Two more finishes

I did finish the fabric postcard for Grandma yesterday.  It is July 1st in Japan but it is June 30 in California still so I will get the card into the mail this morning.  I don't think I'm going to get to the New York Beauty block on time however...

My postcard could have been centered a bit better...  Oh well.  The pattern is care of Allie Oops...  I copied her co-designer, Jenni's idea of using beads for the sun.

No word recently from Marcy but I just sent her a message to ask about Grandma today.  I suppose no news is good news.  Marcy always says my mother has 9 lives as there have been numerous times when things didn't look good but she bounces back again. 

Yesterday I also finished up the trumpet brooch that I was making for Yuma-kun.  I did cut out the yellow felt between the cording just because I was trying to be "authentic".  It worked. 

I am very pleased with it!  The brooch turned out BIG but Yuma-kun is a big guy so I guess that is okay.

Finished just in time to give it to Yuma-kun last night.  Does he look happy?  He said he was and he marveled over the way it sparkled so I guess I was.

Did you know that if you shoot a picture out of focus the sparkles will show...

My entryway this morning.  Now why all the cat cards on the cupboard?  Give a guess.

Isn't this card just the cutest!!! 

Back to sewing projects

The Whole30 is over and maybe I'm back to regular life...  I'm going to have to focus on thrift this month as I went way over my shopping budget trying to make food interesting last month.

Yesterday I went out to lunch with some friends... the first time in a month.  And I immensely enjoyed my french style meal but managed to decline dessert.

After lunch the three of us headed over to the fabric shop to get some ideas on another project for the summer.  My two friends like to have a hand project that they can just pick up but recently they have been practicing their machine quilting.  The request was for something that they can carry with them.  Hand project, summer...  How about ONE Hawaiian quilt block?  It will be a new technique for them and depending on how they take to hand applique it will keep us all busy a few months.  I can imagine us finishing up a block in around December...  A Hawaiian quilt block might not match the season though Hawaii has winters too (not like the one we will be facing!)  Anyway, we will feel summery while working on our blocks.

Kathy Nakajima, the quilt designer who introduced Hawaiian quilting to Japan, has her own line of fabrics and my friends and I spent quite some time fingering the different shades of dyed looking fabrics.  One friend decided to make her block using two solids.  One friend decided to make her block using two dyed panels and I decided to make my block using a solid (with a bit of leafyness) and a dyed panel.  We'll see what we come up with!

Tetsu enjoyed his cold tofu with last night's dinner.  A few months ago I had bought these cute tofu stamps... especially made for serving cold tofu with soy sauce.  They are much like cookie cutters yet they don't cut through anything, they just make dents when pressed into the tofu.  And then the dents fill with the brownish soy sauce bringing out the design.  In this case a cat.  Just what Tetsu wants!  Cute tofu! 

(There is a similar gadget for stamping bread...  after toasting everything else is brown and the imprint is white.  Photo from the Internet.)

On the docket today is finishing the fabric post card for my mother and the trumpet brooch for Yuma-kun.

Whole30 FINISHED!!!!!

Yes, well, we did finish the Whole30 and we did survive.  What impact that will have on our health is still unknown.

Tetsu joyfully came back from the pool last night and from finally weighing in.  Checking one's weight is a no-no while on the Whole30.  He said he lost 4.5 kilos over the month...  Which is about 10 pounds.  I still claim that the purpose was not to lose weight but to become healthier and this morning he went off to get a blood test... results next week

Our last fully Whole30 meal last night was made with no thought to our budget.  I splurged and roasted a pork loin marinating it from the night before and roasting it for 4 hours so that it could be pulled apart easily with a fork and served that way.  It was delicious but I'm not used to spending so much money on one dish...  about $8 for a pork loin for two?  Is that a lot? 

As you may have noticed over the month, in Japan we eat a lot of pork.  Beef is just too expensive and so most of my main dishes are made with thinly sliced pork or with chicken.  Even ground meat is a mixture of pork and beef.  Usually I think of meat as a "seasoning" and a little bit will go a long way but last night I tried my best to make a feast Whole30 style and served half a melon to Tetsu for dessert which in itself is costly...  Let's see... nearly $7 for a melon?  Again, I don't know if I'm just stingy or if things really are expensive.

