Oh, boy, it's been a while.
During my absence, I found a new hobby--one that's not entirely unrelated to my love of good food. Since mid September, I've been taking a weekly class of pottery making, at a local studio. It was as much a result of boredom as that of frustration. I'd wanted more Japanese-style bowls and plates for my food (and for my food porn), but not too surprisingly, good ones are exceedingly rare in Chicago. Especially after the much-lamented closure of the Japanese ceramic shop in Mitsuwa, finding up-to-date ceramics at a reasonable price have been pretty much impossible. So, I thought, why don't I try making them myself? To begin with, we could use some ramen bowls.
Of course, it didn't go as planned. What I discovered during my first few days at the pottery studio was that it wasn't me who determined the shape of the finished product; it seemed that the clay itself decided to take one shape, and once it knew what it wanted to be, there was no way I could force it to become anything else. I cranked out a lot of lopsided, thick-walled bowls of varying sizes, in addition to quite a few outright dead ones (which, thankfully, could be recycled). Ramen bowls were at least a few months away, I decided, with a bit of amusement. And I meekly obeyed the commands of the wild, assertive lumps of clay on my throwing wheel.
The first trick I learned, therefore, was to "let live." Since most of my bowls came out uneven, I soon realized that I need to take their lopsidedness and turn it into something interesting, if I didn't want to start all over again. When one part of the wall had significantly more clay than the rest, I pinched the thick part to make a pour spout; when my finger got caught on the rim of a small dish, I squished the rim even more to give it an artsy flair. That sort of thing.
After a month and a half, I'm surprised to see how much progress I've made. Not that I'm a great potter by any stretch of imagination, but my bowls turn out much more even and they do listen to my commands more. It's not just the clay becoming whatever it wants to be, but now I can, at least sometimes, guide it to take more or less the shape I have in my head. And most of all, it's been such a fun.
Oh, and I've managed to make a few bowls that I can actually use on the dinner table, too. This shallow bowl with Tenmoku glaze is one of them:
Daikon Sprouts, Jamaican Pepper and Chicken Salad for two
Instruction would be just a line: toss all the ingredients together and serve. Daikon sprouts ("kaiware" in Japanese) have a very refreshing flavor akin to that of the shredded daikon you find next to your sashimi. Don't forget to rinse them thoroughly, though--there was a huge outbreak of E-Coli in Japan, blamed on daikon sprouts about a decade ago. This incident, much like the recent contaminated spinach incident here, drove all the daikon sprouts off the supermarket shelves. It took years for the supermarkets to muster the courage to carry them again, and those were sad years--I love the wasabi-like, refreshing flavor of the daikon sprouts. The slight bitterness of the pepper is quite nice, though not absolutely necessary, in this salad.
Not an antiquing person, I didn't know the existence of the Volo Antique Mall untill I came across a Japanese blog about it. It sounded like fun from her description, and it was only an hour or so away from where we live, so my mom, Patrick and I drove to the Mall early Sunday morning (after a filling breakfast of an apple pancake etc. at Walker Brothers' Pancake House). The drive out to the town of Volo, northwest of Chicago, was a pleasant one. The morning sun hadn't reached its midday, sizzling temperature, and the scenery became decidedly greener as we drove past the civilization. Among the new housing developments of identical mac-mansions, a few corn and soy fields popped up, and silos and barns became a regular feature along the road. We even saw a marshy nesting ground of a bunch of large herons from the Belvedier Road.
The mall was huge; there were three buildings dedicated to "real" antique with another selling collectibles that may not qualify as "antique." Here, individual antique vendors pay a certain amount of monthly rent to use a display case or a booth, so there were a lot of overlaps in terms of the items available. For instance, I saw an astronomical number of thick, cut-glass bowls and goblets probably from the 60s or 70s. It seemed as if those had been in everyone's cupboard at one time. Another, slightly less predictable staple was the set of Chinese-inspired bowls and dishes made in Japan. I was astounded to see how horrible its quality was: the ceramics were unevenly shaped, the paints went astray everywhere, and the colors were just ghasly. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I always associated "Made in Japan" with "high quality," but the extremely poor quality of the Japanese-nade ceramics reminded me of the time when Japan survived as a source of cheap labor of the world. The entire place smelled of old things, just like the musty, somewhat pleasant smell of my grandma's closet back in Japan. I was sort of amused to realize that the smell of old, forgotten things are the same on both sides of the Pacific.
