home again, home again

I'm back in my regular digs!

I was lucky enough to meet two wonderful bloggers up in the big city, Catholic in Japan and Sue from Living and Learning. I must add that Sue makes the most delicious cranberry-chocolate cookies I've ever tasted (was there oatmeal in there, too?), and it is partly to them that I attribute my recovery. (Had a run-in with a stomach bug, food poisoning, or who-knows-what over the weekend, but it cleared up by Tuesday.)

Oddly enough, the trip to Tokyo seems to have taken a terrific chomp out of my energy reserves, and I'm absolutely exhausted. Today, time seemed to flow around me in eddying streams. This is rather worrying, since I need to lead an aerobics class on Saturday morning, and what with one thing and another, I haven't yet been able to nail down the details.

However, perseverance is a virtue! And I picked up some medicine from the drugstore; I hope it works.

a trend

Do you sense a trend with the blog these days? Nahhhh...

I made the cauliflower soup and whiskey-glazed carrots from Pioneer Woman's blog tonight! No, I'm not systematically working my way through all her recipes, but I am planning to feature these two dishes in a cooking class later this month, so I figured it would be best to have some direct experience with the pots and pans and white sauce (which took longer than I'd imagined to thicken).

Also, the cold has been making itself felt more than ever, and it's a good motivator. Since summer I just haven't felt like cooking or baking anything, so everything I do make is an accomplishment of sorts.

I am just hoping, with regard to the soup, that the supermarket has enough good heads of cauliflower when we go to buy the ingredients. I stopped there on Saturday, and the four saran-wrapped parts of cauliflower they had were a bit too mushy for my peace of mind. The other night, though, they had more and fresher vegetables, though it was the middle of the week. Anyone know why they would leave the broccoli out in the open air, but saran-wrap the cauliflower?

.....

A big, big thank you to my wonderful family and my awesome aunt and uncle for sending me, the chocolate monster, sweet sweet chocolate for my birthday! :) It won't be long in this world, I say!

sweet chocolate

Chocolate. Cake.

Mwahahahahahaha! As a matter of fact, it's the sheet cake recipe from Pioneer Woman's blog. Just the cake recipe, though, because I improvised my own frosting. The original called for something like a pound of powdered sugar, and anybody in these parts knows that the stores only sell about 1/2 cup, little, fancy packages of powdered sugar for, I don't know, decoratively sprinkling on some fancy little cake. I'm not really sure what you'd call the frosting I made (I call it delicious), but here's how I made it...

I decided to go for a caramel-like base, so I melted about half a stick of butter and added a few generous tablespoons of brown sugar when it was bubbling, then I kept stirring that until the sugar was all melted down. Then I added maybe a tablespoon of cream and kept stirring the lightening, bubbling, frothy mixture. When I thought things had gone far enough, I dropped in some squares of baking chocolate and stirred them around until they'd melted. For some extra flava, I added a few spoonfuls of hazelnut liqueur (the syrup you add to lattes and such) and a wee bit of vanilla. Finally, I stirred in my little 1/2 cup package of powdered sugar until it reached a smooth, albeit thick, consistency.

The recipe said to frost the cake while it was still warm, so that's what I did. The taste was amazing, and still was a couple of days later. The frosting cooled and though it didn't get hard, it firmed up to a nice, fudgey consistency.

So what would you call this frosting?

two words

Chicken. Soup.

There was a time when I thought I'd never make this. It turned out so lovely and warming, though. Fresh parsley and sage, lots of ginger, lots of garlic, lots of chicken, and carrot, celery, turnip, leek, and onion. Also, a dash of salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper for luck. :)

Thanks for the idea, Mom!!!

the event

The busy hour before the event... I have a clown hat in my hand, for some reason, and we're checking all the rooms to make sure they're laid out properly.

During the preliminary explanation, I asked the kids what to call this large, orange pumpkin (one of those we got on the memorable day of the flat tire)..... do-te-ka-bo-cha! No one was actually brave enough to carve this one, though.

Staff was stretched pretty thin, but I loved my group of little kids. Here we are trying to come up with pictures to carve into our pumpkin. They had the cutest ideas!

I did convince them to try just reaching in and grabbing a handful of pumpkin guts, but these kids were pretty neat. They mostly used spoons. It slowed us down, but hey, we weren't in a race with the older kids (were we?). ;)

The pumpkins the kids came up with! The one on the top right is supposed to be a kabuto-mushi (a type of large beetle some kids keep as pets).

Happy Halloween! Mwa-hahaha-hahaha-ha....

:-p

I was going to upload the pictures from the Halloween party, but I slowed way down after Saturday and now I'm sure I'm getting sick. No energy to do anything. If I did have some energy, I might try to make myself a bowl of chicken, chickpea, or even miso soup... but I don't. However, I will upload those pictures as soon as I'm back to normal.

around and around

Pretty soon it's going to be this time of year again, at least in inaka-cho. That's right, we celebrate Halloween and we do our celebrating nice and early before the clingy, warm humidity is all gone. Actually, the reason is that last year, the international association had a windfall of large, orange pumpkins in early September and had to use them before they rotted into putrid orange puddles. (A couple of them did anyway.)

Using the same reasoning, I planned the party date this year nice and early, but, due to the flat tire we got on our way to picking up the pumpkins, we were only able to claim four. Therefore, the bulk of our pumpkins this year are going to be native Japanese kabocha, which you can buy any old time all autumn. Ah well. Live and learn.

Speaking of which, in my recent offline endeavors, I've started Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, since it seems to be one of those books you just HAVE to read before you choke. It influenced a lot of educated men in Europe and North America when Smith published it in 1776 (followed by four new versions in rapid succession). It's most often linked with the "invisible hand" theory of economics; that is, markets produce the most wealth for a nation when they are least regulated, because a benevolent "invisible hand" can then guide the process. Smith only wrote the phrase in his ponderous tome once, actually.

It's slow going. I've learned about the division of labor and the efficiency and progress it brings to society; about prices being based on rent, wages, and profits; about the development of metal money and how sovereigns manipulate it; that the true price of a commodity is based on the amount of labor used to produce it; about how corn is a better indicator of a society's affluence than silver; and a lot of things that Smith just seems to speculate on in a rambling, ambling, don't-care-if-I-get-anywhere fashion. So I started to supplement my book-reading with Wikipedia and an online collection of notes.

I laughed out loud when the author of those notes wrote something to this effect: "I'm not really sure what Smith is trying to say here, but I hope my notes are at least less incomprehensible than his."

All this, and Amazon touts the book as being "highly readable."

(By the way, I once tried to read Tristram Shandy, for much the same reasons as this book, but gave up because of its labyrinthine sentences. I'm determined to plough through Smith, though.)

In other news,

Why is it that it's just when you get a mad itch to leave everything behind and start exploring, perhaps holding your magnifying glass to a fascinating object on the ground near a burbling stream in a sunny meadow on a gorgeous day, that something, let's say a pterodactyl, comes rushing at you and lifts you high up into the atmosphere before letting you hurtle back down to earth with stars in your eyes while it goes on its merry way? You can't get it out of your head, and you can't go back to your single-minded exploration, even though you know pterodactyls don't exist and the chances that the one that grabbed you will come back are nonexistent. In other words, well, no, I can't explain it. You either know what I'm talking about or you don't.