So our final meal was Pulled pork loin marinated in onion, garlic, olive oil, chicken broth, orange juice, lime juice, chili powder, paprika, cumin and oregano.  Salt and pepper of course and all was whizzed in the blender (not the pork) and then roasted for the four hours.  The last hour I threw in potatoes, carrots and onions and reminisced about how my mother sometimes served pot roast.  I haven't had pot roast in nearly 40 years!  My side dish was zoodles...  Which were just shavings off a zucchini boiled and buttered. 

For our first regular meal... as we reintroduce foods, I have bought tofu and tonight I will make a big pot of vegetable miso soup and serve Tetsu his beloved cold tofu with soy sauce.  He has really missed that this month...  Anything else on the menu will not veer too far from Whole30 but already Tetsu is talking about where we should go OUT to eat this weekend. 

We did indeed survive!  (And yes, Tetsu has asked me to continue making him obentos for lunch.)

Another beading project

I spent some time with my beading friends yesterday.  I guess I'm becoming a beader...  At least while I have another project at hand.  I really need to get back to my own WIPs...  This IS the end of the month and I have yet to get a post card made for my mother or work any more on my Leaders/Enders quilt...  I was hoping to get another New York Beauty block done this month too...

Back to beading.  I showed off my beetle brooch to Yuma-kun and he thought it so neat.  In fact that beetle brooch has been noticed by numerous children at the crosswalk too because I've pinned it to my uniform.  A large bug draws children more than a pretty flower...  Yuma-kun admired my beetle and then asked...

"Could you make me one?  Better yet, could you make me a trumpet brooch?"

How he got from beetle to trumpet I don't know but he does play the trumpet in the school band and I do recall he wanted to pin a ribbon or a badge or something onto his uniform when he was performing last year.

I have no idea how to make a trumpet brooch but as I love Yuma-kun I've kept his request in the back of my mind and yesterday I went about designing a trumpet brooch.  I had hoped for silverish or gold but was limited or maybe rewarded with my friends' supplies of beads in other colors.  Gradually my beading turned into a green color scheme which I guess is okay too.

I'm not finished with this yet but I'll try to get the rest of that cording area filled in today.  The trick is going to be cutting out the yellow spaces within the trumpet shape.  And where am I going to put a brooch clasp?  Everything is hit and miss with me.

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Last night's dinner, day 29 of Whole30 was...

1)  Baked salmon.  The recipe called this baked barbecue salmon but I don't know where they got the barbecue part...  The seasonings called for lemon and cumin which I don't use a lot and Tetsu asked what the flavor was... which I take to mean he wasn't too fond of the seasonings.  He ate it all though.  Of course, my leaving out the brown sugar made the recipe no longer whatever it was supposed to be anyway.

2)  Store bought yaki-tori.  This is a life saver for one extra dish when I need it.  Yaki-tori comes in salt flavorings (the one I choose) and sweet soy sauce flavorings which is probably more popular.

3)  Another green salad with ume boshi dressing

4)  Pumpkin, mushrooms and pork saute.  Basically I am throwing a couple of choices of vegetables and either chicken, pork or hamburger into it and sauteeing it all in either olive oil, sesame seed oil or coconut oil.  And then salt and pepper or nampura.  There are any number of combinations that can be made with this formula.

5)  And Kimchee again!  Last week our church had a bazaar and two different people made huge batches of kimchee.  There was a table with pound cakes and with cookies too much as in American church bazaars but the kimchee table was very popular!  Of course, as the pastor pointed out, the whole church smelled as if we'd just stepped into Korea but since most people love kimchee I don't think anyone minded.
 

Visiting Obaachan

Tetsu and I try to visit his mother every weekend.  Tetsu prefers that I come along because she complains less when I am there and I guess I'm better at keeping the conversation going than he is.  That must be normal.  I know Marcy, my sister-in-law can keep my mother occupied with conversation for quite a while but my brother says practically nothing....

Recently we take our home made obentos for ourselves to Obaachan's apartment and pick her up something on the way.  As much as Tetsu appreciates my obentos, he doesn't think they are particularly good for other people... (We were visiting with an American friend LAST Sunday and I suggested I make an extra obento for our friend...  "That's our medicine practically!  He needs a filling obento from the tried and true obento shop.")  Tetsu's mother too can't get around the fact that there is no rice in our obentos.  How can one live without rice two or even three times a day?  Talking about our obentos alone give Obaachan something to marvel about for 15 minutes.

