Ofuna Market

A mini typhoon blew through last week, but that didn't stop us from getting out and going to the street market at Ofuna Station. When we first moved to Shonan, friends in Tokyo mentioned that this area was famous for its cheap produce. Every week, on Saturdays, Peter works at Ofuna station, and his co-workers confirmed that the market there was just the place for good deals on vegetables and fruit. So, rain and wind notwithstanding, we packed our market bags up and went.

Street markets like this one were common when we lived in Vietnam, of course - supermarkets being the exception to the rule there- but even most neighborhoods in Korea still had a local market. Not so here in the Tokyo area - at least as far as I've seen. Going to the market is a great chance to practice basic speaking in Japanese as well, so we thought it would be fun.

I had some recipes I was dying to try out from "Harumi's Japanese Cooking", so we stopped at the sakanaya (fishmonger's) first. I bought some beautiful plump sea scallops for 500 yen, to eventually turn into "Scallops with Miso Cream Sauce". I can't recommend this dish enough - although it's meant to be served on watercress, I used lettuce instead, and turned it into a kind of warm scallop salad. Served with bread, it was fantastic, and I even talked Peter into trying some. Drench seafood in enough cream and garlic, and you can convince anyone to eat it, I guess.


We went through a few of the vegetable stands, where they were offering a much wider range of vegetables than the local supermarket - zucchini, for example, which I hardly ever see. The prices were unbelievable - a half kilo of garlic for 200 yen; red and green peppers for 100 yen each - easily half the price of the supermarket.


The flower stand - people take their flowers seriously here, and flower-arranging is a popular hobby. If my Japanese ever gets good enough, I'd love to take a class. I bought some beautiful pink peonies.

Fruit, which is usually so expensive that I hardly ever buy it - for example, one apple can cost 200 yen; melons 1,000 yen; strawberries 500 yen. Usually each week the supermarket will run a special on something, like 100 yen bananas, and I'll get some, but the days of having three or four kinds of fruit in one day are over for us. Sometimes I really miss Vietnam! The market, however, had these lovely champagne grapes for 300 yen, so I indulged.

We also found an incredible wine shop in the back alleys, with a full range of Japanese microbrews that we love - the Hitachino series. I love their owls, what can I say? We've had the white beer on tap in pubs in Tokyo, but this was our first chance to sample their weizen - I was lovely, warm and spicy, reminding me of Leffe Blonde, but with a fuller, richer taste. We had gone into the shop to get some Chinese wine for cooking, but when I asked after it, the clerk suggested we sample some aged sake - some discussion with his mother yielded the information that it was from 1984. It was a golden amber colour, and was heavy without being sweet. In retrospect, I wonder if it wasn't mirin - the conversation was in Japanese, and he called it "nihonshu", which I usually interpret as sake, but now I wonder.

It was a heavy slog, getting everything back from the market, but it was worth it. I've been cooking from Harumi's book all week, and I can see that her fame in Japan is justified. Every recipe I've tried has been well received by my food critic, and has been easy to make. I'm looking forward to cooking my way through the book.

Sanja Matsuri, Asakusa

Sunday was warm - a perfect day for a festival! Peter and I went into Asakusa in Tokyo, an older area home to Senso-ji, a large Buddhist temple.

We took the Odakyu line from Fujisawa, taking a little longer than we normally do, but saving 200 yen in the process - that sort of thing really adds up in Tokyo. We got into Shinjuku at about 2 pm, and took a brief detour to check out the Kinokuniya book store, where I picked up a couple of books that you'll see me cooking from in the coming days - "Harumi's Japanese Cooking" and "2-dish Bentos " by - and this is my best guess, apologies, Wu Wen, a Chinese take on bentos. We took another quick detour to Tokyu Hands to stock up on bento necessities for Canadian Bento.

That made us pretty hungry, so we went into the basement at Takashimaya Times Square to look for lunch. Normally we would have just eaten somewhere in the station, but it was such a pleasant day, I thought we could sit out in the little park by the station with something out of the fabulous food shops below the Takashimaya. It's so overwhelming down there - there's literally something for everyone, and it's hard to make a choice, but I settled on a beautiful chirashi sushi that looked as bright as I felt.

