If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I cooked myself food last night for the first time in Japan. The experience brought some interesting problems and challenges. You may say, “Simon, you have been here for four months and this is the first time you have cooked?” Well my help has all but been refused in most cases apart from chopping a random root vegetable or two and grating some radish and we often go to restaurants. Oh La de da Simon! Restaurants! Fortunately, eating out isn`t the financially crippling event that is in England, especially when the staple with most foods is noodles or rice..

Everyone else, apart from Reiko who works late, is in random locations over Japan such as Yamaguchi or Matsuyama leaving me to choose to cook for myself. I was aiming for fish with egg fried rice and some vegetables. I only had some asparagus and hot chili peppers. This will give an indication of what the final result was like. I was quite a good cook at university. My speciality was stir fries. My tactic was to bundle as many vegetables and flavours as possible and see what happens. Whilst this brought many inedible failures, the successes were spectacular if I may say so myself.

I couldn`t find the cooking oil and so left the wok on the stove heating up for about ten minutes. Finding no oil whatsoever except vinegar or soy sauce, I resorted to the soy sauce. Marrying it with the hot pan created a thick black smoke to disperse throughout the room. Fortunately there is an extractor fan in the kitchen with two buttons. Yet however much I would frantically press these buttons; individually, simultaneously or together, nothing was being extracted. I found out that if I waited a short time lasting more than a second instead of desperately jabbing at them, the fan would get into gear. I gave up on the oil and cracked two eggs into the wok and hoped it wouldn`t burn. Then I added the cooked rice and asparagus and chilli peppers and mixed it a bit until I had an almost dough-like consistency. Although the rice was hot, the vegetables were near stone cold. I decided to cut my losses and serve with the half cooked fish I had been grilling and Voila! Looks nice. But appearances can and were deceptive. Come back Shiraishi family, all is forgiven.