Americans are obsessed with food lately. So much that we devour books and shows about food almost as much as creatively repurposed corn products. I, for one, recently read the French food culture book “French Kids Eat Everything” and it, combined with a few lines from an Alton Brown podcast, (more food media there, consumed unselfconsciously) fueled a bout of introspection that led me to…an opinion (yikes).

American food culture has been turning more toward the slow, the simple, and the real, and for this I’m very happy. In this process, the car as a location for eating has been stigmatized. French people, in their great food-centric culture, as I read in “French Kids Eat Everything” hold sacred the act of eating at the table.  They also would probably not eat a sandwich from a wrapper, and would never ever eat in a car. This strict devotion to proper meal time with chairs and tables and cutlery is part of the reason French people are, on average, healthier than Americans. Alton added his voice to my brain stew by expressing some sadness over the common occurrence of Americans eating at desks and in cars and the infrequency of eating as families at tables – a sentiment I can agree with. But America is geographically huge, and our drive thru culture evolved as a response to the fact that many Americans have to spend a lot of time in their cars. And lots of us don’t have time to cook before or after (or during) our big commutes, but that’s another can of worms.

While  I’ll admit that most drive through food is nutritionally deplorable and exemplar of our nations obsession with fatty, salty, fast, and cheap, there are things worth preserving in drive through culture. The fast-food hamburger as perfected by In-N-Out for example, or the ideal fountain coke with just the right amount of bubbles, which can be found only in paper cup with plastic lid.

So here it is: I love a drive thru. And while I get that frequenting fast food places is bad for our waistlines and probably our minds and family dynamics, I don’t get the all or nothing mentality that seems to be necessary with every American fad. Let’s apply some Cookie Monster moderation to the drive thru – make it a “sometimes” thing.

Eating is about more than consuming fuel anyway, it’s about connecting. And some of the best conversations of my life have taken place in cars parked in drive-through parking lots, late at night, over a bag of paper-wrapped tacos. I don’t know what it is about sitting side by side in a parked car and sharing fried food, but it inspires camaraderie and honesty like few other situations do. Eating at a table is for polite conversation and wholesome family bonding. Drive through parking lots are for confessionals,  making confidantes out of mere friends, and talking through big choices. French fries and burritos grease the wheels of truth and bond us like bandits. Your teen won’t talk to you? Take them to Sonic at 1am and see what happens. Worried about your best friend? Buy her a chocolate shake and let her spill her guts in the safety of your company.

Should we all be eating fast food a lot less? Clearly. But is eating in a car  every now and then something to be sad or, even more American, feel guilty about? I don’t think so.

(P.S. Thanks to Caroline and Jordan for modeling the awkwardness of posing for a car-dining picture. And for not getting mad at me for using your pretty faces without permission. K?)

Yakushima, aka Monkey Island, is gorgeous, even in the rain. So when hiking seemed like a bad idea, we went for a drive.

Up in the mountains we saw something.

Are those…?

This is where I begin hyperventilating. Stop. The. Car.

Casual regard from an actual wild monkey. Get ready for a monkey photo overload.

And while I was distracted taking pictures of this guy, adorably contemplating his fingernails, something happened.

EEEEEP.

Documentation of once-in-lifetime event.

Just a wild monkey on our side view mirror.

Grooming, or showing off?

Meanwhile, this guy is about to fall asleep on top of his post.

Are they toes? Or fingers?

Big M, little m, what begins with M?

Monkeys. The answer is monkeys.

Monkeys everywhere. And I’m rendered incoherent by the photos almost as much as the real thing. Hence the babbling. But MONKEYS.

Ahoy, thar be 2014 on the horizon.

I’m not exactly opposed to goal setting, but annual resolutions feel sort of arbitrary and can be rendered irrelevant as the year unfolds. Plus, I’m a bit of a contrarian by nature, so once I’ve decided I ought to do something, it morphs from an aspiration to an expectation hanging over my head in an extremely unattractive way. Reflecting on the previous year’s goals is a universally disappointing experience.  Has anyone ever completed all of their resolutions? So, in the spirit of cutting myself a break for 2014, I’m listing some highly-achievable, highly non-committal irresolutions. But you still can’t hold me to them.

