Tabemono (Food)

Food in Japan is hard. Breakfast, and dinner are a constant struggle for me. Thankfully lunch is taken care of due to good, and fairly cheep school food. There are two main problems with eating in Japan: Kanji and Rice. Rice is easy to explain, kanji is a bit harder.

Breakfast in Japan is hard because of rice. As some of you may know rice is a major staple here. Its eaten for breakfast lunch and dinner. As a result bread is somewhat of a luxury item, and cereal, let me tell you about cereal. Walk into the standard super market and you have 5 maybe 10 choices, tops. A box that you could buy in the states for 2.50$ runs around 500 yen. Seeing as I go through one of those boxes every two days, and given that milk 1L of milk (Think a nalgene bottle) costs another 300 yen at least standard American breakfasts are out the door.

To make matters worse my roommate and I have delayed buying a rice cooker until we stop being lazy. In the mean time I've settled for making omelets as they are surprisingly cheep to make here and very filling. They are getting a bit old though. Anyone have other suggestions of non-standard breakfast food that doesn't involve bread or cereal and is fairly cheep?

Dinner in Japan is also a struggle, partly because of the rice issue, but mostly because of Kanji. My staple for any type of meal at home in the states was tons of cheese. Sadly due a joke played by natural selection thousands of years ago I live in a country of lactose intolerant people. This makes even a small bock of cheese prohibitively expensive to use as a staple. This is where the kanji comes in, when I go to grocery stores in America I'm at a loss for what I might be able to cook, I can kind of figure it out though, with those handy danady recipes they put on the sids of boxes and such. When I go to stores in Japan I don't even know what I'm looking at I can barely tell soy sauce from BBQ sauce. Kanji I can learn, but the cooking part is a bit harder, any ideas for quick easy dinners that don't use cheese?

Thankfully my roommate turned me on to the idea of noodles for dinner (ramen style), so if I don't eat out I won't starve, but its getting old fast. This brings me to my last point about kanji, eating out.

Eating out in Japan is great, its always an adventure, and your almost guaranteed to get good food, the staff is super friendly and helpful and you are never expected to tip. When your on vacation this is fantastic. Walk into a restaurant and you can't go wrong! Well except for Natto, but you probably won't accidentally order that anyway.

Anyhow, vacations and living somewhere are a little different, pointing at a menu and saying kore kudasai (This please (Rem I'm looking at you here)) gets old after about two weeks, sometimes you want a specific type of restaurant when your eating dinner with friends in a new part of Tokyo, or you find a type of food you like and want to remember how to order it at a different place in the future, or sometimes you just aren't in the mood for Curry Rice 15 times in a row, as amazingly good as it is. What it comes down to is if you don't know kanji you can't easily do any of those things. Not knowing kanji crippling when it comes to food selection, and its something that I need to fix ASAP.

Ok that all for now, maybe next post I'll give flash update on whats actually been going on in my life for the past few weeks.