The Friday before Thanksgiving was my first payday in Japan, so I decided to attempt a Thanksgiving dinner on my own. This my first attempt at cooking bulk Western food while in Japan, with its unique challenges, such as expensive meat, cooking materials that I can’t always read, and difficulty finding American staples. In addition, being Japan, the only cooking appliance I have access to is a two-burner stovetop – Japanese kitchens seem to not come equipped with ovens naturally, and I haven’t bought so much as a rice cooker or microwave yet. With this in mind, I decided that making my own Thanksgiving dinner in this environment was a worthy intellectual challenge.

Right away, I figured I probably wasn’t having a whole bird or a turkey. Still, since the oven seems to be a staple of Thanksgiving cooking, I consulted the best source for making up stuff as I go along – Google. I found some sites that had suggestions for crockpot cooking, and I ultimately decided on variations of recipes from this post because of the sheer number of recipes offered.

I was pleasantly surprised to find boneless chicken breasts for a decent price – around 500 yen for about 2 lbs. I slow cooked the chicken breasts layered in stuffing  in a giant wok I picked up in a 100 yen shop for about 500 yen while I cooked the rest of the dishes. The stuffing was improvised with substitutions such as croutons for toasted bread pieces (yeah, they’re about the same, but it felt sketchy) and the mixture was cooked in yuzu wine. I may have used a little too much yuzu-chu, because yuzu is a pretty strong flavor, and everything tasted citrusy. I let this cook for a couple of hours, which was apparently too long, because afterwards the bottom of the pot had charred food stuck to it.

As the chicken/stuffing cooked, I made the rest of the side dishes. I made deviled eggs with some wasabi snuck into the usual deviled egg stuffing. I made mashed potatoes and used the extra sauce from the chicken as gravy. I also cooked some eggplant and onions. (Yes, there are both bulb onions and scallions in there. I had extras.) There was also a recipe for hot chocolate for which I used milk, hot chocolate mix, sugar, and some vanilla extract.

It was surprisingly good, with the exception of the mashed potatoes, which were kinda bland. The hot chocolate, vegetables, and deviled eggs were especially tasty. The chicken didn’t dry out with future servings, which was nice, but the yuzu was a little strong and could have probably been diluted more for the sake of people who don’t like the taste of yuzu (I was starting to get sick of it by the end of the week, myself).

My Thanksgiving meal (celebrated the Sunday before Thanksgiving):

Once the starches ran out, I started eating chicken and stuffing over white rice. Good times.

In hindsight, I wish I would have invited some tkd people over for Thanksgiving (or, more likely, crashed someone else’s place with food; the dorm isn’t the best place to entertain others), but at the same time, the challenge of making this dinner was fun enough so that I don’t regret it too much.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

Last night after tkd, Sensei invited me up to have dinner with the kids in the senshu course (the kids who train to compete at tournaments). It turned out the kids were having a sleepover at Sensei’s house, so that they could leave early the next morning to watch a tournament in Tokyo. Those of us who went to the 8 pm practice ate curry while the other kids were in the other room. Some of the kids came in and out periodically, doing homework at the table as we ate. One of the kids kept getting distracted by the TV playing in the background, and at one point, Yuka put her hands on the sides of his face like blinders, focusing him on his homework.

Sensei told Gentarou to ask me questions about English in preparation for his English test on Tuesday/Wednesday (yes, it’s apparently a two-day test) in exchange for having him hold paddles for me at practice. We did end up having a couple of discussions on words in English. For example, apparently the word “trump” has a different meaning in Japanese, but I couldn’t tell you what it was; at another point, Sensei was talking about doing tkd in English since he’s making a trip to San Francisco next year (excuse for me to make another trip to CA?), so they asked what turning kick was in English.

After dinner, kids started trickling in, and we started to play card games. First, we played BS with jokers, with the extra rule that if you didn’t say the correct number in English, it was an automatic BS. As more people joined, we played Old Maid with the punishment for the loser being a flick on the forehead from everyone else playing. I got caught in the endgame a couple of times, but never lost, but then I felt bad because the boy who I always ended up being against lost twice in a row. :\

Once it started getting late, the kids went into the next room, two tatami rooms with a sliding door separating them. There were blankets and pillows and more blankets laid out. It kinda reminded me of sleeping over at Cornell, but this was probably cozier (but still cold).