Yesterday we had a specific purpose.  To introduce Leiya's boyfriend to Obaachan.

A few weeks ago I realized I could Facetime with Takumi when I wasn't even at home.  I had been visiting Obaachan and I sent Takumi a message that if he was available to talk, we'd like him to call me.  He did and I handed Obaachan the iPhone.  She didn't quite understand what was going on.  Was I showing her a picture of Takumi?  A moving picture of Takumi?  Was this a video?

"What is this?  That's Takumi there.  What's he saying?  Can Takumi hear me?  How can he do that?"

The concept of on-line and Internet and Wi-fi is getting beyond me even so I really couldn't explain it to her.

"Obaachan!  Just talk!"

She was quite upset when we finished.

"Why have you been keeping this from me!?  Why didn't you let me talk to Takumi before?!  I want to talk to Leiya too!"

I had to defend myself saying that I had just recently gotten this iPhone, and learned how to do it myself.

So I had told Leiya that we wanted to connect her with Obaachan some Sunday afternoon, our time.  Unfortunately for Leiya, the time difference is 13 hours so our 1:00 pm becomes 12:00 midnight for her.  Still, yesterday morning she texted me that her boyfriend was visiting Ohio from Michigan and that she would like to introduce him to Obaachan.  After church we rushed over to Obaachan's apartment.

I was even able to bring along our iPad which has no Wi-fi, and sync it with my iPhone's hot spot.  I'm rather proud of myself for that maneuver...  And Tetsu was very impressed!  So Obaachan was able to see Leiya and Tony on the larger iPad screen rather than the smaller iPhone screen (Obaachan's eyesight isn't so great.)

We had a wonderful time talking with Tony again (we got to meet him a few years ago when he visited California with Leiya) and Obaachan was so pleased to see him and Leiya together.

"Such a kind looking young man.  Leiya looks very happy."

It was a great day for Obaachan yesterday!

*****************

I am getting pretty good at throwing dinners together at the last minute.  True I had a menu in mind... for a main dish but I hadn't thought farther than that...  Planning is my downfall.  Whole30's dinner for Day 28 was....

YES!!!  DAY 28!!!  I had two Day 25s recorded last week!!!  HORRORS!!!  I certainly don't want to do this any longer than I have to!!!  So yesterday was 28 folks!!!

Anyway...  Day 28 was...

  1)  Stuffed peppers.  This was from the Whole30 cookbook and it was delicious.  I didn't have butternut squash as required (I don't know if we can get butternut squash) but I did have an extra eggplant.  Ground meat, onions, shiitake mushrooms, no kale so I used Komatsuna a Japanese green, simmered that up with cumin, chili powder, tomato paste and paprika and stuffed the pepper and baked it all.  Tetsu declared it restaurant worthy!

2)  With that I shredded up some potatoes and hash browned them.

3)  I was getting tired of green salad so I chopped up some kimchee, added chopped cucumbers, chopped onions and chopped tomatoes.  I added some sesame seed oil and the kimchee salad was delicious.

Not a lot on the menu but it was filling.

A walk in the green

I'm sort of in a rush this morning.  Lot's of photos, not much talk.

I took Choco for an hour's walk on Friday around noon and stopped to take one photo every 10 minutes with a couple extra photos thrown in.  In order...

12:53
Leaving my immediate neighborhood Choco and I get to the main road.  As you can see, it isn't very main.  At this time of day not many cars going by though in the morning when the children are going to school there are enough cars that it is difficult for the children to cross.  No stoplight nor stop sign so they have to wait for a break in the cars.  That's how I got started being a crosswalk guard. Stopping traffic along this road.  (And past the forest there and under a tunnel we get to the school so I'm still stopping traffic along this road.)

1:03
We turned left into the forest and road gets narrower.  Cars can't pass each other along this road and they have to turn out onto the edge or back up to get around each other.  There are farms and another small neighborhood made up of about 10 houses here.

1:06
Ah!  But two minutes later Choco and I go past four or five hot houses where the farmer is growing Rindo flowers.  These are dark blue or light blue or white and they are very popular in Ikebana and even decorating family Buddhist altars.  I popped my head into one of the hot houses to take a photo.  No farmer around though.