1. I will probably not begin tending to my cuticles, but I could at least start removing my nail polish before it’s chipped halfway off on its own.

2. I don’t intend to give up any food groups for any set length of time, unless I find a really fun-looking juice cleanse or something.

3. I may quit conditioning my hair in pursuit of touseledness.

4. I likely won’t begin ironing my clothing more than semi-annually. I will probably use my travel steamer in moments of desperation.

5. I’d like to join a CSA but, you know, we’ll see.

6. I will probably eat less fast food, maybe with the exception of mighty wings and fountain diet cokes.

7. I might work on my omelet making technique, but I might prefer fried eggs anyway and give up without caring too much.

8. I won’t learn to crochet or start watching Two and a Half Men. Pretty resolute on that one.

9. I will probably eat a lot of aged gouda when I get back to the states, but I’ll try to keep it within reason. Less than my bodyweight anyway.

10. I will try to buy more handmade things, provided they are of good quality.

11. I will probably forget this list sometime around April and not think about it again.

Happy New Year!

I think wedding registries are kind of hilarious, particularly for people who get married young, like I did, and have no idea what’s really necessary to keep a household running without contributions from five other roommates. When I got married I registered for a run of the mill, moderately priced knife block set at Target and I’ve been tolerating it humorlessly ever since. So, I’ve never had really “good” knives – knives that are worth having professionally sharpened or washing by hand. What’s worse is I’m an adult now, who has cooked professionally and who now frequently cooks at home. I know how important it is to have quality knives and how much safer you are when you cut with blades that are sharp and strong.

As luck would have it, knives are bit of a specialty here on Tanegashima. So these recent purchases will do double duty for me as a keepsake from our time here, and a solid knife set that will carry me through the next couple of decades at least.

Bonus: they’re affordable. These are the standard carbon steel home-cook grade knives, hand-made on this island, averaging about $35 each, (when you can buy them from the maker) and deliciously sharp. There’s a professional range of knives as well, that cost between $80 and $200 a piece.

The knife below is for hacking heads off fish, but I’m thinking it will perform similarly well on hard winter squashes or whole, large birds.

The knife makers here also make scissors that are supposed to be perfectly balanced and engineered in a way that causes them to become sharper with use. So, witchcraft?

These are my new babies. Welcome to the knife drawer guys! Also, guess what my entire family is getting for Christmas?

So the other day on Tanegashima we were driving from Nakatane to Minamitane, and we saw something peculiar on the side of the road.

We had to investigate.

It was a Christmas miracle. Goats dressed in yuletide garb.

One more thing to make me want to move to Tanegashima.

That’s me trying to sneak up on a baby goat, unsuccessfully.

Finally one decided to give me a suspicious sniff.

CHRISTMAS GOATS you guys.

I am on monkey island for Christmas/my birthday (have I mentioned they are one and the same? well there you go). Blogging from Cody’s phone because I have no wifi access. Yes, I have seen a monkey. It was everything I had hoped. I will do my best to update, but if I am too busy lolloping about with exotic wildlife, please forgive me.

I’ve spent a month in Japan. I can’t even believe it. Only three more to go, and I’m doing my best to soak up every minute. In my one month I’ve observed a few things that I hadn’t anticipated.

