Adventures in Cooking

What can one do with just a hot plate and a rice cooker? This is a question that been I've been faced with since we've moved to Japan. (Not that I've been doing a lot in the kitchen - Mark loves to cook and I'm not one to tell him he can't; I'm more for baking anyway.) Apparently you can do a lot.

Saturday night was game night with some friends, and game night means goodies. We made a quick stove-top fudge. Marshmallows work just as well as marshmallow cream.

Sunday we had a potluck and we brought BLT pasta salad, which was fabulous.

Monday we made onigiri, which at its most basic, is a rice ball. You can put other things in it, bits of fish or chicken, or veggies, or whatever else you can think of, and wrap it seaweed to make it more exciting.


Yesterday we tried a special regional dish called okonomiyaki. Its sort of like a pancake with cabbage and meat or noodles in it, topped with a BBQ-like sauce and mayonnaise. People put mayonnaise on a lot of things here. Its a very popular condiment. I forgot to take a picture of this, but here's what its suppose to look like. Ours were not that nice looking.


And because Mexican food is extremely hard to come by here, I made tortillas.
Not bad for my first time, eh? I'm sure I'll be making this again, and possibly turning them into chips.

On the ground

Well, here I am at almost 36 weeks; just over 32 days to go until my due date. If I'm anything like the rest of the women in my family, I'll be early though.

All in all, I'd say this has been a pretty easy pregnancy. I haven't had any morning sickness and only some lightheaded-ness and occasional swelling in my feet. Most people haven't even noticed that I am pregnant, until now. Now I'm getting people patting my belly, asking if I'm tired and need to rest, and giving me extra pillows to sit on. Its all very strange, especially the pats on my belly.

The only major difficulty I'm having is getting up and down out of our couch. Japanese furniture is all very low to the ground. The couch is probably 8 inches off the floor, and I either fall into it or kneel down on the floor and roll myself up into it. I feel huge and awkward and ungainly whenever I do this. If we had carpet, I probably would probably just stay on the floor.

What we've been doing

The Internet is alive and well again in our apartment, so I thought I would take a moment and tell you all what we've been for the past few weeks.

We had our first doctor's appointment and we have an English speaking doctor (yeah!). None of the nurses speak English, but with a lot of gestures, we can figure out what they mean. Besides, they do pretty much the same thing that the nurses in the US did. They take my blood pressure, weigh me, and have me pee in a cup, then tell me to wait for the doctor.

The hospital is pretty nice. Everything and everyone is in white though. It makes it think it must be hard to keep clean. In the room with the ultrasound machine, there is a big, flat-screen TV hanging from ceiling for mothers to watch the scan and see their baby's vitals. Its much nicer then the little 4"x4" screen that our doctor in Texas had.

We've also been traveling and seeing some of the sights. In Kan'onji there is a giant coin made out of sand. We don't know why its there, but it seems to be the town symbol. Every year the community gets together to clean it up. They weed it and shovel and rake the sand back into nice sharp lines. We found when they were doing it and went and helped.





There are shrines and temples everywhere. The island we live on, Shikoku, is famous for the 88 temple pilgrimage. There was a Buddhist monk named Kūkai who founded them and if you visit all of them in a year something good is suppose to happen to you. So far, we have visited one, Zentsu-ji; but, it has sand imported from all the other temples, so if you visit it, you can say you have visited all of them. Its also Kūkai's birthplace and there are statues of all 500 of his reincarnations surrounding the grounds.





We've seen a couple of other Shinto shrines in parks too. They don't have big stories surrounding them though. Shrines get built in places where something is considered holy, or invokes awe. There seems to be a lot of them on the mountains.


I love the little carvings and ornaments on the shrines.




And finally, I've finished knitting a baby blanket for Emma.