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Kuniko’s parents

Getting The Rice Started

  • May 10, 2010
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We had a very nice time at Sigassiga on Friday night. It was the last meal there for us, but it turns out that Fujiwara-san will still keep his other restaurant open in Sannomiya, so next time we’ll have to go check that place out. The food on Friday was served “omakase” style – we just told the chef that we’d like him to select our menu, and he brought everything out in courses. The highlight was the pasta course – beef tail and asparagus – yum.

After Sigassiga we headed over to another favorite – the Spanish izakaya hidden down a side street near Tokyu Hands. They are starting to recognize me there, which resulted in getting a table on a very busy night. There it was another bottle of wine (a Primitivo) and several tapas dishes to keep us going. The atmosphere at this place is really nice, and it is fun to watch people there having a good time.

Yesterday Kuniko and I went to her family’s rice field to help get the rice crop started. It was the first stage of the process – we used a small machine to fill hundreds of trays with soil, fertilizer, rice seeds and water. Then we drove the trays out to one of the fields, donned our big rubber boots and sloshed around laying everything out in the mud. This was my third or fourth time doing it, and so between me and Atsushi (my brother-in-law-in-law) we laid out the trays at breakneck speed. It was good to see Kuniko’s dad relent a little and let us do some work for a change. He is really big on attention to detail, and so handing over some of the workload to us was a big deal for him.

After a couple hours of work on the rice, we raided their nearby field for strawberries, onions and snap peas, and then headed to their home to have dinner as a group. Atsushi and Tomoko stuck around for dinner as well, so it was nice to have the family together for mother’s day.

We’re both beat from a long day in the sun yesterday, and as one of my students pointed out – we don’t have another holiday at my workplace for more than seven weeks. Time to buckle down and get some work done.

Weekend Menu: Lazy Sushi, Crab and Hayashi Rice

  • Feb 28, 2010
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Turned out to be a fairly good weekend around here. Friday night we got lazy and ended up buying supermarket sushi and croquettes, and spent the evening drinking cocktails and wine. We were both pretty bushed from a full work week.

Saturday Kuniko had to go off to work, and then a party for her students and the “Rotarians” – the bigwigs that help sponsor all the exchange students that Kuniko is in charge of at her school. That meant that I was free for the day, and I spent most of it doing laundry, catching up on my reality TV shows, and cleaning house.

In the evening I had planned to go hit a yakitori and work on my Japanese conversation skills while eating yummy grilled meat, but unfortunately both of the yakitori restaurants that I visit in town were packed with not even one seat available. As a backup I went over to Junpu for dinner. This is the place that served deer meat a couple of weeks ago, and this time around they had crab on the menu. I ordered snow crab, and because they like me I got the entire crab – I guess they weren’t expecting any more crab purchasing customers that night or they were trying to get rid of it. It was a big score for me – an entire crab for about $8 US. Thanks, Junpu!

While I was there Rob came by, killing time before a dating party that he was attending. Rob works at the kid’s English school down the road, and he is also from California. He’s a nice guy and we had a good chat while he killed time waiting for a friend to take him to the party. Not sure about the outcome of that – I’ll have to inquire next time.

After dinner I headed home full of crab and beer, and listened to music way too loudly until I got a message from Kuniko saying that she would be catching a train soon. I met her at the station and we walked home together after one in the morning, and then got home and had another round of cocktails – good times.

Luckily Sunday was much more low key. We did our Japanese taxes during the day, got some shopping done, and then went over to have dinner at Kuniko’s parents house. We had lots of food (as usual) there, sandwiches, hayashi rice, and salads along with plenty of sake from a 1.5 liter bottle that Kuniko’s dad was pouring from. We watched endless updates about the tsunami warning, and saw some of the flooding that happened in Japan, but apparently it wasn’t so bad, and everything turned out to be OK. The footage from Chile was much more scary, and we were counting our blessings that everything was fine here.

On our way home we stopped for a few groceries for the week, and then headed home. Now I’m just writing up this journal entry and getting ready for bed. Work should be fun this week – there are a lot of students preparing to go overseas, so I’ll need to help them get ready for their business trips.