Back in El Jardín del Mundo

El Jardín del Mundo feels more like el Horno del Mundo right now. I got back to Paraguay on monday night and was immediately greeted by the perfume of coconut flowers in the heavy, humid air that very quickly become associated with this place for anyone who has lived here here. I haven't been here very often in winter, so it was strange to arrive in July last time. The feeling coming off the plane was much more familiar and comforting, and it was so nice to escape Boston just as the crisp clear days and beautiful fall colors were ending and the miserly days of late autumn were about to begin. The nights here have been amazing. I love nights that are warm and humid enough to feel tropical and breezy but still not sticky or uncomfortable. The days, however, have already become unbearable, reaching an unimaginable 117F degrees in certain parts of the city, yesterday, and summer is still ahead of us. In January the city empties as anyone with the means goes to the beach in Argentina, or Brazil, or at least to the nearby lake town of San Bernardino.

To my great chagrin, none of the aforementioned heirloom seeds sprouted in our backyard garden, allegedly because the ground has been too hot, though I suspect poor agronomic technique. I think there may be time to take a second shot at it, and perhaps the seeds I gave to my cousins fared better. I will have my heirloom tomatoes!

I booked the cheapest itinerary I could find back to Paraguay for the dates that I needed. Unfortunately, this involved flying into La Guardia on Saturday afternoon from Boston and leaving JFK for Sao Paulo early on Sunday morning. Heavy luggage, despite its name, is not really made for lugging all around New York and surrounding burroughs. This all turned out very well for me, however, and would have been glad to have done it even if it hadn't saved me any money at all, because I got to stay the night at my friend Pat's house. Pat and I met what now seems like many years ago when we both did a semester of study abroad in Argentina, and we have been pretty admirable about staying in touch since, at least about seeing each other a couple times a year, if not at actually talking or writing often. Pat and his roommate Sasha checked out Dinner Bell on occasion, and I've promised them many meals that have never materialized. This quick visit, dictated by the market for international travel, seemed a perfect opportunity to make good on my offer.

Pat and I stepped outside of his Brooklyn apartment about 20 minutes before closing time for the variety of food shops and specialty grocers that populate the storefronts, a bit concerned that we'd missed the boat. Before those 20 minutes had elapsed, we were able to visit a first-rate fish shop, patisserie/boulangerie, wineshop, meat market, and produce stand, assembling all of the necessary ingredients for an awesome seafood stew. Here are the assorted vegetables along with a slice of pancetta.


Having assembled said ingredients in less than 20 minutes, I was left with something less than what is required for a classic bouillabaisse. Furthermore, after consulting a recipe, it seemed to me that the steps required for bouillabaisse were entirely excessive, particularly considering that I didn't even have the pages of ingredients required. Surely something more delicious could be made with less voulez-vous. So I hesitated for a while, deciding what other brand of seafood stew should form the basis of my creation. I was thinking of the Cioppino recipes I've seen on the food network and the amazing Mexican sopa de mariscos that I had eaten in Puerto Vallarta/approximated with Rick Bayless's recipes. The main dilemma was what to do with the whole octopus we had purchased from the fish market.

There are two ways to cook octopus, the fast but difficult way and the slow but easy way. The former involves dropping in the octopus last after the other ingredients are done and cooking it only very briefly. Any longer than a minute and it gets tough as leather. The problem is that octopus is also tough when it is still raw as well, so it's hard to know if you have undershot or overshot the very narrow window. The latter method involves cooking the octopus for 1-2 hours in the oven, allowing the extended exposure to the high temperature to soften the proteins and the braising liquid to penetrate the octopus resulting in a very agreeable texture and lots of flavor. You could always try option 1 and opt for method 2 in the case that you overcook it, except that we were making mussels and clams and shrimp in addition to octopus and they would be awful after cooking for so long. The other problem with octopus is that it lets out a tremendous amount of water as it cooks, and this could have thrown all the proportions off if I'd used method number 1. Of course, I could have blanched the octopus in a different pot until it was done, and chopped and added it to the rest of the ingredients, but then I would not have taken advantage of all of the flavorful octopus juice (seriously, it was good).

