clop clop clop

 

Summer 1963 we moved into a small house in an area of Yokohama called Bayview. Military housing, sitting on a hilltop, it was on a cul-de-sac but a bit off to itself, with a high stone wall on the west side, and looking south over Tokyo Bay. Immediately below us, down a steep hill of rocks and grass, was a small Japanese temple with monks who cared for the cemetery that was on the other side of the high stone wall, and a typical Japanese neighborhood of wood and paper houses and shops, cobblestone streets. 

It was a Time before everything was air conditioned, and our house was not, so we slept with open windows. Mornings very early, in the darkness just before dawn as things were waking up, we would hear, coming up from the neighborhood down the hill below, the wail of a flute-sounding instrument along with the sound of geta, 

those traditional Japanese wooden shoes' clop clop clop on the stone streets. It was the noodle man, announcing as he pulled his cart through the streets, that hot or cold noodles were ready for the day's first meal. Hearing frequent pauses in the sounds of the flute and of the wooden shoes told us that the vendor had stopped to serve customers, who came sleepily out of their houses with their bowls to buy noodles. Everyday life to them, incredibly, quaintly charming to us, it was "old Japan" and our first daily experience of a culture so different from our own. We loved living in Yokohama our three years in Japan, and the people were so kind and friendly.

While we were there, I did learn enough Japanese to get us wherever we wanted to go by train, and around Tokyo in a taxi even with cabdrivers who didn't speak English. 

Those years I didn't experiment much with the different kinds of noodles in the Japanese diet, I wish I had, but I didn't, maybe because I was too fascinated learning about sushi and tempura and sukiyaki and tonkatsu, and the different qualities of rice in barrels in the rice shops. My lasting love is sushi, my only reservation being some of the raw eggs and the slice of raw octopus tentacle with suction cup draped over the little cake of sushi rice - - quite tough to chew, and long-lasting in the mouth. 

Last week though, I read a New York Times food article in which the writer told of his discovery and ongoing pleasure in soba, the buckwheat noodle, with kashi, a sauce or broth based on dried bonito fish flakes. He went on and on until my mouth was watering so that I stopped, did a bit of online research about soba - - a carb of heart healthy buckwheat flour but limit the salty broth - - and brought up Amazon to place my order. It arrived yesterday 

and I will try my first experiment of soba with kashi broth for lunch. 

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 Yesterday was another food day of sorts. After the dermatology visit and stopping by the church to drop off a sculpture that we needed to release from our custody, we went to Sam's for Linda to get new eyeglasses fitted. While she was doing that, I wandered, my favorite exercise, and bought two kinds of sushi, a bag of blood oranges, a slab of sockeye salmon, an extremely appetizing looking package of green beans with almonds (which I bought because Linda loves tender green beans), and a package of the pollock-based surimi pressed into crab-let shape. 

We had a nice lunch of sushi (I buy a California roll kind of sushi for Linda because she doesn't care for the raw fish dishes), a few "legs" of the surimi (quite tasty with lemon, and I had more for supper with lemon butter), and the beautiful green beans.

All perfect except for the green beans, which were terrible. TERRIBLE. Nice flavor but so tough as to be unswallowable: no amount of chewing helped, chewing only reduced them to tough green straw, inedible unless you really, really need the roughage real bad, nomesane? Seldom or never do I complain about food, and this is Not a complaint, it's simply a report and warning to any Sam's shoppers who happen to read my +Time blogpost this Tuesday morning.

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Time to get back to enjoying the heck out of this freezing cold Tuesday, for which

RSF&PTL

T90

       

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