Living in Japan can make it difficult for me to buy certain ingredients.  I try to find suitable substitutions, I use natural yoghurt instead of crème fraiche, milk soured with lemon instead of buttermilk.  But sometimes I can’t find what I need.  While I was chopping soup vegetables this morning I was thinking about how great it would be to be able to buy parsnip.  I have never seen a parsnip in Japan.  There are some other tuber like things in the supermarket but I have never bought them.

I’m not the only member of my family to make food substitutions.  My great-uncle used to make dinner for his mother, my great-grandmother, and he didn’t always have what he needed.  Apparently, if he didn’t have enough salad vegetables he would go out into the garden and pull up some weeds and substitute grass for spring onions.  I’m not planning on doing that with my soup but it didn’t seem to cause my family any harm.  So maybe I should just try cooking with some of the strange looking tubers in the supermarket and not worry so much about having the exact vegetable.

It’s not long after noon and already tonight’s dinner is simmering in the slow cooker.  Yesterday I made Jamie Oliver’s Beef and Ale Stew. It had a lot of flavour and I would definitely make it again.  I mostly followed the recipe but I had to change the ale.  The local supermarket is no longer selling cans of Guinness so I made do with a dark Ebisu stout. I don’t drink Guinness so I’ve no idea how similar the two things are but it was the best substitution I could find.

The only problem with the stew was that it made me think of British bar food and large chunky chips.  I don’t have anything to cook chips in and even if I did they don’t fall under my definition of healthy food.  But I couldn’t help thinking of how well they would have gone with that stew.

I have been trying to find ways to make it easier to eat well.  I’ve noticed that I get tired around 5pm and sometimes I just can’t be bothered cooking.  This can lead to eating fast food or snacking to try to increase my energy levels.  While I was in America my friend used a slow cooker to make breakfast.  I hadn’t seen a slow cooker in years and had forgotten how useful it could be.

I bought one at the weekend and at the minute the room smells of the beef and ale stew I prepared at lunchtime.  I am hoping that being able to prepare dinner in the morning will stop we eating rubbish at night.

I’m not really a breakfast person.  I have been trying to change this, as I keep getting told it’s the most important meal of the day, but I rarely feel hungry in the morning.  It’s not even an interesting meal to cook as it involves breakfast food like cereals and toast.  Marty, on the other hand, loves breakfast and is always trying to persuade me to eat this.

As part of Marty’s Christmas present I agreed to make him breakfast once a month.  In January I made scrambled egg and smoked salmon bagels served with freshly squeezed orange and grapefruit juice.  This morning I am going to make Irish sausages, smoked bacon, fried eggs, and toast.  I have just finished squeezing the juice.  I ordered the sausages and bacon from TheMeatGuy earlier this month as it’s not possible to buy Irish sausages locally.  There is nothing in our agreement that means I can’t just give him cereal and toast but if I’m going to have to make breakfast I may as well try to make it special.

Eating in America often seems to be about quantity.  I have been told that people expect large portions but if there is too much food on my plate I lose my appetite.  I think part of the problem comes from my childhood where I was told that I needed to eat everything that was put on my plate.  Knowing before I start eating that I’m never going to finish makes me reluctant to start.

Last night we went to the Palm Restaurant in TriBeCa.  The quality of the food was really good and I did order the smallest steak – though at 9oz it was still a bit big for me.  But it was the size of the dessert that horrified me.  Thankfully they brought it on a separate plate with a large knife making it look as if they didn’t really expect me to eat it all.  It tasted amazing but I brought most of it back to the hotel with me in a box.

I still have at least half of the cake.  I did eat some of it after lunch but I probably won’t be able to finish it all.  I hate the waste and I have wasted so much food in the past week.  I left half of my lunch today and we are now trying to work out what to do with the remains of the our carry-out dinner.  We got one meal between the two of us but Marty ordered soup as a starter and ended up with about a litre of it.   We don’t have a fridge in our room so most of it will end up down the sink.  And the phrase “waste not, want not” keeps running through my head.