So . . . after what probably seemed like too long to my hosts/diners I decided that I would puree the vegetables and tomatoes and fry them into a paste, as to form the base for any variety of Mexican soups, and after deglazing with a bit of white wine, I would add the uncooked octopus and put it into the 450 oven for and hour and a half. In the meantime I made a roasted red bell pepper rouille, and threw the sliced potatoes in with the octopus after an hour. When it came out, the octopus was nearly done and a nice broth had formed from the cooking liquid and the paste. In went the clams, shrimp, and mussels on top of the stove. Topped off with a crouton and some of the red bell pepper rouille, it was ready to go.




I've made many a seafood soup in my day, but this was exceptionally good. In large part due to the ingredients we had, but the slow braise gave the octopus a perfect texture, and most of all, made a broth more flavorful than any other seafood stew I've made (or perhaps even tasted).



Desert was an assortment of offerings, including butterscotch pudding, pumpkin cheesecake, a sour cherry tart (it had some ridiculous French name that I can't recall now, but something like floucantie) and a chocolate soufflé. The tart and the soufflé were my favorite, but the cheesecake was not bad considering my aversion to pumpkin pie spices.


We had quite a bit of wine and even headed out briefly down the street to one of my friends' favorite beer bars. I at least got a taste of Halloween before leaving the country for a place that knows very little of jack-o-lanterns. It was the perfect way to spend the night before I left the U.S.


I arrived in Paraguay just in time for David's birthday. He has been bugging me for months that he wanted a strawberry cake. We had a slice of one at the expoferia where the producers of Paraguay's agricultural and manufactured goods come together to promote their products each year, and where a small-farmers' association was selling cake made from their strawberries. Admittedly, it was delicious, but David wanted me to buy one for my little niece's birthday even though the lady behind the counter clearly said that kids prefer dulce de leche cakes. At any rate, I knew I'd be in trouble if I didn't produce a strawberry cake for his birthday. Unfortunately, the bakery shop we always go to said they weren't making them anymore because strawberries were out of season (not entirely true, but perhaps they are too expensive in late season to make a cake without a prior order). Rather than losing an entire afternoon running around the entire city in 100-plus degree heat and potentially still coming up short, I decided that I would just make the cake myself. I went to the supermarket and very quickly found all of the ingredients necessary, including two cake pans that I was told I could not return if I found that I already had cake pans at home.

While not the most beautiful cake I've ever seen or made (and much less attractive than the ones you get a bake shops in Asunción), it was very tasty and a close enough approximation to David's dream cake that he was happy. It had mashed strawberries in the cake batter and was filled with strawberries and whipped cream inside and out.


We didn't actually get to eating the cake until the day after his birthday, because the night of his birthday I took him out for Japanese food. It was not bad considering that these particular sushi chefs and cooks were working so far from home, and, while it was hard to appreciate after having been in Japan so recently, it was a nice birthday dinner for David who after four months here was probably ready for something a little different. I'm curious to go back and try the meat dishes--beef being something also highly appreciated and well prepared by the Japanese but much more abundant in Paraguay than tuna or snapper (or than in Japan). So the next night we gathered my family for cake and a bilingual version of happy birthday.


Here is David blowing out the candle:

