torakris

Last summer on my trip back to Cleveland my broher and I found a ad in the local paper that advertised this cajun style restaurant as having all their appetizers 1/2 off during happy hour (5 to 7), so we decided to have a cheap meal by sharing a couple of them. The place turned out to be much more upscale than we imagined with appetizers at $10 and entrees in the $25 to $35 range, we felt bad for the servers because they could have made much more from our table if we had eaten a real meal so we ordered martinis and dessert as well. The place was also a martini bar with an incredible list, but neither of us are drinkers, I was smashed after one drink I my brother practically had to carry me out.... We also left a bigger tip than was needed ...

I have never seen non-Japan grown Jaapnese style rice in a store, ever. It is imported but from what I know it all goes to sake production. Thus we have no option but the high priced Japan grown rice. Even foreign rices like jasmine and basmati are difficult to find and I have never found a source for American long grain. As for buying rice in the US, I usually buy what ever is a decent price... I don7t want to spend all of my money on food...

while answering all of the above question I was also eating breakfast. today was leftover baguette spread with nutella and my iced coffee

Online banking, as in using your computer to do the banking, is still fairly new here but direct deposti (of paychecks etc) and direct withdrawls( of bills) etc have been here as long as I have (10+ years). I am unsure of when they started though. I really have no need to go to the bank at all. Our paycheck is deposited and all of our bills like the rent, utilities, credit cards, even preschool and school payments are automatically withdrawn every month. There are no checks in this country, so everything is paid through a direct banking of sorts. If you don't want to do the automatic withdrawl, you can take the cash of use your bank book and transfer the money to your credit card company's/ phone company's/etc account, this can be done at the ATMs as well. Japanese still don't use credit cards as much as people in other countries. Here bills are paid in full every month, there is no minimum balance payment. If you are buying something that you don't think you will be able to pay for all in one month, you tell the store how many months you want the bill to split into. When I bought my new tv I asked the store to charge me three times and I paid a third of it for te next three months. Almost anytime you hand a credit credit card to a sales clerk they will almost automatically ask you how many times do you want to pay.

When I started sea urchin diving here in the Gulf of Maine there was always pressure to collect as many urchins as possible in the week prior to the 25th of each month. I knew 95% of our daily harvest was flown directly to Japan within 24hrs. I was told by a Japanese buyer that everyone(sic) in Japan was paid on the 25th of each month so the sushi bars had to have a lot of expensive uni on hand for people to buy after they got their paychecks. ← This country revovles around the 25th, do not try to enter a bank on the 26th! the lines will stretch down the street. Restaurants will always be full the weekends immediately following payday and so will the stores. Being on a different pay schedule is nice in that way. I avoid the crowded banks and we still have money at the time of the month most Japanese don't The downside is all of the bills are due between the 26th and the beginning of the next month and that hits us when we are at our weakest....

Compared to chicken and pork, fish and seafood can be quite expensive here. But compared to the fish and seafood prices and quality in Cleveland they are quite good here. Seafood we don't eat too much of, it is quite expensive and my kids really love crab and shrimp, shrimp often sell for $1 a piece.... Prices vary on time of year basically if you buy what is in season you will get the best prices. I shop sales, buy a lot and freeze. Meat prices have been high for a couple months now so we have been eating a lot of fish recently. We had fish two nights ago, no meat last night and fish will be on the menu again tonight...

Yikes! Is there a risk of having the rice confiscated as you come in through customs, because of the tarriff thing or some other regulation? ← I have never been caught and I have never asked... About 30% of my bags on return trips to the US are food...

food is expensive. If you look at this chart is shows that food is the biggest expenditure in Japanese households. I am very good with my food bill and spend about $400 a month for my family of 5, the average spending is more than twice that. We get hurt in housing, most Japanese salaried workers get an allowance for housing, it depends on the company but it can be as high as 75%. my husabnd and I started our own construction company 3 years ago after his father's (that had been started by HIS father) construction company went bankrupt. We get no money for housing..... it comes entirely out of our pockets. In general food is more expensive in Japan, last summer on my trip back to the US I was trying to figure out what was cheaper in Japan and all I came up with was chicken breasts....at the cheapest I can buy them here (and I only buy at this price) is about $1.40 a pound.

Yes it is. A 10kg bag (25lbs) averages $35 to $50 and a "brand name" can be twice that. My family uses about 15 kg a month so it can get expensive. Last year because of bad weather the prices shot up so that the cheapest (and not good) rice was over $40 per 10kg so I cut back our rice based meals to only 3 or 4 times a week. We are back up to about 5 times a week now. If you remember the picture I took of my rice stash on the previous page all of that (except the Japanese) was bought in the US and brought back in my suitcase.....

We've run pretty close... I really envy you those beets! ← Those beets were a steal! I got them at Nissin in Azabu Juuban, 6 decent sized ones for only 480 yen (about $4.50). For those not in Japan, beets are next to impossible to find here and when you do they are about $5 to $6 for 1, so I got a really good deal.