I’m cooking Irish Stew for dinner tonight.  Marty loves this though he has annoyed me before by suggesting that it’s an easy option for dinner.  The problem lies with the word “easy”.  It’s true that there are no advanced cooking techniques required but it just took me an hour and half to get it to the stage where everything is in the stew pot.  In about another hour and a half it will be ready to eat.  That’s not my idea of an easy dinner.

Yesterday evening I got out one of my new knitting books, Victorian Lace Today, as I was keen to try out some of the beautiful patterns it contains.  I decided to start with something marked as an “intermediate” pattern.  After about two hours I decided that it was too difficult and I would start with something marked “easy”.  I have knit expert patterns before and I have also knit lace before so I was surprised that I was having such difficultly.  But then the word easy doesn’t really tell me very much.

The lace I’m knitting, just like the food, doesn’t contain advanced techniques.  It does, however, involve concentration and precision.  If every stitch needs to be perfect is the pattern really easy?  And when I say it doesn’t contain advanced techniques I suppose that depends on who you ask.  I know quite a few knitters who wouldn’t have a clue how to knit the lace as it involves stitches that are not taught to beginners and you have to know how to read a lace chart.

There is a cliche that says that says, “it’s easy when you know how”, but I’m not convinced.  Even a task that is easy can become difficult if you have to repeat many times.  As for the stew maybe it is an easy option for Marty.  All he needs to do is eat it once it’s finished and given how good it smells at the minute that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Marty and I thought it would be fun to try to make a traditional Northern Irish breakfast.  We wanted this to contain soda farls, potato bread, and back bacon.

Potato bread is quite easy to make and it’s not difficult to buy potatoes, butter, and flour in Tokyo.  Potatoes are also sold here in threes and fours; the perfect amount for making bread.

Potato Bread

Making soda bread was more difficult.  One of the main ingredients is buttermilk, which we can’t buy in Tokyo.  There are a variety of substitutes for this and today we used milk soured with lemon juice.

Most of the bacon sold here is the American streaky bacon.  I don’t really like this and wanted to get back bacon.  I ordered this from the meat guy.  The bacon was the least successful part of breakfast.  Not because the meat was bad it’s just that it didn’t taste like Irish bacon.  We joked that we missed the food colouring that makes Irish bacon look pinker.  I think we actually expected it to be smoked or maple cured.

Saturday Brunch

It took much longer to make than it would in Belfast.  It was a fun way to spend the morning even though we made too much food.  Maybe, when I lived in Belfast, I could have eaten it all but here I didn’t manage to eat half of it.

I’m supposed to limit my intake of goitrogenic foods – one of these being strawberries.  But it’s Christmas Eve and I wanted to eat strawberries and drink a glass of champagne.  Since I won’t be eating strawberries that often, Marty bought me the very expensive ones they sell in Japan for Christmas. They are the most amazing strawberries I have ever tasted.  They are huge and full of flavour and nothing like the small watery things they call strawberries in Northern Ireland.

Japanese Gift Strawberries

Today is the national holiday that celebrates the Emperor’s Birthday.  As it’s the start of our Christmas break we thought it would be fun to order some Christmas food from KFC.  We didn’t get our order in on time for the Roast Chicken Barrel but we did manage to get premium chicken breasts filled with a strange white, vegetable and shrimp sauce.  I wasn’t sure about the sauce at first but it was actually quite nice.

Christmas Dinner KFC Style

A couple of weeks ago one of my friends sent me a thank you gift that contained packets of Maltesers.  Since moving to Japan I have started to crave these little chocolate honeycomb balls.  Marty also loves Maltesers so they disappeared much too quickly.

Not surprisingly Maltesers aren’t the only thing I miss eating in Japan.  As a Christmas treat I ordered us some food from one of the online British food stores.  It’s expensive to do this, because of the postage costs, but I really wanted a traditional Christmas pudding, cake, and mince pies. In my last order I decided to get some Maltesers.  I must not have been paying enough attention at the time because I made a bit of a mistake.  Today I received 16 boxes of Maltesers. Anyone fancy a game of Malteser Jenga?

Maltesers Stacked on the Table