Kitchen Squatter

So it has been two months since I've had a kitchen that I could in any sense call my own. It's been four months since I had a kitchen that I could call entirely my own. So its been hard to do a lot of cooking, which means I've been ordering out and eating out way more than I like and spending way too much money to feed myself. But, I have made really good progress on my thesis proposal while I've been in Boston, and I suppose its worth it so that someday I can say I am no longer a student. Putting a thesis together is such a long and thankless process. It really is like Sisyphus and the boulder. Every time you write a new proposal and expend the enormous effort it takes to address whatever set of critiques you received on the last version, or accommodate new evidence, or place the study in relevant theoretical framework, it just creates new problems and new critiques and you have to do it again, and again, and again with no end. This has been the last year of my life, and, while I can say that I am definitely much closer to having a viable thesis project than I was a year ago, the work is very repetitive and it is hard to ever feel you have accomplished anything. Not feeling any sense of accomplishment is not so good for motivation. I think that is one reason that I like cooking so much. It is not unlike other creative projects like writing a novel or a song or making a sculpture, but instead of requiring enormous of sacrifice and patience, it is instantly gratifying. Even the most elaborate meals and dinner parties I've hosted have been planned at most a week in advance. I plan my weeknight dinners in front of the fridge and produce something really satisfying in an hour or so. Cooking gives me an opportunity to exercise my creativity, solve problems, and concentrate on something that gives immediate results. I think it is really therapeutic for someone like me, who has been investing in an uncertain future for years and has years to wait before making good on that investment, to have some part of each day where I feel so productive and useful. I noticed this especially during the few times that I have been able to cook in the last weeks. I hadn't realized how much I missed the familiar sequence of cooking's physical tasks: chopping the vegetables, frying the aromatics, browning the protein, adding the vegetables, seasoning with salt, deglazing the pan, adjusting the heat, stirring, finishing with fresh herbs; all of this has a logical and deeply comforting flow.

I stopped in Chicago to see my family for a few days on my way back from Japan last month. My mom made me an early thanksgiving dinner, since I'll be in Paraguay at the end of November. I've only ever missed thanksgiving once, and that was when I was doing my study abroad in Argentina. Being from a food-obsessed family, I would say that thanksgiving is probably the most important holiday for us, though any holiday is easily made into an excuse to do some serious cooking. I really love thanksgiving, I think it is the best American tradition (leaving aside the idealized vision it provides of Native Americans' relationship to their colonial intruders). No other holiday is more completely about family and sharing with those that mean most to you. I think it is really wonderful that we all get a day off work and school to do what we ought to do every day. Plus, my mom makes a pretty phenomenal turkey, actually two turkeys and either a pork or beef roast too, along with homemade dinner rolls that people demand year after year and pear and apple tarts made with homemade puff pastry. Each year, my tia Mai makes better mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes than I've ever tasted elsewhere and homemade mayonnaise to dress the sandwiches we make from the leftover turkey after getting back from day-after-thanksgiving shopping. Somehow, I didn't manage to get any pictures of the thanksgiving rehearsal my mom held for me, but it was very good. I'll have to plan thanksgiving for David and I and my family in Paraguay. It will be fun to cook my own thanksgiving dinner and to share these traditions with my extended family, but I know it will be a little sad to celebrate where the holiday doesn't have the same meaning.

I did take a picture of another meal we cooked while I was in Chicago to take care of my Mexican fix. I have way too much luggage to take back with me to Paraguay, but I'm still thinking I should buy a bag of Maseca to be able to make tortillas there. Either that, or I'm going to have to learn to make my own masa from raw corn, because there is really no mexican food to speak of (or to eat) in Paraguay. Don't tell the agricultural inspection service, but I took some poblano, jalapeño, tomatillo, and epazote seeds with me, and David supposedly planted some in the garden. I couldn't go a whole year without any mexican food. This dinner will have to tide me over until the plants start to bear fruit: steak tacos with homemade corn tortillas and homemade salsa, guacamole, and black bean salad.

I've been staying with one of David's friends and fellow clarinetists, Kristian, since I've been back in town. It's pretty far from any supermarkets though, but I managed to carry back some groceries on the T a few times and make some good meals. I made a pretty good African peanut stew that didn't get photographed unfortunately. But Kristian and his brother were pretty impressed, so you don't have to take my word that it was pretty good.

I did get a picture of this linguine with spicy sausage and tomato sauce. It was a good quick meal that used up the leftover ingredients from the African peanut stew.
Yesterday, I had my friend Melanie over for dinner and had a lot of fun cooking and drinking way too much of Kristian's dad's "Three-Buck Chuck." That small step up from Carlo Rossi makes all the difference. We quickly concluded that it was well worth all three of those bucks. After putting away for bottles between the three of us, we engaged in a bought unsuccessful intercontinental 'drunk dialing' unfortunately neither David nor our French friend Vincent answered their phone.

