatic editing and music at the end just makes me annoyed and not really in suspense, she would get tense, wring her hands, and look back and forth from me to the computer until the verdict was announced. This reaction of hers went away after a few episodes, but it was cute while it lasted.

Anyway, we got to the Final Four and there was a chef who served a pigeon pea dish whose peas were not fully cooked. During the deliberation, my mom asked me who was going home. I just shrugged my shoulders and told her to wait and see. "It's the girl who made the peas," she said.
"Why do you think that?" I asked.
"You just don't under-cook peas."
Agreed, but I was surprised she had such a strong opinion in the matter. Anyway, she was right. As we all know.

Some words of advice...

if you are ever trying to get me to taste something, a good starting point would be NOT telling me you thought it was congealed blood.

My mom took me for a belated birthday dinner at this place that is a bath-house-slash-fancy-restaurant. I didn't know what kind of food would be served and when I'd asked her on the train ride there what kind of restaurant it was, she told me, "Nice*." It ended up that we were slated to have a kaiseki meal. Not to be overly suspicious, but once a long time ago we had such a meal and one of the dishes consisted of a small 'pile' of slimy, white ooze. Poking it with my chopstick, I had asked my mom what it was, and she looked at me with her crazy eye and said "fish sperms;" so, needless to say I felt a little bit of, shall we say, reservation toward what might be served. Generally speaking, however, everything tonight was quite delicious. Of course, I had also just got out of a nice, hot bath and was working on drinking an entire (small) bottle of sake by myself. There was, however, one thing that I couldn't pop into my mouth with ease. This was it:


It wasn't just how it looked, though. The look of confusion and concern on my mom's face when she took a bite of it was about enough for me NOT to try it.
"What does it taste like?" I asked her. Puzzling, she took another small bite.
"I don't know!" she said.
"Well, is it vegetable? Fish? Meat? (she raised her shoulders, baffled, after each suggestion) Blood?"
"It might be blood. Taste it and you tell me."
At 31, I can finally kind of tell what I need and what I don't need, and what I don't need is to try a cube of blood. Do I even need to tell you I said "Hell, no"?

* My mom has always been this way, using qualifying words instead of quantifying words to describe things. Actually, hers are probably better choices, though they are seldom what I am looking for. Like here when I was wanting to know what type of food, not what quality of food. One time she had bought me sheets with horses on them, and I wanted to know if they were cartoon, or what. When I asked her what kind of horses they were, she replied, "Running." Maybe I'm too like the adults on the planets the Little Prince visits in that book. Maybe, though, it's also not too late to change...

it continues

When I got home from work, I went to the kitchen to try to suss out the lunch situation. I observed a pan on the stove with three eggs sitting in a shallow bath of lukewarm water. I picked one up and held it up to my mom, who was sprawled out on the couch trying to stay cool in the recently warming weather.

"What's this?" I asked her. Her reply?
"Egg."

Naturally.

Sometimes thinking ahead isn't at all

It was raining and I had asked for a ride to the train station. As I was putting on my jacket and bag, I noticed my mom putting an English muffin into the toaster. I asked her why she was doing that when we're just about to leave. Here was her answer:

"So that I'll forget that I wanted toast by the time I come back from dropping you off and will discover them later when I get home from school, all dried and hard in the toaster."

Really, it's that she wants to remember that she even wanted toast, but she recognizes that this scenario is much more likely. Probably based on previous experience.

If my ego was a zeppelin, it'd the Hindenburg

So, today when I went down to have some lunch, the housekeeper was just getting ready to leave. She's in her 70s, the one who is fast. At any rate, we were making small talk and just as I was reaching in to the fridge, she says, "I always thought you were skinny, but you're not really so skinny, are you." I froze. Yes, I've put on a few since I've been here (and yes, sadly in Japan they use the metric system); also, I don't think she meant it as a criticism, but rather some weird post WWII-type compliment in my granparents'-era-style. Needless to say, I reached past my original lunch item and grabbed for the plain, low fat yogurt. Anyway, later when I got home, I told my mom this story and she laughed with me about it. As we were laughing, the cat started to beg for more dinner, and my mom says to him, "You can't have any more. You're fat, too."
"Fat, TOO?!"
"Well, you just said it," she started to back-peddle, "We're all kind of getting fat..."

Anyway, I can't say much because, well, the scale doesn't lie. Also, I think my mom confuses empathy and sympathy sometimes (I guess they do sound alike...) and she wasn't trying to make me feel like a whale. Needless to say, I think I'm going to go on a diet. Failing that, maybe just a day long 'cleanse.'

Maybe I'm a culiary prude

Since I've been here, from time to time I'll notice this concoction my mom makes sitting in the fridge, looking disgusting. It's always in a bowl, covered by some saran wrap, and it looks like chunks of grapefruit in yogurt that has gotten watery and a little curdled from the grapefruit juice. This morning, I finally saw her eating it.

"I don't know why anyone would want to eat grapefruit that's sitting in curdling yogurt," I said maybe a little more rudely than I intended.

"It's not yogurt," she informed me. I look again...the grapefruit chunks are definitely sitting in something milky. "It's plain milk that's curdled. I saw it on TV. It's really healthy for you."

I can eat a lot of things, fermented beans, stinky cheese, foie-gras, I've even eaten ris de veau, though that is an experience I'll likely never duplicate. But I have to draw the line at curdling milk. I had a traumatic curdled milk experience when I was young...my dad can attest to that!

The Queen of Substitutions

My mother has long held the title of "The Queen of Substitutions." She will substitute one thing for another with out regard to scientific property or relevance. Sometimes the results are fine, like when she 'extends' sour cream by adding plain yogurt to it. Other times they've ended in disaster. But I've learned some good lessons, like: Never substitute Red Miso for White Miso in a misoae no matter how much it might seem like a good idea at the time. Or: Just because things look alike, doesn't mean they are alike. This lesson I learned the time she used powdered laundry detergent instead of dish detergent in our dish-washer in LA ("They looked the same!" she said) and I came downstairs to find suds interminably pouring out of the sides of the machine, all over the floor. It was straight out of "I Love Lucy."

Anyway, I was just reminded of this because she's making a cake to serve at the reception of her concert on Sunday. This is a time where it counts, where if the cake comes out badly, it will get served anyway. So, of course, she starts making additions and substitutions left and right. I saw on the counter: a tupperware of frozen cooked apples from last fall, a bottle of Kahlua and one of Absolut, a tub of lard, some recipe clippings that looked like they were from 1940.

Your guess is as good as mine. She turned to me with this worried look and said, "I hope it comes out okay..." I'll be sure to tell you how it tastes this weekend.