See! I’m not the only addict! There’s nothing you can do but to just love those Japanese Bento boxes!!
[© BBC News – Close-up: Japan’s amazing lunchboxes]
See! I’m not the only addict! There’s nothing you can do but to just love those Japanese Bento boxes!!
[© BBC News – Close-up: Japan’s amazing lunchboxes]
Last week my boss told me I should use up my remaining holidays from 2010 before the end of march ’11. So I’m going away again! Finally! This time not so far away though (maybe later this year), it’s more time for my yearly sun-tanking-spring-holiday. Goal this time is:
So keep your thumbs up for the sun in Portugal the next couple of weeks (no, I’m not going that long)!
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Actually I didn’t spend the whole day in my kitchen: it was more something of 1-2 hours. But this time all worked out great! So my head (and the rest of moi) is at the moment full of endorphines (except those places, where the food is).
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
If you have followed my blog, you may have noticed my enthousiasm for the Japanese Okonomiyaki a.k.a. the Japanese soulfood.
A while ago I tried a few times to make the easiest version: the Osaka-style Okonomiyaki and after a few testruns I got something quite nice and good-tasting from it.
Second goal was: the Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki. Today was my first try…
The start was simple (relatively speaking, then) and it even looked like the real thing:
Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki
But the goal has been achieved (partially): my soul feels better again 😉
A while ago I had enough of my cheap Mediamarkt-ricecooker and decided it was time for a change in my kitchen.
The old cooker had costed something like € 35, but it has one disturbing disadvantage: when I cook more than 1 cup of rice or when I cook rice and vegetables together (which is supposed to be OK, according to the users’ manual), the rice gets burnt! Not the black-carbon-barbeque-kind of burning, but the rice gets brownish and (if it’s too much) the rice tastes no good anymore.
The manufacturor claims that “that’s the way most people in the far east (e.g. Thailand and China) prefer their rice: with a little brownish teint”. Well, I don’t. Neither do 99,9% of the Japanese, I guess.
Today, August the 6th, is – as you all will know – the 65th anniversary of the day when the A-bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. It’s not up to me to judge on whether it was justified to drop the A-bomb or not. I can only express how I experienced my visit to the city and especially the memorial site at Ground Zero in October last year. I had visited Nagasaki two days before, so I had been prepared a little bit. I had decided to not go to the memorial site the first day, because I have learned that I need time to prepare and to recover. That may sound rather exaggerated, but believe me: it isn’t.
Hiroshima now is a lively and very open city. Of course the people living in Hiroshima have had to get used to millions and millions of people visiting the city, but they are still very, very friendly. I admit that, while walking in the city and seeing an elderly man or woman, I was thinking “Was he here? Did she survive here? Did they experience it all?” and was on the verge of saying something really stupid like “I’m sorry”.
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