After recharging, we got on the Chuo line over to Kanda, and then changed onwards to Asakusa, to see the Sanja Matsuri. When we arrived, the sun was setting beautifully over the Sumidagawa. The main street was roped off, and everywhere, bodies were slumped over drink machines and in alleys. People had the air of quiet, happy exhaustion that spoke of hours of drinking that had begun before noon. We popped into the nearest Family Mart for a beer, and thrust ourselves into the crowd.

This festival involved several portable shrines being toted around on the backs of hordes of happi-clad men, all shouting and stomping together in unison. The smell of sake and beer was heavy in the air. After wandering down a few alleys so Peter could snap some photos, we rounded back towards the temple in time to see one of the shrines being presented. The main lantern that usually hangs over the gate had been raised so the shrines could be carried through. The men stomped and heaved their way towards the gates, with one leader who seemed to direct the movement of the shrine by whim. A few shouts and hand twirls, and the men would heave left. A quick glance and a realization that the crowds were too thick for movement from the head shouter and the men would heave right. The mass of people ebbed and flowed in and out of their way, toddlers and mobile phones aloft to see and capture photos.

Several beers and bare-arsed photos later, we paused for dinner - we had some thought of trying to find an Indian place that a friend of ours had recommended, but the maze of streets around the temple proved too much to navigate, even for Peter. A conveniently located Gyu-Kaku beckoned.

Gyu-Kaku is a chain restaurant which serves yakinikku - a Japanese take on Korean barbecue. Although it kills me to pay for lettuce and kimchi, I know Peter loves it so much that I couldn't say no. We ordered our favourites - squeaky pork (hancheongsal - fatty pork neck), beef galbi (a rib cut), and Peter's ultimate fav - Kalmegisal - cut from the beef diaphragm - it sounds different, but it's incredibly tender and flavourful.

It's all best grilled over hot charcoal, and served with garlic roast in sesame oil, wrapped up in lettuce with a smear of lemon mayonnaise, miso, and a tall, cold draft beer. I thought of my friend Dave, who always says that Japanese draft beer is like "Angels pissing on your tongue", which really sums it up, I think.

After we lurched out of the restaurant, clothes and hair saturated with lovely beef-fat-smoke, we took a turn around the temple grounds, lit up by the lights of festival food booths put up for the occasion.
Roast corn and fish, steamed buns, baked potatoes with butter, yakisoba, okonomiyaki, candied apples and cherries, and chocolate-dipped bananas. We couldn't manage another bite, but cold beer was being sold from deep chests filled with ice, so a couple of Ebisu Golds were dessert.

Renkon Lunch

My lotus root (renkon) pickles were a hit - they really brightened up our lunches this week. They have a great texture - kind of a cross between raw potato and water chestnut. And apparently they're high in fibre, so - bonus! My Saturday lunches are always kind of a use-up-what's-left-in-the-fridge amalgam, and this one's no exception. Since I'm earning a reputation as a cook amongst my students, I'm beginning to little gifts for cooking - one of my ladies brought in a 2 kg cabbage that I pickled, and also shredded for a quick Friday night meal of okonomiyaki. I also have a bottle sanbaizu for making vinegar pickles, and a few photocopied pages of an old Japanese cookbook with tsukemono and sunomono recipes. Very exciting. I topped some leftover rice with some frozen corn I keep in the freezer for the end of the week, and some chicken-ginger soboro. I mixed the renkon pickles with some standard pink curry pickles (anyone know what those are called?) for a colour contrast, and the clickety container has some indispensable tonkatsu sauce. I couldn't pack it up without anything green, though, so I added a few edamame as well. Everything went surprisingly well together.

Side Dishes We Are Enjoying

In an attempt to finish off my giant daikon, I somehow slipped into making panchan for our meals - and we've been loving it! Panchan are traditional Korean side dishes that are served along with rice, kimchi, and jigae at meals. They're popular, too, in Japan, although the name for them escapes me right now - at any rate, they're a delicious way to round out a meal, and since most of them feature heavily seasoned vegetables, they're happy to sit in containers in the fridge for a couple of days, waiting to be taken out and stuffed into a bento, or put down next to dinner.

First up, mul kimchi - a kimchi that eats like a soup! Instead of being covered in a thick paste of chilis and garlic, cabbage, carrot and daikon are suspended in a cold, gingery spicy soup. It's incredibly refreshing when it's hot outside. I keep this in the fridge, and depending on my mood, just pick out the vegetables for a less spicy option, or have a whole bowl with plain rice.


