Choco day

February 14

Enough has been written about Valentine's Day in Japan, and "giri choco" vs "honmei choco". The tradition is that women buy sweets for men, and they return the favour a month later. But to be honest, most of my female friends are buying those chocolates for themselves! (and sometimes their friends). One of the best things about Valentine's Day in Japan is that the department stores put on big chocolate fairs, and often fly out famous chocolatiers from France and Belgium. You can get high on the smell of chocolate in the air!

Most of these women are buying chocolate for themselves!

French macarons, especially mini ones in pastel colours have become really popular in the last few years, since Laduree landed here. Local boy Sadaharu Aoki is also a big star here, with his colourful approach to chocolates. The packaging is gorgeous. Packaging is so important when you're choosing a gift.

Sadaharu Aoki's store in Midtown, Roppongi is beautiful

When it comes to macarons, just say "hitotsu zutsu!" - one of each

Women are giving chocolates to their friends, but not really bothering with their male colleagues these days, though you might give some chocolates to your boss to keep him sweet! When it comes to "honmei choco" or 'real feeling chocolates' for your boyfriend, husband or secret desire, according to a lot of men here, it's best to give something homemade. Stores like Tokyu Hands are full of heart-shaped chocolate moulds and decorating kits. If you're feeling a little lazy, just melt a bunch of chocolate Pocky sticks together and sprinkle them with sugary stars - that's the schoolgirl way.

My lazy chocolate tarts this year

cold days and kabu

These are really late autumn foods, but kabu and buri are still delicious in mid winter. Kabu is a cute round turnip, and buri is yellowtail. Fish names can be confusing in Japan, as they sometimes get different names at different stages of their life. So yellowtail is called hamachi when it's around 3 kilos, and makes delicious sashimi. When it gets bigger, it's called buri, and has a higher fat content, making it a delicious winter fish. Since buri fillets are really cheap at this time of the year, I decided to make buri no teriyaki. It's really easy because you can just cook it in a fry pan. Just marinate the fish for about 30 minutes in soy sauce, sake, mirin and sugar (I heat the sauce ingredients gently first, to dissolve the sugar). You take the fish fillets out of the sauce, fry for a few minutes on each side, then add the sauce to the pan. Take the fish out when it's ready and reduce the sauce a little and you can pour it over the fish. If you're in a hurry, you don't need to marinate - just fry the fish and add the sauce to the pan; it's still delicious. If you want to see how to do it all properly, watch "Cooking with Dog" on youtube: it's the best!

Don't worry about the 'black' bits - it's just the sugar caramelised 

This time, I decided to make pickled turnip as well, so I made "kiku kabu", turnip chrysanthemums. They're easy if you're patient! Cutting the turnips finely was very relaxing. You should peel the turnips and cut the base (where the leaves came out) flat. You need to make fine cuts perpendicular to the cutting board in one direction, then do the same at 90 degrees, so you get a hash pattern, being careful not to cut right through. The secret is to use disposable chopsticks to stop you cutting too far. Then, soak the turnips in salt water for about 30 mins to help soften them up. After that, squeeze as much water out as you can (without breaking the turnip "petals") and soak in a mix of rice vinegar, sugar, a little dashi and mirin for 30 minutes to an hour, or longer if you like - you'll get a stronger taste, and softer turnip. Again, squeeze as much liquid out as you can, and twist the 'petals' around to look more natural. Traditionally, you garnish it with thinly sliced chili, but I didn't have any, so I put some finely minced beni shouga (red pickled ginger) to make the flower centres.

Here are the main steps, but again, I'm no cooking expert - watch Cooking with Dog!

Disposable chopsticks work well because they're flat & won't roll around

After soaking in salt water for 30 mins - much softer

Finished! It's quite a sweet, delicate pickle, especially if you use mild vinegar

It's a pretty healthy meal - just add rice, miso soup and some cooked veggies or a salad. Buri no teriyaki is really delicious! The only downside is it has a lot of bones, so be careful not to scoff it down too fast!