Dinner was wholewheat noodles with browned tofu, broccoli rabe, crimini mushrooms, and peanut sauce. Melanie said she was amazed at what can be done with a few ingredients. It was pretty good considering how improvised it was. I was just going to serve it with rice, but all we could find was super fancy rice at more than $10 for a small jar at Savenor's market in Beacon Hill where we stopped on our way to the T station. The noodles were even better I think, and the bitterness of the broccoli rabe was matched perfectly by the deeply toasted garlic and tempered by sweet and creamy peanut sauce.
Here is the basic recipe:

1 lbs. fresh wholewheat or buckwheat noodles
1 package firm tofu (you could also use chicken, but I think the flavor and texture of tofu are perfect in this).
6 cloves of garlic sliced thinly
Good Soy Sauce (I like San-J organic tamari or shoyu)
1 bunch broccoli rabe, chopped
1/3 cup dry white wine (old sour wine works well, because the sauce needs the acidity)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (shitakes, oyster, shimeji or other wild mushrooms would be good)
1/3-1/2 cup chunky 'natural' peanut better (the kind that separates when it sits and has no sugar)
1/2-1 cup reserved pasta cooking water
small bunch cilantro

Cut the tofu to desired size (I like larger rectangles) and brown well in some peanut oil. It browns much better if you don't move the pieces around at all until they are ready to flip. Once they are browned add a few table spoons of soy sauce (3). Set aside. Wipe out the pan and brown the garlic in some more peanut oil. Don't let it burn, but let it get a deep toasty golden. Add the mushrooms season with salt and saute until the mushrooms have released their liquids and it has evaporated. Add the broccoli rabe, and stir fry over very high heat, deglaze with the white wine and cover the saucepan to let the broccoli rabe steam until it is tender, take off the heat and add the tofu back in. Meanwhile cook the noodles in salted water. When you are ready to serve, add the peanut better to the broccoli rabe tofu mixture and add enough of the pasta cooking water to make a sauce of creamy consistency, it should not be too watery but if it is too thick it won't coat the noodles and other ingredients either. Toss with the noodles and garnish with chopped cilantro. I think I will experiment with adding some sugar to the peanut sauce if I make this again.

Here are Melanie and Kristian ready to pounce.
We also had a dessert course of a single cheese. I forget the name (I have to remember to save cheese labels so I can post my reviews!) but it was a great value. It was only $5 but a very tasty, soft french cows milk wrapped in chestnut leaves. It had a very creamy almost liquidy texture at room temperature, and a buttery flavor that was good with lingenberry jam as for dessert.
A timer shot of Melanie and I.

Bobby "El Gringo" Flay

So how is Bobby Flay's Spanish so horrendous, despite being the iron chef of southwest cuisine? I mean, I'm not asking for Rick Bayless-style painfully laborious attempts at phonetic authenticity, but come on, Flay sounds like the most contact he's had with Latin language and culture is the South Park Episode featuring Cartman's hand as Jenifer Lopez. I've always been irritated by people who draw too much attention to foreign words by over-pronouncing them and entirely switching accents mid-sentence, but there are ways to not entirely mispronounce Spanish words while still speaking English. I've watched too much food network this weekend . . .

Miserere Mei - 申し訳ありません｡

I'm so very sorry for being away so long. Traveling so much has taken its toll, and I have been very busy trying to get my dissertation proposal completed and presented. In reality, I didn't have sufficient internet access to post until I got to Boston, and was too overwhelmed with work until now to update. More about school later. First, let me catch everyone up on a month of absolutely wonderful eating.