I wouldn't say that the Volo Antique Mall is the place to go for high-quality antique. It's more a place to find kitsch stuff that you can actually use in your everyday life without worrying to death about breaking them. There must have been literally gazillion artifacts there--we ran out of energy after exploring only the first (and the largest) building. But our hunt wasn't fruitless. I found a quaint Japanese-looking tea set for $3.95. (My mom bought two sets of tea cup and saucer and a matching sugar pot.)
Granted, the tea pot had a chunk missing from the handle, and its lid had gone AWOL. One of the tea cups even had a hairline crack on it. But hey, for that price, I wouldn't care. I wasn't going to use the tea set as a tea set anyway--I thought I could use the tea cups to put dipping sauces or small amount of food (most likely something to accompany a good chilled sake!), and the tea pot might look good as a flower vase, say, with a few yellow chrysanthemums in it, when autumn comes.
On the bottom of the tea cups, I noticed a marking that said "kutani-zukuri" (九谷造). Given the cheapish make of the tea set, I don't necessarily believe that it's a real kutani, which is known for its super-high quality and elegant design, but the caligraphy does make me believe that it was written by someone who writes Chinese characters daily. So, the set was probably made either in Japan or China. To imagine where and when it was created, how it came to the United States and how it ended up in an antique mall in Illinois stimulates my imagination no end. I'll probably never really know the history and stories attached to the set, but it'll give me with just a bit more fun every time I serve my food on it. For a lay person, that flight of imagination seems to be the essence of the antique fun.
Today, I was going to write an English version of this Japanese post about what's coming in season and what's going out at the Green City Market. That was until I found an old bottle opener in the back of a kitchen drawer.
Made of a single piece of metal, the opener felt heavy in my hand. I'd never seen it during my three years of kitchen usage at Patrick's, but I was familiar with the opener itself--it was the same bottle opener that my grandfather used to keep in a cupboard in his tiny, tatami-matted living/dining room in Tokyo. I recognized it by the Japanese inscription on both sides of the handle; one said "Sapporo Beer" and the other "Ribbon Citron." It must have been a cheap giveaway that came with maybe a crate of Sapporo Beer.
The original tag was still intact. On one side, the plastic tag showed a design of a can of Sapporo Lager Beer, and on the other, a promotional character, Ribbon-chan, for the family of soft drinks called "Ribbon," also produced by the Sapporo Beer company. The bottle opener was nothing special when I saw it being used every day as a kid, but now the same thing looked awfully cute and quaint. This is a keeper, I thought, and put it on the dining table. (I was doing some packing for our August relocation.)
When I went back into the dining room after a while, I wondered how in the world a Japanese bottle opener ended up in a 30-something American guy who'd been to Japan only once. The most likely suspect is his famous grandma, who left him a truckload of weird artifacts (like a huge set of Thai cutlery with a tiny statue of Buddha carved on each and every one of them, and a garish orange table that can support an elephant). But still. Mistified, I did some quick sleuthing--with Google and Wikipedia being my personal Hastings, Ms. Lemon and Watson.
First, I looked up "Ribbon Citron," for I'd never heard of such a soft drink. I figured it was probably a soda-like thing that boomed in the 60s and ceased to exist since (the graphic had that 60s feel). My guess proved wrong. Ribbon Citron came into being way back in the Meiji era. Carbonated (and sometimes sweetened) water had been introduced in Japan in the 1890s as a health drink, just as many Europeans back then drank carbonated (naturally or not) water in spas to promote health. In 1909, Japanese beer company (Dainihon Bakushu) picked up the fad to make use of the excess CO2 generated during the production of beer, and placed it in the market as "Ribbon Citron."
