I like Japanese food very much. My favorites are sushi, sukiyaki, tempura, oden, and chawan-mushi. If tonkatsu is counted as a Japanese food, miso-katsu is also my favorite.
I also like udon very much. Udon is one kind of Japanese noodles, together with soba. In the Nagoya area people like udon better than soba.
In the Tokyo area, noodle shops are called sobaya, soba shop, while in the Nagoya area, they are called udonya, udon shop.
A wider kind of udon, called kishimen, is a specialty in the Nagoya area. My most favorite kind of udon cooking is miso-nikomi, which is also a specialty in Nagoya. Miso- nikomi is udon cooked in miso soup, but the miso used in the soup should be a special kind called akamiso, which looks dark red and is favored in the Nagoya area.
The miso favored in the Tokyo area is whitish and called shiromiso, white miso, if literally translated. The miso topping on miso-katsu should be akamiso. Most of the families in our area drink miso soup using akamiso, mostly for breakfast.
By the way, when you are served western style soup, you 'eat' it, but when you are served Japanese miso soup or another kind of soup called osumashi, which is a thin soy sauce soup, you 'drink' it.
The difference depends on whether you pick up the soup bowl in your hand or not. You are not supposed to pick up the western style soup bowl off the table and bring it to your mouth. Instead you hold the rim of the soup bowl and eat the content with a spoon.
However, when you are served miso soup or osumashi, you are not provided with a spoon. You are supposed to pick up the miso soup bowl with one hand, mostly with the left hand, even though you are right-handed and many people are, and bring it to your mouth and drink the soup.
Even when you eat the ingredients of the miso soup, you should pick up the bowl and eat them with your chopsticks.
If you eat the ingredients of the miso soup from the bowl on the table without picking it up, it is regarded as vulgar.
In case western style soup is served in a cup, you should pick up the cup and then drink the soup. A cup is a thing to be picked up from the table.
One more important thing when you eat the western style soup is that you dip your spoon away from you, not toward you, and shouldn't make sipping sounds. It is regarded to be very vulgar.
When you drink Japanese miso soup or clear soup, it is OK if you make sipping sounds, if the sounds are not too loud.
In my family, it is always my mother who cooks and does the other household chores. A typical Japanese husband is supposed to come home very tired and late from his company during the week, and to say only three words to his wife after he comes home.
The first is meshi. Then his wife prepares his dinner.
Then after dinner he says furo, and she draws his bath. Finally, he says futon, and she rolls out his bed and he goes to sleep.
My father as a husband is not so bad as the stereotyped husband, but it is also true that he doesn't do any housekeeping work.
Since my mother is not working and has never had a job, she has been accustomed to the status of a full-time housewife, and seems to be satisfied with managing the household.
Actually it is my mother who takes care of the family finances. The monthly salary my father receives from his work is electronically transferred to the bank from his company, and he can't bring the salary home himself. It is my mother who goes to the bank and withdraws his salary.
It is also my mother who decides the monthly allowances for my father and also for me. Sometimes I'm confused who is the master or mistress of my family.
Now I'm pretty sure that the one who has the power over the family finances is the head of the family.
My mother, however, often tells me that the relationship between a husband and a wife will drastically change in the future when I get married. In my parents' time, it had been a socially accepted system that men work to provide for their families, while their wives stay home and manage the household.
Now more and more women want to have full-time jobs and choose to be working wives. Those women hope to find husbands who will be understanding and help with the housework, or even share it. They are likely to expect greater mutuality and companionship in marriage.
These changes will effectively alter the Japanese perception that homemaking and child care are primarily a woman's responsibility. Men will also have to be responsible for homemaking and child care.
With this idea, my mother has always tried to teach me to cook simple dishes and asked me to do the dishes after the meals. When my family has sukiyaki, mostly for dinner, it is always I who prepares it."
As you may agree, each Japanese family has its own way of cooking sukiyaki. When my parents had sukiyaki for the first time after their marriage, my mother prepared it.
My mother's way was so different from the way my father's family had cooked it that my father was not happy at first. Now my father has become quite accustomed to my mother's sukiyaki. He even likes it better than the sukiyaki his mother, that is, my grandmother, cooked for him.
So my sukiyaki cooking was inherited from my mother.
Now I'll tell you how I cook sukiyaki.
The first thing I attend to when I prepare sukiyaki is to go to the supermarket and choose good beef. The best beef for sukiyaki is well-marbled beef with thin streaks of fat, shimofuri-niku in Japanese.
The next important thing, when you cook sukiyaki, is to choose a good skillet. Nowadays more and more families prefer to use an electric skillet. My family sticks to a thick cast-iron skillet inherited from my mother's family.
