Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New Rice Cooker Chronicles submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
More Bread Revolution and Guide to Flour.
“Pita pockets” didn’t excite me as a kid. Toted as a kid-friendly food, the charm of stuffing sandwich fillings into a bread with a pocket was lost on me. I rediscovered pita–fresh pita–in university at Middle-Eastern diners and as (store-bought) hummus became more mainstream. In Japan, I sometimes bought stacks of pita from the import store, but after preparing for an international cooking lesson, I discovered pita are really simple to make, and more importantly, make a great bread substitute for proper sandwiches in Japan. Save the trip to the import store for chickpeas–you don’t even need to make hummus to go with it!*
Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New Rice Cooker Chronicles submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
Early May means fresh bamboo shoots are in season again here in Ishikawa, and I received not one but three lovely shoots from my friends and coworkers this year! 2012 is apparently a bumper year for bamboo in the forests and in my kitchen.
Whether you purchased or received fresh bamboo, one large shoot can seem like a lot to cook up. The best English-language resource for cooking bamboo is, in my opinion, Makiko Itoh’s Just Hungry. The reason why I have only one bamboo recipe on this site is because I always use hers! What I do have to offer is how to cook raw bamboo, my master list of bamboo recipes, comments, and my own photos. Enjoy!
Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New Rice Cooker Chronicles submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
More Bread Revolution and Guide to Flour.
TexMex/Southwestern/Mexican foods were something I purchased from the grocery or at restaurants in the US, missed sorely in Japan, and was convinced I couldn’t make it myself. If I found salsa in a jar, I couldn’t find chips, so what was the point? Avocados weren’t something I could get my town easily, and forget cilantro or jalapeños. I gave up on my dream of enjoying these foods in Japan, but luckily Cheruko didn’t, and she put together a fantastic fajita spread for an international cooking lesson.
Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New Rice Cooker Chronicles submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
One thing that always amazes me when I return to the US is the sheer amount of choice one has about food. Order a pizza in the US and you can usually choose whole-wheat or white crust (sometimes even gluten-free); thick or thin crust; marinara sauce or white sauce; any combination of toppings. With the sheer amount of kinds of pizzerias in towns like Ann Arbor–everything from national chains to Silvio’s organic pizza–the sky was the limit.
I know most of my posts start with me gushing about Ann Arbor, then complaining about Japan, then resolving into my resolution to make it myself, but going from choosing the tiniest details of my pizza to angrily eyeing the corn-and-mayo pizza on a rare trip to Coco’s actually wasn’t that shocking until I came back to the US on business in the winter.
Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New Rice Cooker Chronicles submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
One of the biggest challenges–and triumphs– for me during these 2.5 years living in Japan has been creating bread products I could easily purchase back in the US: pitas, tortillas, flatbread, pizza dough. I experimented (usually disastrously) with a few things in year 1, namely pizza dough, which was passable but not fantastic, and tea bread, which refused to cook through no matter how I reduced the recipe or what device in which I baked it.
My first success was whole-wheat soda bread. Pizza dough took two years and five different recipes. Tortillas and pitas, which I was stupidly convinced couldn’t be made at home until Cheruko of Hokuriku Expat Kitchen decided they could, turned out to be incredibly simple. I, like many Americans, thought bread-making was some sort of epic process, a choice between hours of kneading and rising and punching dough or investing in a breadmaker that would take up precious storage space. It’s really not that bad. I’ll speak more on this later with each recipe’s time-commitment information, but I full work-time, work out, have an active social life and hobbies, and I still have time for bread-making. The rising time, depending on the recipe, is often ideal for cooking the rest of a meal, enjoying a TV show or book, or even an evening trip to the gym for the longer risers.
So, now that you’re less worried about OMG BREAD, let’s get started on building your expat bread factory. First, we need to have a chat about types of flour.
Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
Orange sweet potatoes, ubiquitous in the US, are often nowhere to be found in Ishikawa. Depending on where you are in the prefecture, you can usually locate some in one brief part of late winter in the local-vegetable section of the grocery store with the Noto- and Kaga Yasai (heirloom vegetables from Noto [northern Ishikawa] and Kaga [central-southern Ishikawa]). This March, I found some “Kabocha Imo” (“kabocha squash potato,” かぼちゃ芋), a Noto Yasai, at Marue, and I also found a large bag of annôimo (安 納芋) in the basement grocery stores in the department store M’ZA. Orange sweet potatoes are not as cheap as I remember them being back home during my student days, but they’re every bit as delicious.