To my surprise, Ribbon Citron is still being produced and sold in Japan. Perhaps it is somewhat an object of nostalgia, rather than something people drink for the pure joy of its taste, but I have to say a (almost) 100-year old soda is pretty impressive. Now that I knew how old the carbonated drink was, I grew curious how old the bottle opener might be. A few more clicks around Sapporo Beer's "Ribbon-chan.com," a very cute site explaining the history of the soda and its promotional character, revealed that the animated character of the girl with a big ribbon was introduced in 1957; this means that the bottle opener was made after 1957. Not as old as I'd hoped it might.
Another clue on the tag was the design of the beer can. With a large red "North Star" and a golden S-curve that devides the can into blue and white areas, the design was completely unfamiliar to me. And yet the retro-modern design somehow evoked a strange sense of nostalgia. It looked like I could have seen it on the yellowing pages of my mother's old cooking magazines.
Sapporo Beer's corporate site again proved helpful. Its history page had an information about the design of the can. According to the article, the canned beer was introduced in 1959. The can was designed by a pioneering American industrial designer Walter Landor, who also designed 7-Up cans, Kellog's corn flake box, Levi's logo, and the famous WWF panda, among other things. At the time, the can didn't have a pull-open tab, so one needed to punch two holes on the top with a can opener to pour out the beer (wow). The plastic tag on the bottle opener in question was this type--without a tab. Since the easy-open can started appearing in stores in 1965, the bottle opener was given away probably before that date.
So, the bottle oepner was most likely produced between 1959 and 1965. How it ended up in an American guy's kitchen more than 40 years later is a mystery. I wonder if the same family who gave Patrick's grandma that set of Buddha cutlery is responsible for the bottle opener as well. That would be a very strange connection, if that were the case, for I, too, have lived in the three countries involved (Thailand, Japan and the United States). My grandfather would be amused to know that the same bottle opener he used turned up in his granddaughter's foreign kitchen 6,000 miles across the ocean. Well, actually I'm not quite sure about this--he was very inscrutable--as a real man was supposed to be back in his time, but it's fun to imagine it this way, with my grandfather sharing my surprise and curiosity.
The NY Times article on equipping a no-frills kitchen for under $200 is predictable but interesting. While there are points I would go about differently, Mark Bittman's success in keeping the cost under a spartan limit is pretty impressive, too. But he missed one thing. One BIG thing. And that's not surprising, at all.
The missing thing is the saibashi--cooking chopsticks. They're basically a longer version of normal chopsticks, except that they aren't elaborately coated or decorated. Usually made of wood or bamboo (mine are the latter), the saibashi is a wonderful all-purpose tool in any Japanese chef's kitchen. I use them for almost anything: mixing sauces, tossing salads, stirring noodles in boiling-hot water, stir-frying veggies, turning meat over a grill, transferring food from a pan to individual dishes, whisking eggs, picking up piping-hot tempura from the frying oil, scraping off cookie dough from a mixing bowl. And I didn't even have to try hard to come up with this list. In a pinch, when my pot holder has gone AWOL, I even use them to slide out the hot baking pan from the oven, though I suspect this isn't really their intended use. Without these four sets of saibashi, I won't survive a day in my kitchen.
And of course, Bittman wouldn't have included saibashi in his kitchen essentials, because he doesn't cook (I presume) like the Japanese. (Instead, he included stainless tongs.)
Just Hungry points out that a "no-frills" kitchen would vary culture to culture, and if one cooks differently from Bittman, her kitchen might look quite different from his. This is a point well taken, and (sort of quietly) reveals the unconscious ethnic bias in Bittman's article. I don't plan to be hysterical about his lack of social awareness or ethno-racial sensitivity (it's just a short article, after all), but it does make me feel a bit ambivalent, especially given the newspaper in which the article appears. In the same section (Dining and Wine), New York Times enjoys, celebrates and consumes the very diversity of food and cooking within the United States. Then why this apparent disregard of "other" cooking traditions in this specific article? I don't know the answer to this, but it is, at least, quite interesting to see how cultural differences manifest in assumptions about cooking and, thus, what one should have in one's kitchen.
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