We set it over a table burner on the dining table. Before putting any ingredients in the skillet, I preheat it for several minutes. When I can see it is hot enough, I put in one or two pieces of suet with long chopsticks and melt them in the skillet until the bottom of the skillet is well greased.
Then I put two to four slices of beef in the skillet, pour in a little soy sauce, and sprinkle the meat with a little sugar.
I cook for a minute, stir, and turn the meat over. If we are hungry and can't wait any more, especially because of the good smell of the meat being saut馥d in the soy sauce,
I serve the meat to whoever wants the first service. Then I put in more slices of meat.
I repeat the procedure and then, if everybody is willing to wait for the next service, I push the meat to one side of the skillet and add scallions, mushrooms, tofu, shirataki, greens and bamboo shoots in more or less equal amounts, sprinkle them with a small cup of sake and cook for an additional four to five minutes. Now anybody can transfer the contents to an individual bowl.
When we eat sukiyaki, we put a raw egg in a bowl, beat it and dip the ingredients in it. I think it is a standard way of eating sukiyaki in most of the Japanese families and also in sukiyaki restaurants.
While eating myself, I check the temperature of the skillet from time to time. If it seems too hot and food begins to stick or burn, I lower the heat or cool the skillet more quickly by adding a drop or two of cold water to the sauce.
After everybody has had enough of the meat and other ingredients, we cook udon in the remaining thick broth."
One of the English teachers in my high school days, who had lived in the States, once told us that when we cook sukiyaki for American guests, we should take care not to use sugar and also not to serve raw eggs.
Many Americans don't like sugar because they think sugar will make them fatter, even though they love sweet cakes and other sweets as long as they can't see the sugar in spite of the fact these sweets contain lots of sugar.
As for raw eggs, they simply don't have the habit of eating eggs raw.
It is OK to eat sukiyaki without raw eggs, but the sukiyaki cooked only in soy sauce without sugar will be very salty.
What should we do? The English teacher told us that there is soy sauce pre-sweetened with sugar. If they don't see the sugar, Americans don't care and they like sukiyaki cooked in sweetened soy sauce. It's easy to cheat Americans!
Many Japanese people think that Americans or Europeans don't eat raw fish, and therefore don't eat sushi. The English teacher also told us that now more and more Americans and Europeans like sushi very much. Now in most of the major cities in the States and Europe, there are sushi bars, as they are called in English. "
In many cases these sushi bars are operated by Japanese owners, and sushi is prepared by Japanese sushi chefs.
I've heard that there is even a sushi shop equipped with an automatic sushi maker. I think it's typically American.
My family sometimes goes to a sushi bar on one of the family's birthdays, not so often because my mother says that at a sushi bar they add lots of salt to the vinegared rice and too much salt is not good for our health.
I'll tell you more about my mother's cautiousness about salted foods in more detail later.
On such an occasion we sit at the bar, and order nigirizushi, hand-molded sushi, if translated into English, with the toppings each of us like. The raw fish and shellfish for the toppings are displayed in a glass case on the bar in front of us.
The chefs working behind the bar make the nigirizushi we order, picking up the fishes in the glass case. My favorite kinds of toppings are salmon, mackerel, squid, octopus, squilla, all kinds of shellfish, especially abalone, and cooked egg. As for abalone, I prefer the one sauted in salad oil to the raw one.
My father likes tuna, especially the fatty belly, or toro in Japanese. My mother likes conger eel, which is usually broiled and brushed with thick sweetened soy sauce, called tare in Japanese. "
Since toro and abalone are expensive items, my mother, who is responsible for the payment and afraid of a high bill, complains if we order those items.
If three of us eat sushi until we are full and my father drinks sake, the bill may amount to nearly 20,000 yen.
My mother, who is the finance minister in my family, is not happy about the expense.
Nigirizushi is not the only kind of sushi we like. Like most Japanese people, when we would like to eat nigirizushi, we go to a sushi bar. However, we eat sushi at home, too.
It's fun to make and easy to prepare temakizushi. We just set the sushi rice, various kinds of fillings, seaweed, nori in Japanese, and condiments, which are usually soy sauce, Japanese horseradish, wasabi in Japanese, and vinegared ginger, out on the table.
Each of us rolls the sushi of our choice with seaweed. When we have temakizushi at home, we are careful not to add much salt and moreover we don't have to be worried about the bill. We can eat temakizushi to our heart's content.
Another kind of Japanese dish I am good at cooking is curry rice. Most English dictionaries name this as either 'curry and rice' or 'curried rice.'