Before I left Paraguay, we had a feijoada with my extended family. There was nothing fake about this joada. I had to prepare the beans in two different pots in order to make enough, and, while one pot didn't turn out quite right, the other pot turned out exactly like the feijoada that my Brazilian friend Ana made for her going away party in Cambridge and that both David and I have been dreaming about ever since. I hid the truth about the other pot from my cousin Mari, who is from bellavista--a city that lies on either side of the boarder separating the department of Amambay, Paraguay and Mato Grosso do Sul,Brazil--and whose house I am always eager to visit at meal time. But the truth is that the pot was neglected too long while I ran to the store to get mandioca and bread and it ran out of water and nearly getting scorched, thus never acquiring the thick creamy consistency that takes many, many hours to develop and makes this dish much more than Brazilian pork and beans. I'm making myself hungry writing about this!

Here is everyone at the table, waiting to eat and wanting desperately for David to finish taking the pictures.
Here is the plated feijoada with all of the appropriate side dishes, bread, rice, orange slices (apparently eaten to help digestion), collard greens, farofa (yuca flour toasted with garlic and butter), mandioca, and vinegary tomato-green pepper relish or molho de campanha (chimichurri in paraguay).
I then spent a very brief week in Boston, madly completing my Fulbright proposal and application before going to Japan. I was lucky enough to stay with my friends Abby and Sam. They might have gotten a hint about heirloom tomatoes from my posts in Paraguay, because they greeted me with a meal that would have satisfied a condemned man's last request for tomatoes: two salads of heirloom tomatoes, steamed mussels, and penne with peppers and sausage. You can see the pictures of this and the other excellent meals I've had at Sam and Abby's house on their food blog. An invitation to their kitchen is quite a treat. Sam has got a fantastic knack for planning impressive and very well balanced meals in which each element really compliments and enhances the others. He also has the kind of talent for plating and presentation that always makes you feel like a very special and honored guest.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, I wasted no time in satisfying my tremendous anticipation for two weeks of gastronomic exploration and discovery (oh wait, I was there for a workshop on sustainable forestry and regional development). I got to the hotel the first night after more than 16 hours of traveling and desperately in need of a shower. As I was headed to the elevator I was greeted by one of the program staff and invited to join the other participants for dinner. Despite the protests of my apparently starving dinner companions, I decided I should take said shower, as much for their sake as my own, and rushed back down to join them on what turned out to be a 40 minute hike through Shinagawa for Okonimyaki. Here we are waiting for our meal.
As you will see, the Japanese are very fond of table top preparation. The most special meals we had all involved cooking them yourself. Okonomiyaki are what Americans inevitably lack any word but 'pancakes' to describe, but what we would call a tortilla in south america, that are filled with all manner of different meats and vegetables but typically contain a lot of cabbage. You order what you like, and the waiter brings you a bowl that contains the requested ingredients. This bowl contains cabbage and cod roe, in addition to the eggs, flour, water, and other standard ingredients. You then blend all these ingredients and pour the batter onto the griddle.
Flipping such things is always a bit of a challenge, apparently even for Japanese, and okonomiyaki are quite thick and are still soft when they need flipping, so there were a couple Julia-Child-like repair operations, but the results were still delicious. After flipping, the pancakes are covered with a Japanese barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, seaweed powder, and bonito flakes. The Japanese love of mayonnaise, while sometimes manifesting itself in unexpected ways, warmed my heart and pleased my belly after living most of my life with what I can only describe as the absurd squeamishness that many Americans have regarding this delicious and indispensable condiment.

Here is a professional making some loaded okonomiyaki in asakusa.

Cynthia, a fellow MIT student and participant in the University of Tokyo Intensive Program on Sustainability, and I took advantage of our intense 12-hour jetlag to visit one of Tokyo's must sees (even for the non-food obsessed): Tsukiji fish market, the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world and one of the most economically and gastronomically impressive places I have ever been. The market was immense; really, "market" just does not convey the scale of this place which is for fish what Manhattan is for finance. I'm afraid my camera was running out of batteries at this point, so I didn't get too many good shots. But here is one of the hundreds of aisles that stretch the enormous distance of the main warehouse and are lined with stalls selling all that the world's oceans produced that day. We arrived a bit late (7:30am), but lifts and carts still zoomed about, narrowly dodging wide-eyed tourists like myself, and a flurry of packing and unpacking, gutting and cleaning, and buying and selling revealed the gears of the global fisheries market as thousands of individuals transacted so that the world's most piscivorous nation could satisfy its demand.