1:12
Choco and I turned down a narrower road which is really only used by tractors and farmers checking their fields.  On one side of the road is a small stream, on the other side, layers and layers of rice fields.

1:17
Just for some color here.  The wild lilies are starting to bloom.  Next week the lilies should line the whole stream!

1:23
More green.  Green is supposed to be relaxing for the brain.  If so, we are VERY relaxed.

1:25
Past a corn field with young corn growing.  No ears yet though...  Just pretty leaves waving in the wind.

1:32
A look at one of the factories dotting the countryside.  This is actually quite near my house...  Just across that first main highway.  It is a lumber mill an there are quite a lot of trucks carrying lumber in all directions every evening.

1:45
And back to home sweet home.  Not quite an hour's walk but we added quite a few steps to my pedometer.  Met not a single car nor person during the whole walk!

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Whole30's dinner for Day 26 was

1)  Pork with peppers, red onions and shiitake mushrooms.  I sauteed this in Yuzukosho which is a citrus and pepper mixture.  We are getting pretty tired of salt pepper or curry flavors.
2)  Eggplant pickles
3)  Green salad with walnuts and home made mayonnaise mixed with... curry powder.
4)  Chicken chowder soup.  Which was good but pretty colorless and blah.  Cauliflower and broccoli stems and onions and mushrooms etc which I simmered in chicken broth and coconut milk and then blended up.  I added shredded chicken and sweet potatoes and green onions but it wasn't chunky enough and as I say, pretty colorless.
 

Two finishes!

I have two wall hanging quilts that are ready to go to their new homes.

Thursday I got the binding onto the Dodekula quilt that I've been making for Takumi.  The fabrics I bought at M and L's while I was in California in March and I paper pieced the flimsy while I was still in California.  I started hand quilting this at the beginning of June I think and finished that last Friday.  The black area isn't quilted at all.  What do you think?  I sort of didn't want to disturb the colorful sphere floating in black space...  I tried extended lines just to hold the black down but I did think they were distracting...  I guess I'll send this as is and at some later date if I think it needs more quilting I can do it then.

I proudly put this up on the living room wall to photograph it and left it up till Tetsu got home.  Did he notice?  No, he did not.  I didn't say anything and left it up another day.  Still no comment.  But yesterday Takumi Facetimed me and as I walked through the living room holding my iPhone and talking to him he says,

"You finished the Dodekula!  It looks good."

Great son, to notice the quilt just as I passed by it on the stairway!  This morning I finally told Tetsu to look at the wall.

"Oh...  You finished the quilt."

You would think that something so bright would hit him in the face but it didn't.

I also spent some time machine quilting a very small 8 inch square (with borders it is larger) from McKenna's patterns.  Mrs. O made this same quilt last year and she put it up in her entryway.  She has a friend who keeps admiring it so Mrs. O asked if she could make the same wall hanging for her friend.  Mrs. O did all the cutting out and collaging.  I did the quilting on the raw edged applique pieces.

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Whole30's Day 25 dinner was,

1)  Steamed chicken with tomatoes and grilled shiitake mushrooms.  I drizzled it with homemade mayonnaise.

2)  Poke (fish salad)  This is supposedly Hawaiian and it can easily be made in Japan because of the readily available tuna sashimi.  I bought chunks of sashimi and chopped it up a bit more.  I added the garnished raw daikon which always comes with sashimi.  The daikon is shredded into threads.  I added the burdock leaf in the sashimi package and the parsley that is usually decoration.  Into that I chopped cucumbers and green onions and then flavored with salt and sesame seed oil and nampura.  I sprinkled sesame seeds over all of that and set it in the refrigerator for about half an hour.  Tetsu loves this...  especially because I didn't add avocado as I usually do (forgot to buy the avocado).  Practically anything can be added to this salad...  Red onions, sea weed, lime, chili.

3)  Balsamic sweet potatoes and zucchini.  This was supposed to be balsamic sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts but no brussels sprouts...  I baked rounds of zucchini, red onion and sweet potatoes in the oven with olive oil and then drizzled balsamic vinegar simmered with orange juice.  The balsamic vinegar alone is a bit strong.  Tasty and sweet!