CLICK HERE to read the full post.
Visit JQ's homepage at http://jetaany.org/magazine
As we march into spring, JETAA New York’s JQ magazine continues to provide content with an ever-expanding array of articles, interviews and features (see our recent stories here). We’re now looking for new writers, including recent returnees and JET vets, from all JETAA chapters worldwide for posting stories via our host at the global JET alumni resource site JETwit.com. (Scribes are also encouraged to join the JET Alumni Writers group on LinkedIn.)
Below are story ideas grouped by JET participants and alumni (JET World) and those more on Japanese culture (Japan World). If you’re a JET or JETWit contributor from anywhere in the world, we welcome your interest or additional story ideas! Contact JQ’s editor Justin Tedaldi (magazine [at] jetaany [dot] org) to sign up for stories, and click here to see the story ideas online.
Click “Read More” below for our spring 2012 ideas pitch package.
Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11) is the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan, and curates The Rice Cooker Chronicles, a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan.
New submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
I’ve noticed an increased interest by foreign bloggers and media regarding Japan’s (read: Tokyo, Kyoto) street food culture in the last month, and as I was at a large food fair in Kanazawa, I figured it was time to add my comments and photos to the table.
CLICK HERE to read the full post.
1. Suggest lines for a “Shit JETs Say” video by posting them in the comments section of this post or e-mailing them to jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
2. Once we have enough here, someone in the JET/JET alum world can make the “Shit JETs Say” video using the below suggestions as source material.
Let’s see if this works. Gambarimashou!
The Rice Cooker Chronicles is a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan. The brain-child of JETwit founder Steven Horowitz (Aichi-ken, Kariya-shi, 1992-94) (and inspired by the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant), this series is curated by Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11), the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan.
New submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
*****
Broccoli Lover Learns to BBQ
Part 2
by Clara Solomon (CIR, Nichinan-cho, Tottori-ken; 1999-2001), the Director of Counseling & Career Development at the Office of Career Services at New York University School of Law. She previously worked for the Japan External Trade Organization, specializing in trade relations between Japan and Latin America. She lives in Queens with her husband and twin daughters.
Living in a small farming community has a lot of advantages, I soon learned. For example, I was at the town festival in August shortly after arriving, and casually mentioned to one of my farmer neighbors that I liked sweet corn. I woke up the next day to find about 15 ears of freshly-picked sweet corn on my doorstep. Even when I didn’t particularly like something, I would often find that a kind neighbor, perhaps worried about my over-consumption of broccoli, had left bushels of it at my front door. I guess they’d heard that Americans eat a lot, because they would leave bags stuffed with enough eggplant, cabbage, and carrots to feed a small army. (Why, I often wondered, had I not moved to rural Tuscany, where I could have gotten donations of sun-ripened tomatoes, basil, and fresh bufala mozzarella?).
Read More
The Rice Cooker Chronicles is a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan. The brain-child of JETwit founder Steven Horowitz (Aichi-ken, Kariya-shi, 1992-94) (and inspired by the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant), this series is curated by Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11), the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan.
New submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
*****
Broccoli Lover Learns to BBQ
Part 1
by Clara Solomon (CIR, Nichinan-cho, Tottori-ken; 1999-2001), the Director of Counseling & Career Development at the Office of Career Services at New York University School of Law. She previously worked for the Japan External Trade Organization, specializing in trade relations between Japan and Latin America. She lives in Queens with her husband and twin daughters.
Many of my experiences in Japan are tied up in the experience of food and cooking. Sure, I have my fill of the standard repertoire of “how many weird things will the American try?” My favorite of those is the night I was out at a new inn in my town, one that specialized in fresh, local food, with a “high end rustic” slant. So, I’m out with some co-workers enjoying a truly delicious meal, when they put a plate of glistening, dark red sashimi before me and say “to-rai, to-rai” (try, try). I wasn’t quite sure what this fish was, it was darker red than any tuna I’d ever seen, so dark it was almost purple, or black. There were thick veins of white fatty meat running through each piece – it almost looked like raw beef, though I could tell from the smell and texture that it was fish. “What is this?” I innocently asked, knowing full well that they wouldn’t tell me until I ate it. This game was a favorite of my colleagues, and they again said “to-rai.” So, I tried it. The minute I popped the full piece in my mouth, the entire table burst out with giggles and choruses of “Greeenpeesu! Greenpeesu!” Yes, Greenpeace. Turns out, I was eating endangered whale, the fishing and eating of which Japan has long been at odds with environmental groups like Greenpeace over (not to mention UN conventions, and the opinion of much of the rest of the world, minus Norway and the Inuit). How was it, you ask? Honestly, not that memorable. For one, it was extremely cold, indicating that it had probably been frozen and shipped to my town from somewhere further south (so much for eating local). For two, I think I would have rather had a piece of fatty tuna, whose rich, buttery flavor far outshone this piece of whale.