But in my opinion, curried rice is more appropriately the dish called 'dry curry' in the menu of Japanese restaurants, and 'curry and rice' doesn't necessarily mean curry-flavored sauce on top of the rice. When it is served with curry-flavored sauce on top of the rice, it is nothing but 'curry rice.'
You may wonder that curry rice is a Japanese dish. The words used in the naming are surely English, but it originated in Japan, and is a Japanese invention. Curry powder itself was brought to Japan by the English at the end of the Edo period. During the late Meiji period the Japanese version of curry roux was developed and curry rice began to be served in Japanese restaurants.
Since curry roux began to be sold in prepackaged blocks for easy preparation, Japanese housewives started to cook curry rice at home and it rapidly became popular among children.
I have always liked my mother's curry rice since early childhood.
I think my mother is a very good cook. When she cooks, she doesn't depend on recipe. Her recipes seem to be ingrained in her brain. I hope I'll learn how to cook more and more kinds of dishes from my mother before I get married so that I can find a good mate.
My mother is not just a good cook. She is also a nutrition expert. She majored in dietetics in a women's college. She has a bachelor's degree in dietetics. She had been working as a dietician in a hospital before she got married to my father. So she has special knowledge about foods and how they affect health, growth, and disease.
Based on her knowledge and expertise in healthy cooking, she prepares our meals and gives us good advice on healthy foods. She never allowed us children to go to the convenience store alone and spend money on junk food, or to buy canned or bottled drinks from vending machines.
We have never dined out in a fast food restaurant such as McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken.
She always says that the soft drinks and junk food served in these restaurants or sold at the convenience stores and by the vending machines contain ingredients and additives not good for our health.
She says junk food is not only harmful to our health, but also it can stick to our teeth and harm them. According to her, many soft drinks are just a solution of sugar and water.
There is a carbonated kind of soft drink, called "soda"or "pop", which has another extra solution --- a gas dissolved in a liquid, carbon dioxide. In hot weather, this kind of carbonated soft drink tastes good, but my mother rejects it as harmful.
When we were children, we were not allowed to drink coffee, or black tea, koocha in Japanese, because they contain the drug caffeine, and because foods and drinks with caffeine are not good for young children.
The only kind of soft drink she allows is a so-called sports drink, which is designed specifically to replace the body salts lost during prolonged periods of intense athletic exercise.
According to her, the most widely used of all food additives is food coloring. Soft drinks, ice cream, pistachio nuts, candy, baked goods, pet foods, and sausages contain various artificial colorings to make them more colorful and appealing.
Another widely used kind of additive is a preservative.
Many processed foods contain preservatives to keep them from spoiling. Without preservatives, many foods would spoil before people could use them.
However, my mother says that food manufacturers have developed a range of additives just to improve the appearances of their products, thus to make them more attractive to the consumer, and to give them longer shelf lives in order to increase the sales and profits of the manufacturers.
They are not concerned whether those additives are healthy or not. What they are concerned with is only their profits.
In many of the developed countries, food additives are presently the center of a storm of controversy. Food manufacturers have been known to use additives that had not been proved safe; some substances in common use have been proved unsafe or potentially unsafe, and have been taken off the market.
Food additives are now regulated by some kinds of agencies of the national government of each country, and now additives are subjected to extensive testing before they can be placed on the market.
Recently there has been a pessimistic view that the young generation who has been fed lots of junk food 'polluted' with many kinds of additives might not live long.
That's why my mother has been so cautious not to let us eat junk foods or drink soft drinks. She gave us only healthy snacks and drinks, which have little salt and other additives.
The drinks she gave us, which were also our favorites, were milk and various kinds of fresh fruit juice.
What's more, she has never bought juice at the supermarkets or liquor shops. She has made fresh juice with a juicer, and taught us how to make fresh juice when we started to attend school. She also made various kinds of vegetable juice with a juicer. Those fresh fruit and vegetable juices are not only healthy, but also nutritious.
My mother is also very concerned about my father's health. It sounds only natural, but there is a reason for her concern.
When my mother was going to get married to my father, she asked my father for his health record. Every thing was fine except one thing. That is my father's blood pressure.
At that time his blood pressure was 140 over 100.
It was higher than normal, and could be defined as high blood pressure or hypertension. Most persons affected by high blood pressure have no symptoms. Although high blood pressure generally is symptomless, this doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous.
High blood pressure has been termed 'the silent killer' because so many Japanese people, even young people, have it but half of them do not know they have it. It has been well proven that the risk lies in the long-term damage the ailment can cause to their heart, blood vessels, and kidneys, causing problems that can lead to early death.
