Tampopo: a quest for divine noodles

The movie Tampopo, which we recently viewed in class, is rich in themes about how food and life mingle. It was intriguing to me about how a movie can be made around this central idea of revitalizing a Japanese noodle bar. The owner of the restaurant, Tampopo, comes to the realization that her noodle bar is not meeting the expectations of its costumers when a hungry truck driver named Goro stops by and critiques her cooking skills. Through his help, she is introduced to people from all facets of Japanese society who collectively help her reach her goal for divine noodles and make her noodle joint "high class."

One aspect of the film I found to be innovative was the idea behind food and class. One scene

 in the movie depicts an "etiquette school" where a woman is teaching a class of presumably wealthy teenage ladies how to properly eat spaghetti as a Westerner would. She is explaining how Japanese will slurp up noodles, but this is taboo in many parts of the world. The teacher then instructs the women on how to use a fork and spoon to swirl the noodles into a bitable quantity. Yet, a westerner who is sitting across the restaurant over hears this lesson and decides to shake up the idea on the proper way to consume noodles. He outwardly slurps the noodles, gaining the attention of the class. The class, assuming he is the embodiment of a typical westerner, begin to mimic his eating habits, including the teacher. The theme behind this frame is that you can't generalize a whole culture.

In the same restaurant that the noodle lesson is going on, a business dinner meeting is occuring. The group of older Japanese men include on young man. He is depicted as a clumsy fool at the beginning of the scene, dropping a load of folders. When the waiter comes around to take their orders, all the older men follow suit of the first person who orders and get the only thing on the menu they recognize, along with a Heineken beer. Yet, the young man shines as an expert in food. He goes so far as to recall the name of the restaurant in France that his dish originates from. Also, he proves to be a wine connoisseur. This is a breakthrough moment where the theme that being high class and old doesn't mean your refined in food knowledge.

Bento Making 101

One of the many transitions I made when I came to college was my diet. After leaving the comfort of my Arizona kitchen and being transplanted to Seattle, I suddenly was left without an area to make my own meals. This spurred the opportunity to explore numerous different types of cuisines. One of the first local specialities I came across was the Thai food restaurant- Thaiger Room- on the Ave. Never before had I sampled Phad Thai, but it was love at first bite.

Next I became enthralled by sushi, which I assumed to be the entirity of Japanese cuisine. I started out slow with some avocado rolls from QFC. I have always been a bit apprehensive about eating seafood- especially raw seafood- because I hail from Phoenix, land of no water and thus no fresh seafood. But during a date I went on to Saito's, a Japanese Cafe and Bar in Belltown, I fully immersed myself in the idea of toro and eel, even Nigiri.

 

I prematurely thought I had eaten all that Japanese culture had to offer- like Sushi was the only thing eaten in Japan. But during the Bento Box making experience we had in class on Thursday, I realized there was much more to the Japanese cuisine, and most of it was pickled. I don't enjoy "American" foods that are pickled, so it was a challenge to appreciate the Japanese foods that were. To the left is a picture of the colorful Bento Box I prepared for Elizabeth. Most of the items are labeled to the best of my memory. The tastes were so unique on my palette- flavors I had never before experienced. I enjoyed the rice ball, though I was unsure if I was supposed to devour it in one bite. That is also my issue with pieces of sushi. I look like a slob if I try to fit the whole thing in my mouth, but it falls apart if I eat it in multiple bites. I believe I need to attend an etiquette course on how to properly eat sushi, or sit in a sushi bar and observe how it is done. 

Japanese Bento Meets the American Brown Lunch Bag

Few of my elementary school friends' mothers would have had the time to make intricate lunches similar in style to the Japanese Bento lunchbox. My lunchbox was primarily an assortment of prepackaged foods- with the exception being a peanut butter sandwich prepared by my mother and a piece of fruit. A cross-section of my generalized elementary school lunch box would reveal a frozen Capri Sun on the bottom, then my apple or pear, followed by the sandwich and a bag of cookies with Doritos on top.
During class on Tuesday, Andrea Arai introduced us to the history of food systems in Japan and the significance of bento as a child’s lunchbox. In addition, there were a handful of her Japanese students scattered around the classroom allowing us to gain first-hand knowledge of each other’s eating culture. One of the many aspects of bento that struck me as odd was the size of the container; all the individual components of my lunch made it quite mammoth relative to the size of a bento box. It seemed like the bento would have difficulties housing even just a sandwich. But the Japanese students said that it was the normal size.

While reflecting back on my elementary lunch experiences, I feel absolutely no regret that I wasn’t raised in the Japanese culture bento boxes. It would have been a hardship for my mother to spend 30 minutes to an hour each day racking her brain’s juices for a creative looking meal. I’m sure I wouldn’t have appreciated it relative to the amount of effort she put in it- especially if it was the norm. I’m glad that when I am a mother I won’t feel obligated and pressured by my child’s school district to make an aesthetically pleasing bento for my children. Plus, the whole environment of a school cafeteria would change if we didn’t have “Americanized” brown lunch sacks. I have fond memories of the swapping that goes on during elementary school lunch, which enhances the community and social aspects of eating. The sharing of food would be cease if everyone had the more individualized bento lunch.