Tetsu and I have been talking about the Whole30.  He LIKES it!  Did I ever think I'd hear those words?  He says he could continue on this way another month...  He feels lighter, better.  He says that psychologically he feels good about himself whether because of the diet change or just because he knows he's doing good things for his body.  Another factor is that he gets a jolt of love from me every lunch time when he opens up his obento box...  Just the fact that I've gone out of my way to make him a lunch everyday must make him feel loved.

Aches are NOT gone however... though his knee pain has reduced...  Tetsu says he doesn't grunt and groan anymore when bending over or picking things up.  He still hasn't weighed himself so whether he's actually lost weight or not is a question...  That will come next Wednesday.

SOOOO.....  I have offered to continue making Tetsu obentos after the Whole30 is over.  I don't know if he's going to take me up on it.  I asked to be relieved from cooking duty at least once a week though just to give me a breather.  Cooking dinner 7 days a week plus 7 lunch boxes has been challenging to say the least.  We will have to find us some "clean(er) eating" restaurants.  Or Tetsu could take over cooking on the weekends... but I don't think that is going to happen.

Four more days to go!

Family History

Though I think I have written about my grandfather a few years ago... several years ago, I thought I'd post a bit about him today.  I'll devote this post to him because a friend of mine, after reading yesterday's post, went online and found some information about my grandfather that I hadn't been aware of.

My grandfather was born in Japan into a family of 11 children and I think he was the youngest.  His name was Shinzo Ohki though I'm sorry to say I don't know how to write his name's characters in the Chinese way...  Japanese uses Chinese characters and any number of choices of characters might be used for his name...

My grandfather went to America at the age of 17 working as a ship-hand and he arrived in Anchorage where he became a houseboy for an American family.  The family moved to Indiana and my grandfather went with them and he was enrolled in the community high school in Columbia City, Indiana.  Later he went to a college in New York and studied business.

At some point my grandfather returned to Japan to pick up a bride his family had chosen for him (I am somewhat pleased to note that he PICKED UP his bride rather than had her sent to America where Japanese immigrants would wait on the docks with pictures of their wives-to-be, thus the term Picture Brides).  Of course this was an arranged marriage and my grandfather's one request was that the bride be able to speak English.  My grandmother had taught English after attending an elite women's university in Japan.

Back in Indiana my grandfather started a soy sauce business  (I think he had spent some of the time when he went to back to Japan getting instructed in soy sauce making... so maybe his trip back was more practical than romantic) and then he began manufacturing soy sauce in the small town of Columbia City.

And yesterday, this is what my friend sent me after she Googled History of Soy Sauce Production in America.

The third earliest known manufacturer of soy sauce (actually shoyu) in North America was the Oriental Show-You Company, which began production in Columbia City, Indiana in 1924. The company had been started in 1918 in Detroit by Shinzo Ohki, a Japanese man, who began by importing shoyu and tea from Japan. In 1922 Mr. Ohki went to Japan to learn the method for making soy sauce, then late that year he moved his business to Columbia City and by 1924 was making shoyu, along with mung bean sprouts, Chow Mein noodles, Chop Suey, and Jigg's Corn Beef and Cabbage. The company was quite small, making about 12,000 gallons of shoyu a year; this was sold mostly in the Midwest, and only east of the Mississippi River. In 1932 Mr. Esta Keirn joined the company and soon became the second Caucasian shoyu brewmaster in the Western world. In 1946 the firm published a 15-page booklet entitled "Oriental Recipes," showing how to use shoyu. In 1963 Beatrice Foods (which had sold La Choy HVP soy sauce since the early 1930s) acquired the company, and Mr. Keirn stayed on to supervise production of Beatrice's first fermented shoyu, sold under the La Choy label. 

From: History of Soy Sauce, Shoyu, and Tamari - Page 7  by William Shurtleff and Akiko AoyagiA Chapter from the Unpublished Manuscript, History of Soybeans andSoyfoods, 1100 B.C. to the 1980s ©Copyright 2004 Soyfoods Center, Lafayette, California

That's sort of interesting...  I hadn't seen this article before though I have spoken with the co-writer, Mr. Aoyagi numerous times.  When he was a college student he wanted to study in the States and he asked my grandfather, a very distant relative, to serve as his guarantor for his overseas studies.  At the time foreign students could only get a visa if they had a US citizen guarantor and my grandparents had acquired citizenship by that time.  Mr. Aoyagi later became a professor of anthropology at the International Christian University in Tokyo.