The fish seemed to be generally of very high quality and very fresh, and of tremendous variety as well.

Quite a large amount of octopus.


Outside of this main warehouse were other stalls selling produce, kitchen equipment, and other ingredients. It was like seeing a book or magazine article come to life for me, or stepping through the television screen into iron chef, where familiar characters like fresh wasabi, or matsutake mushrooms were suddenly within my reach.

Matsutake Mushrooms

It was very difficult for me to be in the world's marine garden of eden and know that I had no kitchen available to me and that I would not have an opportunity to cook. The pain was only assuaged by the knowledge that only a few feet away, my breakfast of the freshest and most authentic sushi of my life was hopefully waiting for me at one of the many tightly packed restaurants inside the market. Lacking any Japanese skills whatsoever, I had no choice but to order the 10 piece set and hope for the best. I was not disappointed. Except for a battleship sushi that overflowed a bit too much with its cargo of sea urchin roe, this was one the most delicious experiences I had while in Japan. The exquisite texture and flavor of the fish left no doubt about its freshness. The highlights included the creamy and delicate anago, or simmered salt-water eel (not the typically barbecued fresh-water unagi that is also common in Japan and readily available in the U.S.), the mackerel, and of course the fatty tuna. Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed in the restaurant for some reason.


That afternoon, the group of participants left for Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost major island, where the University of Tokyo Forest is located and where we would spend the two weeks of the program. My fears that they would either skimp on the food budget, as often happens in the U.S., or that they would somehow try to accommodate the very wide range of non-Japanese palates was quickly allayed, as even the lunch box we got before boarding the airplane contained a tasty assortment of sandwiches that were more high tea than gate gourmet.

Our first meal upon arriving at the university forest in Hokkaido was also impeccable for what was essentially cafeteria food. It included (from the bottom left) steamed salmon with shitake and inoki mushrooms, what I believe was spinach stuffed cabbage rolls, seafood and vegetable tempura, japanese pickes, a mixed salad, and tofu miso soup (not shown).
The next evening was the welcome party, which began with Mongolian hotpot and large amounts of beer and sake. The hotpot consisted of a dome-shaped grill surrounded by a broth-filled trough. slices of mutton are grilled on top, while cabbage, onions, beansprouts, peppers, and onions are cooked in the broth.
What appeared to be an uninspired desert turned out to be a life-altering experience. Hokkaido is japan's main agricultural area, and despite highly unfavorable conditions, its small farmers have survived and continue to compete with much cheaper imported products by forming production and marketing cooperatives and specializing in very high-quality high-value produce. One such product is melon. Mind you, I had had quite a lot to drink, but this was no ordinary cantaloupe. It was the perfect fruit. The platonic ideal of melonhood. It was sweet and perfumed, but not cloying; it was juicy but still rich and not watery, and above all, it had a texture unlike any melon I've ever tasted. Somehow firm and silky or at the same time, not tough or squishy or slimy as melon is apt to be, but imparting a luxurious sensation as you bit through the flesh and swirled it around your tongue. Clearly, I enjoyed this more than anyone else.



Another local specialty is lavender, and, while the fields were not in bloom, a lavender theme park did have fields planted with other beautiful flowers and had the broadest variety of lavender products imaginable, including lavender-flavored ice cream.


My delight continued the next day as I opened my first Bento box, and marveled at what an ordinary lunch is like in Japan. To begin with, the rice by itself is excellent, and though I am not Japanese, I suspect its worth the tremendous amount of subsidies payed out by the Japanese government each year, largely to farmers in Hokkaido, so that this product of paramount cultural importance is not obliterated by the free market (liberal economists be damned!). As I write about the food in Japan, I am starting to believe that Japanese food is all about texture, because, again, the texture of rice in Japan is incomparable, even to the Japanese rice sold in the U.S. The box of rice is accompanied by a multitude of side dishes, which typically included a piece of grilled fish, something breaded and fried or what Japanese call 'cutlet,' some pickles, a salad, and some kind of fish roe. While it was undoubtedly better than peanut better and jelly everyday, I'm sorry to say my enthusiasm did wane a bit after about two weeks of nothing but bento for lunch, and, while I quite enjoy fish roe in many applications, I doubt that I'll ever have the Japanese appetite for it.