1. Fried chicken. Not that I didn’t expect to see fried chicken at all, I just didn’t expect to see it quite so much, or for it to be so ridiculously good. We have a favorite sushi place that we’ve been visiting about once a week, and on a recent visit the owner said “next time, chicken fry”. So that’s what we did. His fried chicken was probably the best I’ve had, and he is duly proud of it. But I’ve had similarly delicious versions at a hotel, a casual lunch place, and a fried rice place. And it’s not just a dish that gets thrown at the gaijin – I see Japanese people order it pretty regularly. In fact, KFC is the most popular American restaurant in Japan, particularly around Christmas, when Japanese people have to make dine-in reservations in advance and pre-order their family-sized Christmas chicken buckets (that’s a link to a Smithsonian blog article I found about Christmas KFC in Japan, not some bit of spam). I have the sneaking suspicion that Japanese KFC is better than American KFC.

2. Portion sizes. American foods in Japan tend to come in small portions, like little tiny cheeseburgers and a side of 15 shoestring french fries. Japanese style meals, on the other hand, are huge. Especially dinner. Our little tiny Japanese friend, Suja, basically ate us under the table at one meal. We started with sashimi, then gyoza, then roasted fish, then a bowl of noodle soup with stewed vegetables, then kimchi, steamed snap peas, miso soup, and of course rice. We were slumping in our chairs, moaning and clutching our guts, so far from finishing, and she cleaned all eight of her dishes easily. Also, the average bowl of ramen eaten by the average small Japanese woman for lunch is bigger than my head. Go figure.

3. Napkins, or the lack there-of. People in Japan tend to carry their own hand-towels (called tenugis).  You’re about as likely to get a box of tissues on your restaurant table table in lieu of napkins as you are to get nothing. So we have to come prepared. Bathrooms are the same, though hand dryers appear here and there.

4. Sesame dressing. Not the dark brown super-gingery vinaigrette you get on “asian” salads in the states. This stuff is made from toasted, pulverized sesame seeds and it is creamy and rich. Suja said she’d teach me to make it. I will be her shadow until she relents.

5. Low expectations. An American can pretty much dazzle all the locals by saying “please” in Japanese (onegaishimasu). They will compliment you on your mastery of the language. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten, getting gold stickers for raising my hand. It’s actually preeetty fun. But sad. At the same time so very sad.

Anyway, Cody’s been working twelve-hour plus shifts straight through the weekends for the last two weeks, but he’s finally finished with that nonsense ’til after Christmas. Next week we’re thinking of taking a trip to the neighboring island of Yakushima, which is also known as monkey island. So I might get to spend my merry little birthday with monkeys. Squeeeeeeal.

Publishing a blog post about Thanksgiving when we’re already halfway to Christmas isn’t the kind of thing a good blogger would do. But those of you who know me also know that I’m not exactly breaking character here.

Anyway, the idea to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for the NASA people out here in Japan came to me as a reckless whim while I was sitting in the hotel dining room about a week and a half before the holiday. I started thinking hypothetical logistics, fully aware that the whole idea was ill-advised. I was just daydreaming. But then, in a serendipitous moment Suja, our Japanese translator and general fixer, walked into the dining room. Before I could stop myself, the words tumbled out of my mouth: “can I make Thanksgiving dinner for everyone?” I was thinking I could casually throw together a couple of nostalgic dishes for the 30-some people I’d met who’d be missing their families. Suja liked the idea, but had a better grasp of the scope of the project than I did. She said there’d probably be 100 people who would want to come, no way would we be able to find turkeys on the island (Japanese people generally find them dry and I generally agree), and the kitchen at the Sun Pearl has no oven. Did I still want to do it? Yep. And that was it.

But word started getting around that someone was planning a Thanksgiving without turkeys. We thought Korean barbecue would be a tasty alternative – but the general consensus among the NASA folk was that it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without turkeys. Our friend, and Cody’s colleague, Lou took it upon himself to do some late-night networking at the karaoke bars in town and came back to us with news: he’d found a guy, who knew a guy, who could get us turkeys, and he’d get them cooked and delivered, with gravy no less. We were all channeling Goodfellas in this turkey acquisition and it felt sort of illicit.

Two other items we had a tricky time finding were green beans and white potatoes. We ended up paying about five dollars a pound for the white potatoes (they’re out of season here) which we had to order from a farmer through Mama-san. Once we figured out the Japanese name for green beans “ingemame” (roughly translated to mean English beans) we were able to get our paws on some of those too.

