So Jealous of Japan’s Seasons!

The way they work with their hands is completely different. They don’t seem to mind food textures either. Japanese would never over-cook vegetables, because they pay extra-special attention to the boil time. Over there they’ve started to pay a little more mind but boiled vegetables used to be extremely soft, for example their carrots. Just a bunch of vegetables with no firmness with all nutritional value destroyed. If a Japanese person were to eat it, they might say “Are these really vegetables?”. The shape and color are barely still there, but they’re soggy and have no fragrance. The way they stew them also doesn’t get rid of the scum. Even removing it just a little bit after boiling changes it, but they don’t in England so you get a weird combination of decent taste and bad odor with a strange texture. Only the Japanese can really bring out the best of the 5 senses, I think. However, English cooking is simplistic and has good qualities too. Every home has its own style. Even if it is the same dish, each English household has that “mother’s home cooking” taste to it and each dish is delicious.

The older generations still believe that “Japanese food” is just another word for “sushi”, and seem to be under the misconception that Japanese people just eat sushi every day. However, the younger generations have a lot more interest, and new Japanese restaurants are opening up all the time. The restaurant “WASABI” in London is selling onigiri, Japanese rice balls, and is becoming a big hit. The “WAGAMAMA” noodle shop serves ramen and gyoza, Japanese pot stickers, but the most popular dish is chicken katsu curry, a common dish in Japan that features a breaded chicken cutlet over rice with Japanese curry. It’s even written on the menu as “chicken katsu kare” as we would pronounce it, and people will come in and order with their cute English accents. During my daughter’s birthday I figured if it’s really this popular, maybe English kids might like Japanese curry. So I made the chicken katsu curry dish at home. You know usually children avoid their vegetables? They ate every bite. I was thrilled the children were that drawn to it. I’m sure if the English came over to Japan they would love every dish we give them.

Of course! There are a ton of Japanese vegetables that come into season during the spring. I can’t get butterbur sprout and field mustard here in England. I’m running a blog so I get to see a lot of other blogs from Japan. Everyone writes entries, introducing these delicious-looking dishes that use seasonal ingredients. Like one that worked with freshly harvested bamboo shoots boiled in rice water that made me jealous from the very bottom of my heart. I can only get it canned. I may even be forgetting what seasonal vegetables taste like! Then I go back to Japan and taste the food again and it all comes back to me. The fragrance is rich and the ingredients have been fully utilized. Going to England really forces me to appreciate the Japanese culinary culture.

Yes, but there is a movement in England for getting seasonal vegetables while they’re still fresh that is gaining momentum. There are a lot more farmer’s markets than there used to be. I wrote an entry on my blog once that said the English don’t have any sense for seasonal ingredients and it makes me miss Japan. Someone with the pen name “Farmer’s wife” commented on it saying “Don’t you go to any farmer’s markets? There are a lot of producers who take great care in raising vegetables.” I assumed by the username that she must be the wife of a local farmer in England that was very hurt by what I had said. I felt really awful about it but it taught me that there are indeed many people who take pride in raising vegetables in England. These people harvest the vegetables themselves so they know exactly when they are in season, but that information isn’t being conveyed to everyone else. These farmers definitely want people to get these vegetables as soon as possible so they can enjoy them, but they sell them wholesale to the supermarkets and during the distribution process the seasonal freshness of their vegetable starts to wane. That’s one of the reasons farmer’s markets are starting to increase in number, and those farmer’s markets are spreading the joy of seasonal ingredients across the country, I think.