Another Japanese meal that I can't say I was enthusiastic about was oden. It is a rather bland assortment of vegetables, bean curd, and egg boiled in dashi and served with miso. I had it a second time from a street vendor in Tokyo with a group from the program, where it included fish cakes.

We had one free day during the course of the program, and I spent it as you might expect, eating and relaxing. The day began at the Hokkaido wine festival, where the regions wine-makers showcase and celebrate their produce. I can't say Hokkaido would be my top pick for wine-tasting, but some of it was surprisingly agreeable, and I would have had much more if I was not still getting over the miserable cold I caught in Paraguay. I also had an incredible bowl of soba noodles, which I maintain were handmade. Some of my companions laughed at this proposition, but, again, the texture was remarkable. The noodles' rough edge and their graininess suggested to me that this was not instant soba, and after all, they do grow buckwheat only a few kilometers away.

Contemplating the noodles.


I then very nearly won two bottles of local Furano wine, because there was a contest for the person who had come from farthest away. It was between me and two fellow participants, Niklas from Sweden, and Cau from Vietnam. Here we are being interviewed.



Sweden and Massachusetts are very nearly equidistant from Tokyo, at least in terms of flying time, and I felt a bit dishonest saying I had come form Paraguay since I technically did stay for four days in Boston. So Niklas was deemed the winner, getting two bottles of wine as well as his name and picture in the paper. I lost my chance at minor celebrity, but didn't miss out entirely on the wine as it later formed part of my final meal in Japan.

We stayed at the wine festival a bit longer in order to watch taiko drumming presentation


and then went off to find some lunch. The plan was sushi, but the wait was too long so we settled for a ramen shop, specializing in 'cheese ramen.' Hokkaido is especially known for its dairy products, including milk, custards, and cheese. Tempting as cheese ramen sounds, after a week, I was beginning to crave something spicier than standard Japanese food and went with the 'spicy' ramen, with korean chili sauce.


After the wine festival and getting lunch, our third order of business was to take the train to a nearby town for a highly relaxing afternoon at the natural hotspring. Niklas, Cau, and I enlisted one of our Japanese classmates to help plan our free day, and no one could have planned a better day for me. I have always wanted to visit a hot spring and had suspected that such natural luxury would be highly agreeable to my personality. After finally visiting one, I've got to say that the availability of hotsprings must make a substantial contribution to the Japanese quality of life that is not reflected in their GDP. This particular onsen consisted of ten different pools: a hot pool, an outdoor pool of the same temperature, a very hot pool, an extremely cold pool (which I did not enjoy), a slightly sulfurous cave pool, a pool with tiny bubbles, a sauna, an underwater recliner with massaging jets, large ceramic urns that held a single person and were the water was somehow highly buoyant, and--probably my favorite-- a stone stool above which a heavy stream of hot water fell upon your shoulders massaging your back. Access to all this cost less than $10. No clothing is allowed in the bath, so naturally, I took no pictures. Here we are with our Japanese friend Eiji on our way to the onsen.



Strangely enough, the hotspring was located in a suburban strip mall, so before catching the train back to Furano we killed sometime at a large supermarket, another element of a free day made especially for me. I'm probably the only person who could find an hour too little time at supermarket even when I wasn't there to shop. Indeed, my friends had to drag me out so we would make the train in time. The fish section was impressive

and included whole Alaskan king crabs, which I'd only seen in pictures.
We then returned to Furano and the sushi place that we had abandoned at lunch time. There was still a bit of a wait, but none of us wanted too pass it up a second time. Conveyor belt sushi is apparently the cheaper alternative to a true sushi bar, but I enthusiastically gorged myself on sushi of much higher quality and much lower cost than you'd find in the U.S. I always say that cheap or even moderately priced sushi isn't worth it, because you get what you pay for, and if you are going to eat sushi you might as well cough up what a delicious meal is really worth. Except in Japan, where all the excellent sushi I could eat (well actually, i could have eaten this sushi until it killed me) cost me less than $17.