I learned of Mr. Aoyagi when one of my English students mentioned she had read about my grandfather in a Japanese book and when I told her I didn't think it possible she searched out the publisher (this was before Internet!) and got in touch with the writer.  Mr. Aoyagi had lost touch with my family after my grandfather's death and he was overjoyed to make acquaintances with me and my mother and my brother's family all for the first time.

Mr. and Mrs. Aoyagi once visited us in Nikko... and the conversation went to how they had been invited to have lunch with the Emperor and Empress of Japan the week before to help His Imperial Highness prepare for a trip to Australia and New Zealand...  something to do with societies and anthropology...  Tetsu and I were rubbing shoulders with important people!

Anyway...  My grandmother never returned to Japan after marriage, my grandfather returned twice when he was in his 80's.

(Photo from the Internet)

I find online photos of antique bottles, one being the Oriental Show You bottle that I remember so well on our kitchen table.  I think my mother has a bottle or two left in the garage someplace...

Thank you for coming down memory lane with me.

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Day 25 of Whole30 was,

1)  Meat Loaf Whole30 style!  Ground beef and pork, chopped onions, sauteed mushrooms (the sauteeing helps to hold the mixture together) and egg.  I plopped the mixture into a pyrex dish, hid some hard boiled eggs inside and topped with a can of tomatoes mixed with oregano, garlic powder and parsley.  Baked it for 45 minutes with potatoes on the rack besides.

2)  The baked potatoes which weren't great because... maybe because they weren't the type of potatoes that are good for baking.  The addition of clarified butter made them better.

3)  Some fresh tomatoes there...

4)  Some boiled broccoli...

5)  Left-over sauteed pumpkin

The hardest part of Whole30 has been trying to make obentos every morning for Tetsu.  Mostly left-overs...  This is what the night before's dinner evolves into...

1)  Tomato, broccoli and pork sauteed in sesame seed oil (flavored with orange juice and nampura)
2)  Tarako which are salty fish eggs
3)  A salad made of lettuce and cucumbers
...On the top
4)  Eggplant pickles
5)  And the meatloaf!

Beading again

I never planned to do beading. 

Beading just started happening when I was with one group of friends and I expressed an interest in their projects.  I thought I'd make one thing and that would be it.  But then I bought beads in America for my friends and they just assumed we had become a beading group and so as not to be impolite and to make use of the beads I'd bought, I made that beetle brooch a couple of weeks ago.  Which was actually a lot of fun as it was my own design and I wasn't copying anyone's idea.

And then I showed my beetle brooch to ANOTHER group (two ladies) of friends and wouldn't you know, they wanted to try beading too.  And of course I said, "Okay!  I'll have the materials ready, you just come on such-and-such a date."  Which means I became their beading teacher.  (With hardly any experience myself.)

I bought green beads.  My friends brought pearl beads.  And we spent a couple of hours on Tuesday beading.  One friend is working on a flower...  The other friend made a four leaf clover.  And I made a leaf brooch...

And have a lot of beads left-over for the NEXT project.  I really need to get back to quilting!

**********

Whole30's Day 24 meal was,

1)  Seaweed salad with konyaku (which is that gelatinous potato product that has no calories or nutrition).  I threw in some lettuce and then made a dressing from sesame seed oil, orange juice and ume boshi...  Ume boshi are salty, sour pickled plums and their addition made the dressing just salty enough.

2)  Nuka pickles.  I'm still throwing in cucumbers and turnips and eggplant into my nuka bed and turning out pickles daily.

3)  Sauteed sweet potatoes

4)  Stir fry vegetables with pork

5) Grilled smelt, eaten whole

I was thinking about how my tastes have changed since coming to Japan.  As a child we NEVER ate fish.  My father especially didn't like it and my mid-western raised mother didn't know how to cook it.  The only fish we ever ate was canned tuna fish.  Once a year or so we children went trout fishing up in the mountains and we were REQUIRED to eat the fish we caught but the fishing was fun but the eating was not.

I remember eating dinner with a Japanese family  a couple of months after I came to Japan and having a plate of these smelt set in the middle of the table.  

"How do I eat that?!  How do you de-bone such a small fish?  And the insides?  Ooo no!"

