Spices From Afar

DH hit a Singaporean grocery store for me and brought back some great spice mixes and a little recipe book (a little like one of those Betty Crocker or Philiadelphia Cream Cheese recipe booklets from the checkout stand, but with recipese for curry and spiced fish head on rice).

One of the spice packets was Perencah Berlada Hitam, a black pepper mix packet from Maggi. Wow was it yummy. And surprisingly, even all of the kids gobbled it up.

Now I have the quandry of having used up the packet and having no idea what the recipe for Malaysian/Singaporean black pepper meat might be.

Books and Basketball

Great article a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal about how NBA basketball players love reading . It seems that in days gone by, many basketball players were well known for bringing loads of books to the locker room or on road trips.

The revival of reading has largely been led by the NBA's international players. There is a cute vignette about a couple of players arguing over the latest books sent from family members in Moscow.

Not only is this a refreshing article about sports figures who care more about a good read as about trash talk or bling, but it hints at the deleterious effect that electronics has had on our reading lives.

I'm planning on taking my copy of the article in to our library for the bulletin board.

Backyard Bird Hunt

We aren't in the US so we weren't active participants in the Great Backyard Bird Hunt over the weekend.

But I did discover a new favorite treadmill at the gym. This one looks out over the harbor at a couple of ships and the tug boat area.

During my 30 min treadmill walk I saw 17 crows (jungle or carrion), 2 herring gulls, numerous LBJs (little brown jobs, probably sparrows), and a pair of cormorants (including one that was diving for fish).

Winter Tree Observation

It hasn't really felt much like winter here. It did get chilly and I had to break out the hats and warm coats. But nothing like the incredible tons of snow that the east coast is getting. But this is likely to be all that we get, so there is little reason to keep delaying out winter nature challenges.

We got out yesterday to look at a few trees. We have a lot of Japanese cherry trees around the apartment. Right now they are leaf-less and you can pick out the little branches and even see some of the buds waiting for the beginning of spring.

One tree in particular was obviously much older with a nicely divided trunk. It was also covered with some strange growths all over the older stretches of trunk. Rutabaga thought that it might be galls. It looks like something had happened under the bark and the bark itself had errupted in an irritated response. Maybe it is an insect infestation, because much of the tree showed signs of being rotten.

This tree was in nice contrast to the cedars growing nearby, which still have foliage and have one straight trunk with loose peeling bark instead of the cherry's smoother bark. The cedar looks like an upside down ice cream cone balanced on a stick.

Then we sat down to sketch one of the trees by the road. Another Japanese cherry tree, but not as old as the first. I was very please with what the kids saw and tried to capture in their drawings. Each focused on something a little different, but they all clearly reflected that they had looked at and seen the tree for what it is right now.

I'll have to go back and take some photos to add.

Ramen in Japan

I can't claim that we've ranged far and wide exploring Japan's food offerings. We started out with ton-katsu (which is pretty much a pork cutlet) and gyoza (which are yummy little pork dumplings). We have finally branched out into steamed dumplings (I call them moanapua, but they probably have a real Japanese name too) and ramen.

The Frugal Traveler from the New York Times has a long piece about Tokyo's ramen shops. We have been to the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum (shown above), which I think depicts post-war Japan c. 1958, not the 30s as the article suggested. The museum is fun, featuring restaurants from all over Japan who come and set up shop for a few months. The museum actually goes around auditioning restaurants from different regions. But it is something of a bother to trek so far for ramen, when nearly every street has at least a couple of shops on it. I think our favorite so far is the ramen at a shop in Kamakura that has a spicy chili sauce in the broth. Looks a little like this.

There is a ramen shop right outside the main gate here in Yokosuka. It is popular as an entree into Japanese food and rightfully so. Having had to ask the waitress to come outside where I point to various pieces of plastic food and wave my fingers around to order, it is wonderfully helpful to have a bilingual menu in hand. After our last visit, Rutabaga, my oldest son, turned to me and sighed. "Mom, I love Japan." Well worth the price of a visit to a ramen shop to hear that.