I'm sure you can all attest to my lack of culinary talent, but along with fluency, I want to leave this country with mad cooking skills. So I've been practicing. Fortunately all the right ingredients are right at my fingertips.
This is 新米, pronounced shinmai, which literally means "new rice." (There are supposed to be Japanese characters there, so please comment if you can/can't read them.) You know how I was complaining about all the pretty rice fields being harvested? Well, one of my coworkers owns a rice field and gave me this nice bag of freshly harvested rice. So far I've used it to make rice balls and omurice (omelet with rice in the middle), and it is delicious.
That's going to be the downside when I bring my newly acquired Japanese cooking skills to America: finding the ingredients. Japanese white rice is different than American white rice. And while every grocery store over here carries cooking sake and mirin, that's not exactly the case back home.
And you know what else is hard to find in American grocery stores? Fresh octopus. Behold the glory that is my octopus salad:
And it was really good, too.
More cooking accomplishments to be photographed and posted in the future.
Actually, Publix generally carries cooking sake and mirin - for exorbitant prices.
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And you have shinmai. I'm insanely jealous.
Publix does? Oh, cool. There's one really close to my house back in T-ville.
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