Setsubun 節分

February 3

Setsubun marks the beginning of spring, or the start of the New Year on the old calendar (and it’s about the same time as Chinese New Year). Soy beans are believed to have the power to drive away evil spirits, so throwing them to get rid of bad luck is a good way to start the new year, or at least, new season. If you live in a house with kids, it can be really fun: Dad puts on a devil mask and the kids throw beans at him, shouting “oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi” – or out with the devils, and in with good luck. The kids love pelting Dad with beans. I threw a few dried soy beans at my husband when he got home from work, but he didn’t really appreciate it.  You’re supposed to eat one bean for every year of your life, but I don’t think they taste so good – maybe edamame (boiled soybeans) would be better!

Dried soybeans with a few sweets

For some reason, it’s become popular to eat a big sushi roll called a “futomaki” on setsubun. It has 7 ingredients (lucky 7!) and it’s usually a bit expensive – the ones I bought were 500 yen for a half roll, but they had very yummy prawn, salmon and tuna, as well as vegetables and omelette.  Apparently , this tradition started around Osaka in the Edo era,  but it’s popular all over Japan now. You should eat it whole (don’t cut it or you’ll cut the ties with your family), sitting in this year’s lucky direction, without speaking. The lucky direction is printed on the sushi pack if you buy it. 

You can see the lucky direction on the pack

This year was north, north west, so we had to face the corner of the room and it was hard not to laugh.  Anyway, the futomaki was delicious. I suspect the reason the futomaki or ehou maki (lucky direction sushi roll) has taken off is that it’s a good retail opportunity.

Hey, Mr Kerosene Man

February is cold!

Ok, it’s not a special seasonal tradition, but winter in Japan is cold, and houses are generally not centrally heated (though I did visit an apartment with under-floor heating, which was very comfortable). We live in an old Japanese house with tatami mats and wooden floors. In winter, it gets really cold, so we stay mostly in the living room, with an electric carpet (since we sit on the floor), and a kerosene heater. Kerosene is much cheaper than electricity for heating, but you have to get jerry cans of kero and use a battery-powered  pump / siphon to fill the heater. It's also a bit smelly; you need to keep a door or window open a little to keep fresh air circulating. Like most families here, we keep a kettle of water on top of the heater, to humidify the room. This means there’s always boiling water for tea, but it’s also noisy. Every weekend the kerosene man comes in a little truck, which plays dinky music.

Our friendly local kerosene man

It costs a little more than going to the petrol station, but he’s very cheerful and he’ll carry the full jerry cans to your front door. In Japanese, kerosene is "touyu". During the big earthquake last year, a lot of houses lost power, but they could still keep warm with the kerosene heater. It has an automatic shut off if it gets tipped over. 

The other advantage of a kerosene heater: you can toast mochi on it! My husband loves to do this in winter. Mochi is very cheap, being basically pounded rice, and it’s quite filling. It starts as a hard white block – kind of like plastic – but when you toast it, it becomes crisp on the outside and fluffy & stretchy inside. The easiest thing to do with toasted mochi is to dip it in soy sauce and wrap it in a piece of nori, to make isobe mochi. It’s salty, chewy and delicious!

Toasting mochi directly on the kerosene heater. It's a bit of a pain to clean after.

I also used the toasted mochi to make a more filling soba soup, with some crispy fried prawns.

Soba with tempura ebi and toasted mochi.

Curry Day

January 22nd is Curry Day.

After eating far too much mochi and every variety of nabe, it's nice to change to youshoku (Western-style food).

Curry day comes from the history of Japanese school lunches, or “kyushoku”. It seems that lunches were served for poor students at various schools on an ad-hoc basis since the turn of the century, but really took off in 1946, when Japanese Americans, worried about the poor nutrition of Japanese children after the war, started a scheme to provide food aid for school lunches. Shichinosuke Asano started the group on January 22nd 1946 in San Francisco. Immigrants in North and South America contributed and sent food aid until the mid 1950s. You can read more information at the excellent yokosonews.com website.