The last puzzle was dessert. Remember how I had no access to ovens? I asked Midori-san if she knew of any bakeries that made apple pies or pumpkin pies and she said she didn’t. So she took it upon herself to enlist her adorable friend Tomomi-san to make us some gorgeous and delicious apple tarts, which were a perfect substitute.

The night before our party, Cody and I got back from dinner and went to the dining room to do some prep, where we found Mama-san sitting stringing a huge pile of ingemame for our meal. I made a fuss and told her to stop, but she wouldn’t, so I joined her. Cody and I had a nice little moment (I should say a nice couple of hours) working with Mama-san and Midori-san and Seki-san to string beans, skin onions, stem mushrooms, and peel potatoes. When I told them to go to bed and let me do the work they refused and said, simply “we like to help people”.

The day of went amazingly well. Cody, Suja, Seki-san and I went into the kitchens at 10am and took things over. After about an hour, the kitchen’s head cook showed up and started sneaking around watching us make idiots of ourselves with their foreign equipment. He had a little smirk on his face as he observed and nudged us in the right direction when we started looking lost. He saw me dumping frying oil into a pot and said “no no no” and uncovered a deep-fryer I’d missed somehow. He was like a little genie/kitchen ninja who just quietly let us go about our business, but swooped in with solutions when we got confused.

Sweet potatoes are luckily one of Tanegashima’s primary crops, so we had plenty.

That’s Suja’s angry-looking Korean barbecue marinade on the left. Good stuff – much tamer than it looks. And don’t worry, I’m never doing my hair like that again. I was going for a low, maybe slightly mussed chignon, but clearly it went all Hester Prynne. I just love being in photos.

So the guy we’d put our faith in to source, cook, and deliver turkeys came through. The four pretty birds came to us from Australia, via Tokyo, and were cooked impressively well by two separate local restaurants that each had just enough oven space for two turkeys. OH and gravy.

Successes of the night: the Japanese people really liked the Turkey, and while the Americans were obsessed with the crunchy almond and cashew brulee’d sweet potato situation I came up with, I saw several piles of untouched sweet potatoes come back on Japanese plates. Different palates, you know? The only real fail of the night: we ran out of gravy.

Cody was such a champ, along with Seki-san and Suja, the NASA folks that washed dishes and served food, and our personal kitchen ninja whose name I still don’t know (Suja asked and he said just call me “brother” in Japanese, which is sort of deceptively vague if you ask me – typical ninja behavior). We worked all day and ate our dinner standing up, between cleaning and serving food, and I had such an inordinate amount of fun I think I missed my calling as a caterer.

One of the first things I noticed about Japan is that they’ve thought of everything. When I stepped out of the shower at our hotel in Tokyo I looked at the fogged mirror and noticed a perfectly clear rectangle of mirror-space above the sink. Eastern hemisphere phenomenon? NO – JAPANESE DESIGN. Exhibit B: the vending machines. You’ll notice the top row is made up of bottled tea and coffee with red labels. Anything with a red label is dispensed hot. That’s right, hot vending machines.

So anyway, Minamitane is a small town, about a 15 minute drive from the closest beach. There are gardens planted between the shops on the main drag and farmland lining the highway to the shore. The newest building was probably finished in the 60’s. People dress in utilitarian layers and more than once I’ve seen someone who looked over the age of 70 hop on a bike and ride down the street, probably to do some grocery shopping or fishing.

I feel like all the islands I’ve been to (so, Hawaii) have this wind-whipped, mother nature is in charge kind of vibe – and Tanegashima is no different. It’s like the people just let things grow the way they want to, and grow they do.

