… and living in Japan in general, I suppose.
As I am both nervous and bad at timing, I am not a fantastic cook. There are very few things I feel completely confident about making for others. I still love to cook, especially for people I’m not worried about wowing, or who I know will still love me if I screw something up. Generally I get by okay if I relax about the process. But cooking in Japan has proven to be a totally new, unforeseen challenge.
Whatever knowledge I have of Japanese cooking has always been a little californized: lightening things up by using less oil, sodium, meat. Less frying, more fresh. Which isn’t Japanese cooking; it’s fusion. And as far as technique, I hit the usual wall of knowing alll about how to do it, but having little practice in actually applying that information. Needless to say, if you put all the ingredients for tenpura udon in front of me, I’d be all kinds of confident in my mind, but applying the methods of frying, creating good soup bases and perfectly done noodles is a whole ‘nother story.
Interestingly, I think the techniques involved are straightforward. The problem arises when I try to apply my weird Californian/American/French kitchen sensibilities to this style of cooking. It just doesn’t compute.
So, rarely do I have everything lined up…
- a good recipe (difficult),
- applicable cookin’ skills (meh),
- a supply of ingredients I’m confident to use† (it helps to have tasted/cooked with it. Not that it’s bad if I haven’t, it’s just harder to be confident about using something in a recipe when you have no idea how it will taste/alter the dish etc),
- ingredients that aren’t prohibitively expensive here (dude, I saw an ¥800yen persimmon today, a head of lettuce was around ¥600yen, and my grocery list of ~6 basic items was ¥3000yen).
You can feel the necessity of turning less into more in any supermarket in Tokyo. There you learn that a single stalk of celery can cost you a dollar. Or you eye a nice slab of beef that costs more than a Prada leather wallet. You quickly realize that a design problem emerges: namely, how to cook with fewer resources to create the “illusion” of more. —John Maeda
The kitchen is only the half of it. Conquering a grocery store here is not easy if you’re all but contextually illiterate: kanji and little-to-no visual help as to exactly what is in a package makes grocery shopping slow and potentially aggravating. I consider myself able-bodied when faced with identifying foodstuffs, I can figure it out if need be, but the first time I needed to do that in a situation where I wanted to know whether it was silken or “cotton” tofu, regular or buttermilk, or what spice was in that opaque packaging—simple stuff, really—I was quickly frustrated.
The answer is to learn the language. Fair enough. Clearly, after sauntering into my first store with such undue confidence and then failing to buy normal milk, I learned to differentiate (ok, that actually took me two fails to figure out). But there’s only so much you can learn between trips to the store, eh? (I won’t get into the whole issue of only being here for two months so how much time should we spend on Japanese classes rather than just living and exploring, etc etc)…
(To be clear, I feel wildly fortunate to even be in this position, where this is a real life ‘issue’ worth writing about. Totally silly.)
† There is so much available to us in the Bay Area, so I am always excited to find things I’ve never seen. Tokyo markets offer such a beautiful array of things that are perhaps not all new to me, but are at least limited to the Things Japanese People Cook With (what a novel thought!) closely chosen items that give off a curated feel. Even asian markets don’t do this in the same way in the states. The closest I’ve come to this is Japantown in San Francisco, a few tiny grocers and that big awful chain grocer that’s more kitsch candy store (Milky candies and Calorie mate ohhh) than comprehensive grocery store.