Rona I have looked into driers a couple of times but they just aren't worth it yet, they are just too weak and most only hold half the capacity of a regular washing machine so you would have to do two loads in the dryer.... I actually enjoy hanging out the laundry, it is the folding and putting away that I dread, but a dryer wouldn't help me there. Those coconut ones are the best! You HAVE got to try them Rona you will love them!!

bean sprouts are a lifesaver aren't they?! The week before payday sees me pulling out the dried and canned foods... As we saw with last night's dinner with the fu (wheat gluten) and wakame (seaweed). I also tend to avoid dinners that us too much rice, so we tend to have non-rice meals more often as well. I would hate to run out of rice right before payday.

dinner... I didn't make it to the store today so I fell back on one of my staples, pasta. I especially love tomato based pastas but my husband doesn't care them (he prefers cream sauces), he does love the fresh tomato sauce that I make though. It is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and it consists simply of fresh tomatoes, butter and salt and pepper. This is not how my (Italian) grandmother made pasta.... My friend raved about this pasta for over a year but I jut couldn't imagine butter in pasta, then I tried it and wow! It is my favorite now and sometimes in the summer I make it every week! the prep I also had some beets that I had roasted last week, thanks to all of the advice I received here at eGullet. I always have some kind of citrus in the house so I decide to make a salad with oranges and parsley (from the garden), I dressed it with EVOO, some of the orange juice, red wine vinegar and salt and pepper. the pasta with romano cheese, this is the cheese I grew up on... we also had a baguette with butter but it disappeared before I could get a picture. and sitting at the computer I had two more sticks of coconut pocky...

I forgot to mention that for lunch I also had a large glass of water. Except for breakfast I drink water with all other meals. Now as a small snack I am having a glass of grapefruit juice, I love grapefruit juice.

4/6: ニギス nigisu　(knee-ghee-sue) deepsea (deep sea) smelt nigisu

what can't you do with shiso? I love this stuff too. I can't believe at one time I couldn't touch it, actually I couldn't eat anything IT had touched.... I love shiso in gyoza, I put one whole leaf on the wrapper and then place the filling on op and fold it. I shred the leaves and add them to salads It goes wonderful with tofu prepared in ayway roll it up inside pork or chicken with some umeboshi meat and deep fry shiso pesto?

I think I might have the sameone Helen does, it looks like this. I have the same problem in the summer, it doesn't matter how long I freeze it, it is just too soft... I also hate the fact that it has to put in the freezer for 8+ hours, I don't often plan ahead for that kind of stuff. the othr problem is that most of te recipes I have for it call for fresh cream and it is just so expensive here... I do have a really good peach ice cream recipe that is made with milk, maybe I will do that one again, my freezer is pretty empty now too.

dried foods are pretty common here, sort of like canned goods in the US, it is easy to keep them on hand for when they are needed. I think in general the food packaging is pretty similar, though normally smaller sizes. How much I shop depends on how well I plan my menu for the week and how far away we are to our next paycheck. The majority of Japanese get paid once a month (on the 25th of the month) and it can take some getting used to to spread the money over the whole month. I tend to shop more frequently and spend more just after payday.... my husband is on a slightly different schedule so our payday will be this Friday, so I am actually in my poorest part of the month. Including my Tuesday co-op delivery I probably shop about 3 times a week.

let me show you the rest of my yard! my raspberry plants, I transplanted the tall one in the back (along with 3 others that didn't make it) from my in-laws house in November, now it is spreading all over! the big tree in the middle are kumquats and the smaller tree on the right is sudachi (a Japanese citrus), the front row from the left: bay leaf (I have been using these a lot), rosemary and thyme, fig with a planter of Italian parsley and oregano behind it and the last rectangular box is baby leaf lettuces that I just planted on Sunday. our 3 grills (we love to BBQ) Hide on the slide the back part of our house faces directly south we get great sun all day long.

I forgot to add that on the morning news they even have laundry information telling you the chance of your laundry drying that day.... it looks like this

dryers are still not commonplace in Japan. I have a yard, which it quite rare in suburban Japan, so I hang mine out there. this is the view of the laundry from my backyard the 2nd and 3rd floors of my building and the two houses next door It took me a while when I first came to Japan to get used to seeing apartment buildings with laundry hanging off the balcony as we drove on the freeway through the heart of Tokyo.

I will get to more of your question but first lunch. We were in the car headed to McDonalds when Hide suddenly vomited all over the back seat.... I had no towels in the car but I found some t-shirts inside my husband's bag of football gear (it is too big--has shoulder pads, helmets etc-- and we have no place to store it in the house, so we keep it int eh bag of the car) I used the shirts to clean him up and the car as best as I could. We then headed back home. I ended up making ham, lettuce and mustard sandwiches on wheat. and Hide is fine, no fever and playing like nothing happened.... I am not sure what that was.... Now I have cleaned the car, sprayed it with febreeze and the clothes are in the washing machine... and I have just rewarded myself with today's pocky!! coconut pocky probably my all time favorite

Only for you Wendy... the door the main part the vegetable drawer the freezer (it is not usually this empty) and my collection of rice and the hardier vegetables

It is 12:30 and I am starving but mia still hasn't come home from school yet. It is a half day, no lunch, so she should be here soon. I have already promised Hide I will take them to McDonald's, the poor boy has been having a bad day. I have no idea what to have for dinner, I normally plan a couple days of meals at a time but haven't done anything tis week. I guess I will just do the typical Japanese thing and just pick up what looks good at the store!

First the walking together. This is mostly for saftey, but it is aslo a way to get the kids and neighbors to know each other. Community is quite important in Japan, though in some parts it seems to be disappearing. There is some sort of community group in most areas of Japan and basically you are a member wether you want to be or not, the leader position also rotates and everyone WILL get their turn. How ever much you want to participate is up to you. Some areas hold lots of events, others do nothing. There are also children's community groups and I am a leader for that this year as well as it is tied together with my other leadership responsibility. I am fortunate to live in a wonderful neighborhood were everyone looks out for everyone else and they are always there to help a neighbor. the bento was for myself and the 3 kids, the futomaki were 3 layers deep. I am sorry if I confused you about the sausages, they are NOT homemade and most Japanese people do not make their own sausages. Sausages in this style are vERY popular in Japan and show up on Japanese tables in some way a couple times a week. Normally I would eat futomaki with soy sauce, but it can get messy so I just seasoned all of the individual ingredients well enough that no sauce was needed.