Back to the Basics!

Hi, I eat loser of contest for snack. Also I'm copyright Madeline. I live in Kurama, Japan

...my cooking basics, that would be. I more or less learned to cook when I moved to Japan after college (thank you, dining hall and parents, for feeding me till I turned 22...). Japan is full of food in a box. It's like extra points are given out for every layer of packaging involved in the food-boxing process. Sometimes fresh fruit even comes in a box. Food in a box, however, loses its charm when you can't read the box. There was that time I thought I was buying little pink sweets, and they were actually shrimp chips...

So when I moved to Japan, I not only learned to cook. I learned to cook without food in a box. Even after I started to be able to read the boxes (and after a Japanese-speaking friend told me to just put Cook-Do eggplant sauce in everything), I wasn't sure what to do with the contents of the boxes. Eventually, I did discover the foreign food store, where I began buying things like $12 boxes of garden burgers. I also ate a lot of mochi, ice cream, and roll cakes because I knew what they were. However, I also made stuff. From scratch. Gaijin food that I would normally have just bought in a box in the US. I even tried making peanut butter once, with limited success (I made peanut powder somehow).

For example, the only kind of recognizable breakfast food I could find at my grocery store was All-Bran. All-Bran is weird. Japanese breakfast traditionally consists of fish and rice and pickles and miso soup. I miss it now, but I missed Western breakfast then. So, I learned to make very basic mueslix: mashed up banana, plain yogurt, oats. Other fruits optional. I made myself some mueslix tonight for the first time in ages...now I have a big jar full in the fridge to eat for breakfast for the next several days. And I am happy.