The Seasonality of Pomegranates

Apparently, pomegranates are not available for purchase in March.

I abruptly realized this after unsuccessfully searching QFC for them at the end of Winter Quarter. I was about to embark on a very long plane ride from Seattle to Washington D.C. and had learned earlier during a similar situation in December how glorious a pomegranate can be to pass the time and keep my mind (and stomach) occupied on a long journey. During my search at QFC, I came across a binder that listed all the fruits and vegetables that QFC had ever had in their produce section. Sure enough, this book listed the season of pomegranates as September through December.

Before I came to college, variability in my fruit choices had been minimal. The fruits I generally purchased and devoured were ones available during all months- like apples, bananas, and oranges. I’m a huge fan of blueberries as well, and although they may be ridiculously priced in the months outside of July, August, and September, I was always able to find them stocked at the supermarket. Being raised in Arizona, I don’t really have a strong sense of the seasonality of growing and harvesting. The only two crops I was exposed to were cotton and citrus.

In class on Thursday, our discussion of Bill McKibben's “The Cuba Diet” lead us to wonder if it was possible for a person in Seattle to eat seasonally and locally. I am a consumer who lacks knowledge of the globalized food chain and where my food comes from. I generally glance at the stickers on my bananas that state their origin as Ecuador or read over the label on the plastic crate of strawberries that lists they were grown in California. But my thought process doesn’t go much beyond that; I don’t consider the amount of resources that were used to transport them to my shopping basket.

I do frequent the University Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings, but usually end up walking across the street to Safeway to do my produce shopping. At this point in my life, cost is the major decision factor in what I eat. But as I learn more about the environmental impact and the health concerns of produce that is “imported” into Seattle, I will certainly be more likely to shell out the extra 30 cents for a pear in a farmers market that was locally grown.

Maybe I’ll just have to settle for pomegranate juice during their off season. But I still wish someone could genetically modify pomegranates so that they could be available all year around…

Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies

The thing that mattered almost as much to me as the presents I received on Christmas day was the massive amount of cookie baking that I did with my mother, brother, and sister during the few days prior to Christmas. My mother is a middle school teacher, so we were only allotted the 3 or 4 days before December 25th- depending on when school let out for winter break- to get “down and dirty” in the kitchen.

We’d start early in the morning. Boxes of butter would have been set out the night before, in a place safe from my curious cat, to ensure it was soft. All the recipes were located on index cards in a wooden box essentially only used for this Christmas cooking making extravaganza. The usuals that I can recall were: Russian Tea Cakes, Spritz, peanut butter kisses, oatmeal raisin, meringues, chocolate chips, gingerbread cookies, snickerdoodles, and peanut brittle. We would make and bake an exorbitant amount of cookie batches because we would give plates of them to neighbors and friends.

The peanut butter kiss cookies are still my all time favorite. There are numerous ways to screw up the other cookie recipes; the gingerbread people are troublesome to remove from their mold, the meringues are not always fluffy, the cookie press may stop working when trying to make the Spritz shapes causing us to resort to fashion our own forms out of them. But the peanut butter kiss cookies always cooperate.

It certainly was a family affair getting the peanut butter kiss cookies made. My two siblings and I were each given a task of either rolling the peanut butter balls, dipping them in sugar, or unwrapping dozens of Hershey’s kisses. My ideal chore was unwrapping the chocolate because then I got the opportunity to arrange them how I wanted them to be on the holding plate. Sometimes I’d make pyramidal structures out of them, and at others it was simple concentric circles. When the dough was all rolled out, we would bake two cookie sheets at a time. But the vital part during the baking process was timing when to add the kisses. If one added them too soon, the cookies ended up undercooked because the kisses can only stand so long at 350° F before they haplessly melt. When the sheets were removed from the oven, it was a race against time to place the kisses in the center of the dough ball. We worked like well-trained factory workers transporting the kisses from the plate to the cookies. The cookie sheets were returned to the oven for a few minutes before taken out to cool.

When it came time to eating the peanut butter kiss cookies, I generally ended up removing the Hershey kiss and simply eating the cookie. I loved how the area underneath where the kiss had been plopped was compacted doughy-ness, more so than I enjoyed eating the chocolate kiss itself.

Peanut Butter Kisses:
1 cup butter
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup granular sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2 2/3 cup flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
36 Hershey’s chocolate kisses

Combine butter, peanut butter, and sugars in electric mixer and blend until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. After mixing flour, salt, and soda, add to cream mixture and stir well. Roll dough into quarter size balls. Roll each ball in a bowl of sugar. Bake dough at 350° F for 8 minutes. Take out and quickly place a chocolate kiss in the center of each cookie. Bake an additional 2 minutes.