My parents' marriage is not a love marriage, but an arranged match by a go-between or a matchmaker. So she asked for the family history of my father, and found that his grandfather had died of a stroke apparently caused by hypertension in his early fifties.
It also turned out that my father's mother was also suffering from high blood pressure. My mother once confided to me that she had actually been a bit hesitant to marry my father, because as a professional dietitian she knew too well that people whose parents have high blood pressure are more likely to develop it than those whose parents don't.
So my mother was afraid that if she got married to him, their sons or daughters would inherit the disposition to high blood pressure and would be liable to diseases triggered by hypertension.
But she sort of liked my father, who is from a respectable family, a graduate of a prestigious national university, and had a good position in a reputable company. He was an ideal would-be husband for an arranged-match.
What she knew quite well as a professional dietitian is that high blood pressure is not a fatal disease, but a manageable risk with a good diet or eating habits. Then she made an inquiry about my father's eating habits until then, and found that his mother had been rather careless about the food she had prepared for him and that he himself had been in the bad habits of drinking a lot and eating lots of fatty foods.
He also smoked, though not a heavy smoker.
Since his mother was working as an insurance salesperson, she often neglected to prepare healthy meals and used many kinds of processed foods, which contain lots of additives such as preservatives, sweeteners and colorings.
Processed foods contain lots of salt, which is the main cause of high blood pressure.
This fact assured my mother that my father's blood pressure could be lowered to a normal level if my mother took good care of his diet. Anyway my father had fallen in love with her at first sight when they met for the first time at omiai, and was very eager to marry her.
So she proposed one condition for their marriage that he would quit smoking, because smoking is not good for his health. My father had to submit to this condition as the proof of his love for my mother.
The first thing my mother asked my father to promise her after the marriage was not to go wining and dining with his colleagues after work, but to come back home directly from the company.
Now that she knew the cause of my father's high blood pressure, what she prepared for him was all low-sodium and low-fat foods.
On the other hand, she prepared foods high in potassium, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, soybeans, pumpkins, salmon, and mackerel, because potassium helps to excrete more sodium from the kidneys, in effect reducing the sodium in the blood vessels.
My father hadn't been accustomed to eating raw vegetables until then. So she served vegetables containing potassium raw, since raw vegetables keep most of their nutrients. She never failed to serve apples, peaches or bananas as desserts, because they are the fruits high in potassium.
Then she set up my father's target blood pressure at 130 over 80. It was good that as a dietitian she knew where and how she could obtain every kind of low-sodium, reduced-sodium, or unsalted condiments and foods.
I'm sure that my father who had been accustomed to foods strongly flavored with soy sauce and sugar must have found the foods cooked by my mother rather bland or tasteless.
Many Japanese, especially men, like pouring Worcestershire sauce or catsup on fried foods such as pork cutlets or hamburgers. My father had done so before their marriage. However, on the dining table in their household as newlyweds, there was no such things as Worcestershire sauce, catsup or tonkatsu sauce (mixture of catsup and Worcestershire sauce).
I can imagine my father's bewilderment when he couldn't find those kinds of condiments he had been accustomed to using with his foods. However within a few months my father became quite used to the lightly flavored foods.
When my father and mother were invited to dinner to my father's parents' house, I heard that my father complained that his mother's foods which he had been eating for so many years was too salty.
Another factor that affects blood pressure is weight.
Excess weight is not only one of the causes of high blood pressure, but it also causes many other diseases.
When my father got married, he weighed around sixty-five kilograms, apparently overweight. As you know, Japanese brides bring lots of furniture, domestic appliances, kitchen utensils and other stuff to their new households.
One of the appliances which was rather unusual for the brides to bring, but only natural for my mother was a bathroom scale. She set up my father's target weight as 55 kilograms. She encouraged my father to measure his weight after a bath and keep a record of his weight change every day.
This way of weight control helped my father reduce his weight. However his loss of weight brought economic retaliation. As a result of losing weight, my father's waist size became smaller. Then many of his suit pants became too loose for him, and he had to buy many new suits.
Thanks to my mother's careful and also skillful dietary strategies, his blood pressure and also his cholesterol level, which was a bit higher before their marriage, was lowered to a normal range within a year or so.
High cholesterol level is also a cause of high blood pressure.
My father's mother also became very concerned about her blood pressure and changed her eating habits and started to follow the dietary program prepared by my mother. Her blood pressure also was lowered to a normal level.
She is sixty-six years old. We hope that she will live up to one hundred years of age. We know many old people who have lived long, but are bedridden or senile. We don't wish that kind of longevity for our grandparents.
We hope our grandmother attains healthy longevity with the dietary efforts guided by my mother.
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