In honour of their efforts, January 22nd was declared “curry day” in the early 1980s, and this most popular of school lunches is served on that day. It’s also traditional to have curry on Friday nights in the Japanese Marine Self Defence Force. 

This year, “Curry Day” was a Sunday, so sadly, schools didn’t serve a special curry lunch, but we had curry at home. Looking into the history of Japanese curry (which tastes quite different to the Indian style curries I grew up with), I found what we eat now in Japan as “curry rice”, was developed by the Japanese Navy. Curry first came to Japan as the country opened up after the Edo period, when it was considered a rather exotic, luxury food. The story goes that the Japanese navy, worried about sailors’ malnutrition on long voyages (since plain rice, miso and pickles was the standard fare), adopted British Navy style meals with meat and vegetables. They adapted curry to be served at sea, with navy cooks adding more vegetables and flour to thicken the sauce (so it didn’t spill easily) and beef tallow (fat), which keeps for a long time. Since it was easy to cook, tasty and long-lasting, it became popular at home too.

This is the “authentic” Japanese Navy Curry, based on the original 1908 recipe. It’s a popular souvenir for visitors to Yokosuka in Kanagawa, which was originally the Japanese Navy’s base and shipyards and is now home to the US Navy.

Curry is so popular that different regions of Japan have their own variations. In Sapporo, I tried the ‘soup curry’, which really fills you with warmth and good feelings on a snowy day. At Omiya station in Saitama, the supermarket has a kind of ‘curry library’ with hundreds of regional curries, stacked like books!

Start your own curry library!

Since curry sauce tastes even better the next day, it’s popular to serve it as curry udon. I add a little (just a little) water to thin the sauce slightly – especially if you use the commercial curry roux cubes, they tend to thicken up a lot. Boil some udon noodles according to the pack instructions, put them in a bowl and pour over the curry sauce. Easy! I sometimes see people add shredded cheese (best eaten alone; it’s a tasty, gooey mess). I like to make curry spaghetti. The easiest way is to use pre-made Keema Curry – just put it on top of spaghetti, instead of rice. Or you can make a normal bolognaise sauce with plenty of onion, ground beef, garlic and some chopped, peeled tomatoes, and then add curry powder to taste.

While I used to have mango chutney, cucumber raita or pickled lime with my curries in Australia, the popular sides here are pickled rakkyo – like a pickled onion crossed with a schallot bulb – and my favourite, fukujinzuke, a pickle which is a little sweet and crunchy, usually with daikon, eggplant and cucumber.

Rakkyo

So, make Friday curry day! If you’re down in Yokosuka, you can try the Yokosuka Kaigun Curry restaurant near Yokosuka-chuo station or a restaurant called Wood Island. Enjoy it the traditional way with pickles, a small salad and a glass of milk! Or you can make it at home with the rather militaristic looking “Yokosuka Kaigun Curry” package from choumi.jp, as seen above.

Nanakusa 七草

January 7 is the time to take down your decorations (and slow down all that New Year pigging out). In a tradition borrowed from China, we make a kind of rice porridge with 7 herbs, called nanakusa. Just be careful not to call it "nanakusai" like I did the first time - it sounds like "7 bad smells"!

The idea is that by eating this, you'll stay healthy all year - but it's also a welcome respite after all the drinking and rich, salty foods. Okayu, the rice porridge, is just like Chinese congee. If you're feeling sick, it's very gentle on the stomach. You can have it with a little cooked salmon, egg, or a salted plum (I confess, I prefer the Chinese version with chicken, shredded ginger and peanuts - especially for hangovers). So, you get your 7 herbs, which are conveniently sold in a pack, chop them up (you'll get a mini daikon - suzushiro and a mini turnip - susuna; slice those thinly), and stir them through your rice porridge. Rice cookers have a setting for okayu, or you can cheat and buy it ready made.