At one point, I was asked about what I do on non-tkd days, but I didn’t want to sound lame and say that I don’t really have any friends, but they took my hesitation to mean that I was dating someone here. I clarified that I was dating someone in Boston in a very gender-neutral way (surprisingly hard to do; about the only time gender is specified in Japanese is in asking whether someone has a boyfriend/girlfriend). If I were to explain to anyone in Japan about my dating situation, it would be these guys, but I wanted to avoid potentially awkward situations in front of the kids (I also want to avoid potentially awkward situations in general).

Because my first paycheck is this Friday (despite doing almost two months of work), I had to figure out ways to save money while staying alive. The ways I’ve saved the most money are by riding my bike everywhere and bulk cooking; I’ve managed to (mostly) live on 5000 yen/week since coming to Sendai. (This doesn’t include bills for rent/utilities, initial purchases of things like pots for cooking, and freak payments like textbooks and bike issues.)

Whenever I mentioned my bulk cooking practices to people in Japanese, however, they’re really surprised. It might be because my Japanese is still awkward when it comes to describing things like bulk cooking (lit: I cook once a week and eat a little bit every day). Last week, I got the same response two days in a row (Ouchan and Imai-sensei, one of the professors in my lab): isn’t it boring eating the same thing every day?

To be honest, it’s much more convenient for me to cook once a week, freeze most of the remains, and eat that for the week, especially since I like cooking and most recipes (yeah, I know, I’m not that hardcore) and food servings come in packets of families, not individual people. On the other hand, I look forward to the day I can grab some Mos Burger or Sukiya after tkd. I’m usually really hungry after workout in the first place, then I have to wait 45 min. while I bike home, then another hour to get settled in and the food warm, so I usually end up eating dinner at 11 pm on tkd nights.

In case anyone is curious about the sorts of things I’ve been cooking, it’s actually not that exciting. I’ve been resorting to instant sauces (curry, nabe, mapo tofu), adding tofu and vegetables (because tofu is so much cheaper than meat – it’s unbelievable), and letting it simmer while I cook rice (without a rice cooker; I also look forward to the day I can buy and use a rice cooker), like I am right now. Starting next week, I’m thinking of expanding my horizons to things that aren’t on sale at the grocery store, so maybe I’ll start browsing some food blogs for ideas on things to cook.

I’ve also been drinking hot tea (and sometimes hot chocolate) like mad, since the temperature regulation is similar to living in Bexley with a non-working heater (read: pretty miserable). Sometimes I sneak in some milk, to get in extra protein and calcium and that sort of good stuff.

This week’s special is mapo tofu sauce with tofu, ground beef, scallions, carrot, eggplant, and mushrooms. The fresh batch is pretty tasty.

Upon arriving in Sendai about a month ago, one of the things on my mind was tkd. Even before I left for Japan, I’d been looking online on the off chance that there may be some information on places to train in Sendai. To my surprise, I did find a dojang, and with the help of Shingu-sensei, wrote a very polite and Japanese email asking whether it’d be okay to train while I was in Sendai.  We exchanged some emails, and in less than a week, I found myself inadvertently stalking a middle school girl with a bag that had a hogu tied around it.

Since then, I’ve been going to workout three times a week. The atmosphere is chill, but focused. The kids workout has a CW feel to it, with comparable intensity and drills. The adult workout is less intense, more technical, less competition-focused.

Since I’ll probably be talking about tkd a lot, here are some brief descriptions of people I train with:

Aihara-sensei: The sensei. He’s a few inches taller than me, and according to the website, he competed as a bantam weight, so he’s really freaking skinny. When he does demonstrations, he has the fluidity of someone who’s pretty freaking good at sparring. There are interesting differences in style between here and MIT, but similar enough that it’s a comfortable extension of what I already know.

Yuka: Reminds me a lot of Emma, only lighter. Loud kiyap, strong kicks, lots of energy. The only person I’ve legitimately sparred in Japan (that time where we made the boys put on hogus so we could kick them doesn’t count). Outside of tkd, really friendly and outgoing.

Ou-chan: Token Chinese guy? Started doing tkd about a month before I started here, but did aikido for a few years. He’s been in Japan for a long time, so his Japanese is pretty fluent, and I feel like he’s more Japanese than Chinese. Easy to poke fun at for things like lack of kiyap.

Nakama-san: The first time I met him was actually about a week ago when some of us went out drinking. A red belt who apparently stopped coming for a while (maybe because of an injury), but came to practice this past Friday. For not having practiced for a while, his kicks looked pretty good.

Kondou-san: Another white belt. His style reminds me of what Ning may have looked like if he’d been in the awkward white belt phase. Also really likes reverse turning kick (apparently). When he sparred the guys, he kicked low (around thigh level), so I felt bad for the other guys.

There are more people, but I’m teaching English soon, so perhaps more later.