We had the privileged position in the shop, the first booth next to the wall, so we could be the first to pull whatever we liked from the conveyor belt, which included the widest variety that I've been able to try in a single meal: yellowtail, tuna, shrimp, squid, fried octopus, snapper, tuna with grilled mayonnaise, egg, abalone . . . At the end of the meal, the waitress just adds up the number of plates of each color, representing the different price categories, and totals your bill.
The Japanese clearly share my priorities in life, because the program ended with another awesome party centered around Korean barbecue. Each table had a pit filled with charcoal and covered by a grate upon which we grilled the combination of chicken and beef skewers, whole scallops, prawns, and tripe they brought out to us. Generally not a big fan of the cow's digestive organs, I was surprised to really enjoy the small intestine that we call chinchulín in Paraguay.The grill was very hot, and the room was filled with them, so you couldn't help but consume tremendous amounts of the incredibly refreshing and constantly flowing beer, and the mood became very festive very quickly.





After returning to Tokyo, we had one last outing all together to a Persian restaurant, which can only be described as the most insane dining experience of my entire life. The restaurant's proprietor ran about the restaurant yelling at his guests to eat more, literally pelting food at us, at one point placing a chicken in front of me, yelling violently and incomprehensively to me to give it back, and serving a portion of it to a separate party of guests at another table before bringing the chicken back to me, dragging unwilling guests by their ankles on the ground to dance with the belly dancer, lifting a friend of ours onto his shoulders and taking an inexplicable and uncomfortable liking for my MIT friend cynthia.

After the program ended I spent a couple of extra days in Tokyo and enjoying the excellent hospitality of my new friend Yosuke. I had an awesome time and made the most of the little bit of time I had there because Yosuke was willing to show me around. Here we are at Asakusa, a temple and tourist destination in Tokyo


where they sell lots of Japanese souvenirs and snacks.

Here we saw gentlemen hand making little cakes filled with red bean. It was amazing how quickly he moved and how coordinated the whole process was. They were delicious hot off the griddle.

Despite their less than appealing appearance, even more delicious were little fritters filled with red bean. They were like jelly donuts, deliciously crisp and sweet and still hot from the oil.


Yosuke and I also visited a sushi restaurant where we had an awesome rice bowl topped with anago and wasabi.

bonito tataki,


and an assortment of hand formed sushi.

This is, of course, not a food blog, but a cooking blog, meaning that it's not really about the meals I eat but about the meals that I cook. So I'll end my post with pictures of the way I ended my trip. The only meal I cooked the whole time was for Yosuke and his friends to thank him for his friendship and hospitality while I was in Tokyo. I wanted to make pasta with pesto, but fresh herbs are scarce and outrageously expensive, so I went with a seafood pasta with mojo de ajo. To my surprise, the ajo in Japan was unlike any garlic I had ever seen. Unlike garlic in the US and latin america, it didn't have any individual 'teeth,' consisting instead of one large clove. For this application it worked perfectly, saving a great deal of peeling time and energy.
Here was the final product, which contained copious amounts of cuttle fish, grilled shrimp, and shimeji and king oyster mushrooms. Niklas also brought his bottle of prize furano wine, and we made sangría to go with the Mexican theme.
Here we are posing for the camera at my final celebration in Tokyo.

This was an unbelievable experience. I only wrote about the food-related aspects here, but I am so very grateful for all the friends I made and for the chance to engage with students from all over Asia and the world about sustainable development. It really did remind me why I do what I do and convinced me that there is value in a Ph.D. in social science--something I was sorely in need of at this stage in my education. It is hard to keep motivated and stay focussed, and my time in Japan has definitely helped feel prepared for the hard times ahead.

Thanks to everyone who gave me this opportunity!