I could go on for pages regaling you with stories about the strange things I was given to eat, and the strange situations in which I found myself eating them (wild boar on live TV, anyone?). But, when I think back to the essence of my eating, drinking and cooking in Japan, those are only the warm up acts, the comedy routines that politicians put into the beginning of their stump speeches to play to the base and entice the crowds to stick around for the meat and potatoes (not that I had a lot of meat and potatoes in Japan…). My story of food in Japan is one of cooking and sharing, and gaining not only friends, but also self confidence in the process. Read More
As we welcome a new year, JETAA New York’s JQ magazine continues to provide content with an ever-expanding array of articles, interviews and features (see our recent stories here). We’re now looking for new writers (including new returnees and JET vets) from all JETAA chapters worldwide to write and share more material that we can post online to the widest JET readership on the web through our hosts at the global JET alumni resource site JETwit.com.
Below are story ideas grouped by JET participants and alumni (JET World) and those more on Japanese culture (Japan World). If you’re a JET or JETWit contributor from anywhere in the world, we welcome your interest or additional story ideas! Click “Read More” below to see our story ideas, and contact JQ’s editor Justin Tedaldi (magazine [at] jetaany [dot] org) to sign up.
Via CLAIR Tokyo’s Scott Borba (a JET alum himself):
Each year in the Spring, CLAIR publishes JET Streams, an annual newsletter for JET alumni. We will be compiling this newsletter again during the next few months. I am e-mailing today to request article submissions from JET alumni. Article topics are usually about such themes as: your life/experiences after JET, memories/reflections of your time as a JET, connections with the Japanese community in your home country, etc. We ask that you please avoid articles advertising your current company or books you have written, etc. as we cannot publish these.
If any JET alumni are interested in writing an article, please notify me by e-mail by January 10 and I will give you more details regarding article length and content.
Email: jet-aa [at] clair.or.jp
You can view past issues of JET Streams here:
http://jetprogramme.org/e/former/jetstreams.html
The Rice Cooker Chronicles is a series of essays by JETs and JET alumni on the theme of cooking/eating and being alone in Japan. The brain-child of JETwit founder Steven Horowitz (Aichi-ken, Kariya-shi, 1992-94) (and inspired by the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant), this series is curated by Leah Zoller (CIR Ishikawa-ken, Anamizu, 2009-11), the editor of The Ishikawa JET Kitchen: Cooking in Japan Without a Fight. A writer and web administrator for The Art of Japan: Kanazawa and Discover Kanazawa, she also writes I’ll Make It Myself!, a blog about food culture in Japan.
New submissions always welcome. Just e-mail it to Leah at jetwit [at] jetwit.com.
******
Kaijō!
by Justin Maki (ALT Osaka-fu, 2002-06), a writer and editor currently working at the Sports desk of Kyodo News America in New York City. He also writes about health and exercise science for J-Range Training (www.jrangetraining.com), a Denver-based fitness company whose method of low-impact weight training is under review for a US Patent. Justin’s short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in a handful of small journals. Contact him at makij408@gmail.com.
“When you go to the kitchen to prepare dinner, be born in the kitchen. When you finish there, die. Then be born at the dining table as you eat your dinner and, when you finish eating, die there. Be born in the garden, and sweep with your broom. When you get into bed at night, die there. And when daylight comes, and you awaken in your bed, be born anew.”
Thanks to JETAA Music City President (and Arkansas Cherry Blossom Princess) Terry Vo (Kumamoto-ken, 2007-09) for sharing info about the songwriting contest for the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival.
Terry writes: ”It’s open to ANYONE that believes that they can create a song (lyrical or instrumental) that exudes the spirit of the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival (or any cherry blossom festival). This is an awesome opportunity and I would love for a JET alum to win this!! Let’s hope we get some entries on the JET or JET community side!”
GRAND PRIZE: $3,000 + A spread in the premiere Nashville Arts Magazine (February 2012) + Opportunity to have the song performed at the annual Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival (March 24, 2012)
Deadline: January 15, 2012
For questions or inquiries, please contact 615-383-0278 or songs@nashvillearts.com.
