Lady GaGa Excited by Blenders, Big Knives, Teasing Kimutaku, Flirting with Tsuyoshi, Japanese Food

Yup, she was on SMAP Bistro! And gets all interactive while the guys are cooking....



Here she explains why she's so into Hello Kitty--and shows off how much she likes spicy food! Man, Shingo steals the scene at the end of this clip in his usual costumed appearance...this time as Shingo-panda!



So do Kimutaku and Goro win or Shingo and Tsuyoshi?



I won't give it away because I'm too hungry!

Cuteness for Lunch

Here's a pile of photos of really cute lunches for kids. Japanese, of course.

Japanese Fortune Cookies Made in America

Reporting in today's New York Times, Jennifer Lee informs us that Chinese fortune cookies originated in Japan:

Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies. . . .

As she researched the cookie’s Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Ms. Nakamachi found was an illustration from a 19th-century book of stories, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.”

A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called, variously, tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), and suzu senbei (“bell crackers”).

The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads “tsujiura senbei” and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.

The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.

So how'd Japanese fortune cookies end up in America as Chinese fortune cookies? WWII, that's how:

The cookie’s path is relatively easy to trace back to World War II. At that time they were a regional specialty, served in California Chinese restaurants, where they were known as “fortune tea cakes.” There, according to later interviews with fortune cookie makers, they were encountered by military personnel on the way back from the Pacific Theater. When these veterans returned home, they would ask their local Chinese restaurants why they didn’t serve fortune cookies as the San Francisco restaurants did.

And so they spread across the country from the West. However:

But prior to World War II, the history is murky. A number of immigrant families in California, mostly Japanese, have laid claim to introducing or popularizing the fortune cookie. Among them are the descendants of Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant who oversaw the Japanese Tea Garden built in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the 1890s. Visitors to the garden were served fortune cookies made by a San Francisco bakery, Benkyodo.

A few Los Angeles-based businesses also made fortune cookies in the same era: Fugetsudo, a family bakery that has operated in Japantown for over a century, except during World War II; Umeya, one of the earliest mass-producers of fortune cookies in Southern California, and the Hong Kong Noodle company, a Chinese-owned business. . . .

Ms. Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chop suey restaurants, which served Americanized Chinese cuisine. The Umeya bakery distributed fortune cookies to well over 100 such restaurants in southern and central California. . . .

Early on, Chinese-owned restaurants discovered the cookies, too. Ms. Nakamachi speculates that Chinese-owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries all over the West Coast closed as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps.

Miracle Mimika Cures Sinus and Ear Infections

Or so we've heard. Actually, the Full Metal Alchemist and I just like to cook to this anime cooking show's theme song!



Oh, and onechan has the sinus infection and imoto has the ear infection.

Never Underestimate the Power of a Bad Haircut

So onechan has had the same fever as imoto had a little while ago (minus the diarrhea and vomiting, thankfully), and even though it left her little sister on the third day last week, I chalk up the fact that it left onechan on the exact same schedule to the bad haircut I gave her in the middle of the night last night. What could I do? She was revved up from the medicine and was complaining that her hair was getting in her eyes--in fact, it was her idea that I cut her bangs. I cut them just the tiniest bit short. Yeah, yeah, did I mention it was the middle of the night? It was kind of like that episode of The Powerpuff Girls when Bubbles and Buttercup accidentally destroy Blossom's hair, without the multiple attempts to fix the original mistake. At least I had enough sense to know to stop. The Full Metal Archivist did what she could to salvage onechan's hair in the morning, but it's still pretty bad. Bad enough to scare away whatever was causing her fever.

I'm not going to show the haircut, not just because I want to preserve onechan's privacy, but mostly because if I leave a visual record of it anywhere she's likely in the future to be much less accepting of it than she has been today. In fact, she's been in a great mood, playing for hours at baking and planning a birthday party with the FMA's best friend visiting from the west coast. As a preemptive peace offering to onechan, then, I offer the following Ojamajo Doremi version of the ABC song. Don't watch it on an empty stomach!

And Zen Mai Samurai?!

Wow!



This isn't even one of the very best episodes, but it includes the opening and closing theme songs. Plus you can get to a lot of other episodes uploaded by michellewie1011 through this one....

Pond Scum Tuesday

With a reminder to get the old homestead ready for the winter:

bzzzzzz yum

monarch

Value (Meals)

At a diner on the rez to the north of us on Labor Day, the tsuma, onechan, imoto, and I were able to finish exactly half of the two pancake meals we ordered (one with ham and eggs on the side, one without), knowing how huge and heavy the pancakes at that place were. We spent just under $9 and still haven't finished the leftovers.

At a cheap bento place across the street from us in Fukuoka, we used to spend about the same amount of money to feed all four of us at lunchtime. Rather than just three kinds of foods, we usually got 3-5 different kinds of meats/fish, 5-7 different kinds of vegetables, and 2-4 different kinds of carb-laden things. So the volume of food was much less, but the variety of tastes and nutrients was much higher.

Perhaps this explains why we felt heavy in Japan and feel thin in the U.S.?

No Comment

That Mostly Harmless jinx is pretty powerful. Not only is it hurting my three favorite golfers at the State Farm Classic, it's also given everyone in the Constructivist household (except imoto, thankfully) a bad stomach bug--or maybe just food poisoning. Either that, or my posts on imoto and onechan over at CitizenSE this week have literally worried us sick....

Just Wondering

I've been to an aquarium in Kagoshima, one in Fukuoka, and now one in Tokyo (where yesterday we met one of onechan's best friends from Fukuoka whose family was visiting family in the neighborhood), so I can't say this is true of every one in Japan, but it's enough to form a recognizable pattern. Which is: every single one of their on-site restaurants features a predominantly seafood menu. Why is that?

Behold the Power of Imagination!

So when onechan was little, she'd eat all the foods we'd offer her. She's since developed taste preferences, which is natural and normal. But we found out at dinner the other day that it's not always about taste alone. She used to like kinoko (mushrooms). Then she stopped. I finally asked her why and she told me she was afraid of them. I asked her why and she mentioned Gankochan. It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually I recalled that there's a kind of "bad witch" character who dresses like a mushroom and tries to turn the main characters into mushrooms. Mystery solved. Plus we were able to convince her to give kinoko another try--and she likes them again!

This is not an isolated incident, by the way. When we were waiting at an airport play area, she was afraid of one of the animal-pillow-things because it was shaped like a wani (alligator), as I mentioned here earlier. More recently, she was afraid to do one of the mazes in a book her grandma sent her because there was a wani in it.

I think Emily Dickinson was onto something.