I have been living in Imabari for about five months now, since the end of May, 2006. My company placed my lodgings in an apato called Leopalace21. In its favour, it is clean, modern and has air conditioning. It’s also about a third the size of my last one bedroom apartment in Vancouver. It was designed for itinerent twenty-somethings, who never cook anything more than a cup of coffee. The kitchen is an alcove with a one burner hotplate in it. There is a special closet with room for eight pairs of shoes in it, but nowhere to put canned goods. It’s ok, though, I can cook on one burner.
There’s lots of cheap, great tasting Japanese food available takeout and in every Lawsons, Circle K, or in my local 24 hour shop, Lifeshop, so adjusting to eating in Japan is pretty easy. But I always like to be able to cook. Amidst all my complaining and research and so on, I mentioned to Mayu, my manager, and Chihiro and Michico, my two Japanese colleagues at the school, that it might be fun to start a cooking club. To my surprise, they jumped at it.
First meeting
We held a first meeting at a small restaurant called ‘Manana’ which had recently opened near GEOS Kodomo. It’s run by a young woman recently returned from the west coast of America, where she lived for three years. While there she developed a liking for Mexican food, and has brought it back to Imabari to add to the mix. Kudos!
We had a nice meeting, where I presented a cobbled together Avocado salad, approximated from a description of one at an Indian restaurant in New York City. I uncovered this recipe while searching for Indian food suppliers on the web. I found a great company in Japan called Indo-Jin, www.indo-jin.com, from which I can order online and receive stuff in four or five days! Very cool. My thanks to the gourmet bloggers, who must remain anonymous because I managed to lose their url and name, for a wonderful blog.
The salad was very good, I thought, with highlights of roasted cumin and lemon. Yum. The meeting was also good, and we agreed to meet again.
Second Meeting
The women suggested that our next meeting be at Michico’s house. Michico lives at home in a region called Sakurai, in the southern part of Imabari proper. Chihiro picked up Mayu and me and drove us there in her very efficient, boxy little van. It’s got some cute little name like ‘Cuby’ or something. I don’t think any one reads these names.
Sakurai is country-ish, with a lot more greenery than downtown. Michico lives right down near the beach. There are dirt roads and driveways. I’m beginning to find this sort of thing refreshing, the more concrete I see. It sometimes seems every road in japan is paved or concreted over. I’ve been down roads that were 10 feet wide, hadn’t seen a vehicle in months, maybe a year, and were concrete. It’s a bit weird. I come from British Columbia, and 16 years of treeplanting, and have seen a lot of logging roads! Next to none of them were paved…
Anyway, I find that there’s a kind of appeal in ‘brown’ lands, lands on the periphery of human interest, the verges of highways, abandoned fields and factories, railway lands, and so on. Michico’s neighborhood has this kind of interest for me. Her dad is a well known stone sculptor, and half their property is taken up with his factory-like, sheet metal, production studio.
There are lots (20+) of wild stone sculptures at the front of the house, some of Buddhist deities. Her house is interesting; on the exterior it looks like an amalgam of western and Japanese influences, it seems to me. Inside, it’s laid out with a combination of shoji and western style walls. The dining room had a western style dining table and chair set, and a lot of Japanese and western clutter. The kitchen was, surprise!, fairly large and well laid out, with lots of cupboard space. Yowsers! This was the first Japanese kitchen I’d been in and it reassured me that not everyone cooked on single burner stoves in alcoves…thank goodness.
The women had decided on a menu of traditional Japanese dishes: Nikujaga, a kind of beef and potato stew, a squid dish called Ika no Nimono, a pork dish called Buta no Shoga Yaki, Yaki Zakana (grilled fish), Miso Shiru (Miso soup), and of course rice. My contribution was a bottle of cabernet sauvignon I’d won bowling. Michico’s sister, Mariko, joined us with a lovely cake.
Michico was lead cook, Mayu and Chihiro assisting. I was chief potato peeler and stayer out of the way. Of course I got in the way, taking pics with my shiny new Casio exs-600. For a point and shoot, it’s a very nice little camera. Of course, I wish I could afford a Nikon d20 or something of the sort, but those large cameras, as well as being out of my budget range, are hard to carry around. They sort of demand that one become a ‘PHOTOGRAPHER’, which is not my aim. So the little exs600 works quite well for me; I throw it in my pack and bash it around all over the place, and it takes, by and large, quite credible pictures. Of course I found out two days after I bought it that I could have gotten the ‘pro’ version of the same camera, presumably with better manual controls, for a little more…I decided not to bother.
By now dinner was cooked, the table set, and all of us starving. Dinner was delicious, a great success. We agreed to meet again, but did not set a date.