But I distinctly remember the small daughter in the family, maybe only 3 or 4 years old, deftly picking up a smelt fish with her chopsticks and popping it into her mouth head first with the tail end wobbling at me as she chewed.  If SHE could do it, then I can do it!  And I closed my eyes and ate that smelt head first!

Maybe that is the way other cultures eat fish too but eating the head and all was a break-through into Japanese cuisine for me.

Seaweed was never a problem for me, nor was using chopsticks as my Japanese grandparents sometimes served seaweed after our family moved to California.  And my grandfather cooked with chopsticks.  Little Tokyo was just an hour away and finally when my grandparents visited they were able to get Japanese ingredients again.  Like seaweed and mochi and sweet bean desserts.  All these were exotic to me back then.

Soy sauce however was not, as my grandfather had been a soy sauce manufacturer in Indiana, one of the first in the United States.  He found the mid-west farmland with its successful production of soy beans to be the perfect place to make soy sauce.  He later expanded to canned bean sprouts too so bean sprouts and soy sauce were often on our menus even in my American family life.

My mother also talked about how living in the mid-west she and her parents often ate eda mame, which are young soy beans, and how the neighboring farmers gossiped about the Japanese family (my mother's) who were eating pig fodder.  Now of course, eda mame are considered the ultimate health food!

Well, on this Whole30 we've stayed away from soy products which certainly wouldn't have made my grandfather happy.  Less than a week to go and I'm already planning on my first soy sauce flavored meal!

Apps I'm using

I can't believe that I'm a quilter...  I haven't been able to do any quilting for days!  I seem to spend less time in front of the TV, less time up in the sewing room.  I'm not sure what all I'm doing... but the iPhone could be the time eating culprit.

Since purchasing this iPhone I enjoy listening to audio books while I walk or cook or am in the car, so that gives me some incentive to move around while I listen.  I have been using the app Overdrive which allows me to check out library books and audio books.

The iPhone also is my pedometer and I try to keep to a quota of steps each day which spurs me on to more outdoor activity also.  I downloaded the Pacer app for that.

I followed the widget that was on Mary's blog to a website called Walk 4 Fun and registered for that and am enjoying that immensely!  It is a virtual hiking site and I'm tackling the Pacific Crest Trail right now.  Every night I log in with my steps (and if you have a FitBit it will log automatically...) and then my route is tracked, complete with pictures of that stretch's scenery.  What fun is that!  Another incentive to go out and walk.  I haven't decided if I want to figure out how to put a widget on my blog like Mary's but I'm enjoying the West Coast scenery at the end of the day.  (I probably should have started with a shorter hike...  I'm wondering if this is going to be my life work...  Virtually hiking the PCT.)

Let's see.  One more activity app is Speedo's lap swimming and though that doesn't get as much attention as some of my other apps, at least I have a record of my swimming.

I also really like an app called Cozi and that sort of organizes everything I have.  Calendar, Flylady To-do lists, shopping lists, birthdays, even recipes.  I seem to go to Cozi several times a day to keep track of what I need to get done.

On the game side of iPhone... well, I'm not that into games but Takumi steered me to one app called Neko Atsume.  Cat Collecting...  As if I need that!  It is cute though and I sure would rather collect cats virtually than in my own backyard.  It is not a game so much as a keeping track of animated cats and thus I check in once in awhile during the day.

And Leiya steered me to an app called Bitmoji where you make an avatar of yourself.  That app has become a hit with my friends that have downloaded it too.  Now our mail messages and Line (a social network used in Japan) is decorated with different illustrations of ourselves.

This is supposed to be me...

So the iPhone is keeping me busy if not quilting.  I don't know if that is good!

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Day 23's Whole30 dinner was,

1)  Left over simmered daikon radish mixed with Korean seaweed
2)  Left over green salad
3)  Sauteed chicken breast with maitake mushrooms
4)  Mackerel cakes.  This could probably be made with canned salmon but in Japan we can get canned mackerel easily.  I boiled up some potatoes and mashed them and then add sesame seeds, burdock leaves and chopped onions.  I mixed in the drained can mackerel (the cats went crazy for the drainings!) and then formed balls that I fried with some arrowroot (katakuriko) powder... instead of flour.  This was another successful experiment!

And for dessert....  Cherries!  My friend went to a northern prefecture and picked cherries and brought some of her bounty to me.  So sweet and delicious!  Like eating candy!