It tastes quite plain; I added a little grated ginger and salt, but it does make you feel quite refreshed and virtuous, ready for all the 'welcome the new year' parties to come.

The herbs: seri, nazuna, gogyo, hakobera, hotokenoza, susuna and suzushiro - all taste like grass!

Matsunouchi

You can keep your New Year's decorations up until about January 7th. You'll see big kado matsu outside stores and hotels, made of bamboo and pine branches and smaller arrangements of pine outside houses to encourage the new year god to visit and bring good luck. So this time is known as "matsunouchi" - literally 'during the pine'. You can buy pine branches and shime kazari decorations (usually featuring shinto rope to keep out bad spirits and lucky symbols like lobsters and oranges and kelp) at the supermarket for your front door or alcove, from about 250 yen (plastic and straw). These days a lot of people don't even bother.

The kadomatsu outside Dozeu Iidaya, a very famous dojou (loach) restaurant in Asakusa

We also had a kagami mochi in the house - mochi cakes shaped like mirrors, because gods were meant to live in mirrors. Remember that next time you're preening in the bathroom mirror! After January 11th, you can break the mochi and put it in soup. You can buy the kagami mochi formed inside a plastic cover, or you can make your own mochi - which few people do these days. In Asakusa, I came across an elaborate kagami mochi with a real lobster and real fruit etc. It was in the window of Bunsendo, a famous fan shop which supplies kabuki actors.

kagami mochi in Bunsendo

I went to Ginza to see all the elaborate New Year decorations - far more subdued than Christmas, but very beautiful. I stopped off at Higashiya, a wonderful sweet store and cafe in the POLA building (on Chuo dori, Ginza 1-7-7, 2F). I wanted to buy hanabira mochi, which is a traditional sweet to have with the year's first tea ceremony. For a change, I tried yuzu green tea, made with whole yuzu; very refreshing. I'm afraid the dining options in the cafe are quite expensive, so I opted for the shio musubi - a simple, salted rice ball wrapped in nori. Wow. It was the most delicious one I've ever tasted, and I realised the ones I make for my huband's lunch are pretty bland in comparison. Since it was New Year, they also offered free sweet, warm sake!

Hanabira mochi is sweet, but not overly so. The mochi is wrapped around miso paste and sweetened gobo - burdock. The slightly "turnip-ish" burdock taste is a nice balance to the sweet miso and mochi.

Hanabira mochi

Hatsumoude 初詣

Hatsumoude means your first shrine or temple visit of the year.  If you're really good, you went to the local shrine or temple around midnight New Year's Eve, but most people try to go within the first few days of January. Going to a big, famous shrine is popular, so you'll find the major ones like Sensouji in Asakusa and Meiji Shrine in Harajuku, absolutely packed. We live in Saitama, so we went to Hikawa Jinja near Omiya, along with hundreds of other people.  You line up to pray and give an offering - usually a 5 yen coin. Go-en sounds like "connection" in Japanese, so it's a way to make a good connection with the gods.  UPDATE: my friend just told me she puts more money - for example 15 yen (jyu go) sounds like "enough connection", 25 (ni jyu go) sounds like "double connection", 35 (san jyu go) "triple connection"and so on - so on her advice, I'll try doubling my lucky connections next time!

After you've done that, you usually make a beeline for the omamori store, staffed by "shrine maidens", to buy omamori - a lucky or protective amulet for the year. Miko - the shrine maidens at a shinto shrine - in their distinctive white haori  and red hakama have been fetishized in countless manga and anime, but in reality, most of them are just university students earning some part-time cash.

Busy Miko-san

You also need to dispose of last year's omamori and daruma, so there's an area where you can put those, and you're expected to give a small donation. The shrine will burn them in early January. I never knew omamori had a "use by date" before!