I think an American town of comparable size to Minamitane would have a handful of restaurants to choose from: probably a McDonalds, an Arbys, an Applebees, and a Panera Bread or something. Then they’d have a Wal Mart and maybe a Home Depot. Minamitane only has two chain stores: the co-op, which is delightfully punctuated to read A-COOP. I just call it the coop. Locals call it a-co-opu. It’s a grocery store. And then there’s the everyone store which is basically a super deluxe 7-11 where I get all my insane pastries. More on that later.

Instead of Arby’s or McDonalds, Minamitane has over thirty independently owned restaurants and almost as many karaoke bars. Most of the businesses here are family-run and each one has a character all it’s own. One of my favorite places is called the Sama-Sama. It’s a yakitori place and the teeny kitchen is tucked behind the bar, so you can see everything happening. The cook wears a bandana on his head and grills with the window open to keep the smoke situation to a minimum, but the whole place smells like burning meat anyway and I love it. I’m going to do a whole post on the Sama-Sama sometime, but all the restaurants here are just bubbling over with nonchalant charm.

If you walk around town you’ll notice a lot of businesses put bowls of salt outside their door. These are not for eating. They’re for good luck. Also there are a lot of dogs.

That’s me leaning on our Japanese whip. We’ve only had to put gas in it once in the three weeks we’ve been here. And that’s with Cody driving it at least a half hour every day, and it was only half-empty. Below is a picture of Cody and I out to dinner at a Korean barbecue place and a sign with the town mascot – a cute little rocket astronaut boy. He’s on all the bus stop signs.

Apparently rocket launches are a big deal here. All the hotels are booked up for the end of February and Midori-san said people will come and sleep in their cars if they have to. So while every town has a mascot and a thing that they take pride in, Minamitane and Tanegashima have more to boast about than most.

Cody and I looked into staying in an apartment here in Tanegashima, but ultimately decided against it. As introverts, we knew our only hope of meeting people and staying out of the hole of solitude was to live in town, near people and shops and food. It’s working pretty well so far.

So we’re living at the Hotel Sunpearl in the town of Minamitane. The hotel is basically full of NASA people right now so we see lots of Americans every day, but it seems to be a pretty happenin’ place for Japanese people too.

Every night the hotel owner, Midori-san puts out a list with everyone’s names where they order their breakfast and have the option of adding a bento box for lunch the next day. In the morning the boxes are stacked and wrapped and waiting to be taken to work.

For breakfast we have two choices: western style or Japanese style. The typical Japanese breakfast looks like this: pickled vegetables, some kind of meat, a piece of fish, miso soup, a packet of nori, rice, an egg (raw if you’re Japanese, boiled if you’re scared or American) and green tea. I’ve had the Japanese breakfast a few times, and it’s fun, but I rarely eat all the pickled vegetables and I feel bad leaving things on my tray, so I usually opt for western. That piece of fish there looks scary, but it was braised in sweet soy sauce and it tasted shockingly good.

The Sunpearl is home to lots of goldfish that I’ve taken an unhealthy interest in (probably because I’m missing Murdock). One has been floating upside-down for a couple of weeks now and has me concerned, but he keeps on kicking. Midori-san made fun of me when I told her I was worried about him and suggested I take him to the hospital. Maybe I will! Harumph.

Freshly washed and folded NASA shirts.

Midori-san and her mom (Mama-san) have been keeping an eye on me since I’m at the Sunpearl most of the day. One day I was eating a salad for lunch in the dining room and Midori-san said “only salad”? and gave me this rice ball to fill out my meal. The tray on the right is a typical western-style breakfast. That bowl at the top was mushroom chowder, which was kind of an odd thing for breakfast, but man was it good. It seems like Japanese people make chowder whenever they have a bunch of vegetables to use up, and I’m going to follow suit when I get home.

Mama-san cooks lunch for the hotel staff sometimes and every now and then I’ll get a knock on my door with a surprise treat from her. One day she even made okonomiyaki and brought it to my room. I was worried I’d have to hide it in the trash (based on my previous experience with okonomiyaki), but it was delicious.

So this is my home until March. I’m quite taken with it.