I still had some daikon hanging around, so I dispatched it completely with two different dishes:

First, Japanese-style pickled radish with soy sauce and lemon peel. It's meant to have yuzu peel instead, but I also had the end of a lemon lurking in the fridge that I used instead. That took us from last Sunday to mid-week.


By Friday about a quarter of the daikon was defiantly holding on, so I googled one of my favourite radish dishes from Korea - daikon pickled with vinegar and chili flakes.


Well, that link gave me the idea for cucumbers, which Peter loves in any form, so while I was doing the radishes, I made the cucumber recipe as well - lightly pickled cucumber with sesame oil.

On Monday, one of my students came in with a 2-kilo cabbage that she had bought at her local farm stand for me, so I knew we'd be having ddalk galbi for dinner tonight - Korean food is always an excellent way to go through volumes of cabbage. But you've got to have creamy salad to go with ddalk galbi, to kill the heat, so it was an excellent excuse to make Japanese potato salad from Just Hungry! It sounds exotic, but it isn't really, it's just creamy and good. It's fairly expensive in Japanese supermarkets - something like 200 yen for 100 g, so I've been wanting to make it at home for a long time, but I couldn't figure out how they got the cucumbers so crispy.


I've also been trying to add one new vegetable to our rotation each week, and this week I felt like playing with lotus root. I used to see it for sale a lot when I was living in Vietnam - ladies would have big dripping baskets full balanced precariously on the back of their bikes. They'd sit in the shade of the trees next to the Temple of Literature and sell bags of it to people whizzing by on the back of motorcycles. I had no idea what to do with it, but there were a few recipes in Washoku, so I decided to be brave and give it a try. Lotus root is blanched and then soaked in a sweet and sour syrup overnight in a glass jar - hopefully it'll be nice for lunch tomorrow.


Since I was making Korean food, it was a good excuse to make chili bean sprouts with sesame oil - Peter ate most of it at dinner, but there's still enough of it left to put in his bento for tomorrow.


As for the cabbage...I've still got about a kilo of it left. I put some aside for making okonomiyaki later this week, but it looks like I'll have to do some more pickling.

Iced tea

It's sufficiently warm enough here now that when I wake up in the morning, I want a cold beverage before I face the day. Juice and iced coffee, my go-to cold drinks when I lived in Vietnam, are now out of the question. Fruit is scandalously expensive here - and so is coffee.

No, the thing to drink when you're in Japan, obviously, is tea. If you go into any convenience store in Japan, you'll find cold drinks taking up 2/3 of the wall space - but don't be fooled. Instead of the cornucopia of cold drinks this implies, you'll find only one thing in the bottles - tea. Green tea, mostly, but some roasted tea, and some Chinese Oolong tea; some English-style "red" tea, some "red" tea with milk, and my current favourite, Jasmine tea. I'm hoping someone will introduce cold Indian Chai - that will be a dangerous day. There are whole ranges of fruit-infused teas from France, and there are also herbal teas and "health" teas made from various grains and beans, but for me, real tea has to actually involve a tea leaf. There are a couple of sad little rows of other beverages - one row of real coke, never any diet; some Fanta; some Mitsuya cider, a kind of melon-flavoured clear pop; and maybe, maybe, some Pepsi. There are a few fruit juices as well, but they're mostly sugar and water.

So I'm drinking iced tea from here on out. It's incredibly refreshing when it's humid, and since most teas on the market are calorie-free, it doesn't induce that much guilt. Except for the environmental impact of all those PET bottles. And the fact that flavoured water is going for 150 yen a bottle.

Whenever I have a crisis about saving money or the environment, I immediately go to Muji, because I know that they have the product that will help me feel better about myself. (How can you not love a company that improves your self esteem?) I use their shopping bag every time I go out, to reduce the plastic bag blight in my house (you can't use them as garbage bags here!) and I knew they'd have just the thing to solve my tea dilemma. I got on my bike and rode straight to their giant store in Fujisawa, and got myself their tea jug (small size). It's the best tea-related 800 yen I've ever spent. Now, every morning when I wake up, I have a cold, refreshing glass of tea waiting for me.


Next on my shopping list: the Muji thermal flask, for taking the tea to work.