Daruma waiting for burning

Next, you need to get your fortune for the new year, so you can line up again and get your omikuji. A lot of people say, it's better not to get the most lucky one (daikichi), or your life won't get any better than this year. If you don't like your fortune, you can tie it to a branch or one of the metal wires at the shrine and hopefully the gods will take care of it while you await better fortune. People often also tie their good fortunes there after reading them.

Must have been a lot of bad fortune this year

Finally, what my husband likes best about hatsumoude is the array of food stalls surrounding the shrine. There's always yakisoba, okonomiyaki, takoyaki and those bananas covered in chocolate and sprinkles.

Oshougatsu お正月

New Year's Day

If you're really motivated, you get yourself off to Mt Fuji (to hang out with the bikers) or down to Enoshima to watch the first sunrise of the new year. But most people are probably sleeping off mild sake hangovers or worse - making last minute preparations for o sechi ryouri. It's designed to save the women of the house from doing cooking for a few days, but if you make it yourself, you'll be slaving for a few days before, anyway. My Mother-in-Law ordered ours. Smart woman. It looks gorgeous, though a lot of items are either quite salty or sweet, as they were made back in the days before refrigeration. Each item has a symbolic meaning, which may be more important than the taste.

You can see the spread here, for 4 to 5 people, supplemented with roast ham and ozoni soup. Lobsters and prawns symbolise long life - they're bent over like an old person. Near the front you can see a yellow thing: kazunoko, rather chewy dried, salted herring row, which, being so prolific in eggs,  is meant to encourage fertility. In the bamboo cup, you'll find kuromame - black beans, meant to protect you from evil. Next to that is a little dish of kinton - sweet, slightly mashed chestnuts to represent money. In the second box you can just see kohada awazuke- marinate shad, carrot. It's meant to help you get a promotion at work... the bottom line is, your MIL will encourage you to try everything, as everything is lucky in some way. One of my favourite items is date maki, which is a sweetened, rolled omelet, shaped like a scroll, so they're supposed to make you smart.

To be honest, this was last year's osechi, before the Tohoku disaster. This year, in the spirit of restraint and tighter economic times, we had a much simpler version. Still, Aunty brought over her shamisen, so we had some entertainment (well, I dutifully listened, the others dozed off). In some ways, a Japanese New Year's Day is a lot like a western Christmas: eating lots of good food, enjoying wine, beer and sake and cake, then falling asleep on the sofa or the heated carpet in front of the TV.

Omisoka 大晦日

I really meant to start this on January 1st, but like many resolutions, it was quickly forgotten. However, spring is a time of new beginnings, so I'm back-tracking a little, but let's start from January. While Japan is a very modern country in many ways, a lot of people still observe traditional events and honour the seasons. I'm trying to follow the Japanese annual events and seasons, to give you an idea of what Japanese life is like for a fairly typical family. We live in an ordinary small town, about 50 mins from Tokyo, with fields of cabbages and spring onions next to convenience stores. 


So, let's start from December 31st, crossing into the new year. We had ten don - tempura shrimp on rice for dinner, and watched a combination of Kouhaku (the interminable singing competition) and Downtown (the equally painful comedy duo and friends), eating mikan and drinking beer, dozing and keeping warm under the kotatsu. 

Just before midnight I made toshikoshi soba, or "crossing the year soba". It's really simple and light. I got some mentsuyu - premade soba stock (basically dashi, soy, mirin etc). It's "straight type" but you still need to dilute it a little to taste. Cook your soba noodles for a few minutes in plain water till al dente, drain and rinse to get any starch off: you can feel the texture change. Then toss them into the soba stock, add a fistful of sliced green onion (naganegi), some greens like spinach or chingensai, etc and warm through. Put in a bowl and add a little thinly sliced yuzu peel.
At midnight we opened the windows and listened to the temple bells chime 108 times (we fell asleep well before they finished).