One of the big challenges with moving to Japan has been adapting my diet and cooking habits. In the States, a typical day of eating for me was to have coffee for breakfast, a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, and anything ranging from Hamburger Helper to homemade fettuccine alfredo for dinner. Here in Japan, the coffee is easy enough to come by, in a variety of forms ranging from instant to brew-in-your-cup to a basic coffee pot to Starbucks. It's not as popular or as common as tea, but it's still very common and very easy to get. So, breakfast is taken care of.

Lunch... well, lunch is a different story. Biggest difference? It is SO HARD to get cheese here. Or at least, cheddar cheese like we would use for sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, etc. Thinking about it, I think cheese is one of the things I miss most about American food. So, for lunch I generally have pasta salad or fried potatoes. Lunch tends to be my most American meal of the day, since Brent usually prefers Japanese food. I like a great deal of Japanese food, don't get me wrong, but I can only eat so much rice or udon.

Potatoes are easy enough to get here, although they are small and expensive compared to the States (which doesn't mean that they're expensive compared to other food around here, they're just dirt cheap in the States.) I have actually expanded my range of things I cook with potatoes, since it's harder and more expensive to buy the ready-made stuff here. Also, I figure I might as well put all my free time to good use! So far I've made mostly potato soup (thanks Mom!) and fried potatoes which are not to be confused with potato fries, the Japanese term for french fries/chips. (Side note: I don't capitalize french in french fries, but I capitalize it when speaking about the French language or culture. Is this normal or common?) I experimented with a recipe I found for microwave potato chips, and while they were really really tasty, I had a severe problem with them sticking to the plate I cooked them on. Currently, I have some fries soaking in water, and will make my first attempt at home made french fries shortly.

For dinner, I'll occasionally make something like potato soup, but it's more common for us to have something fairly Japanese for dinner, such as curry rice or yaki soba. Last night was had some pan-fried fish (no clue what it was, it was red uncooked and a dark pink cooked) with rice. Tonkatsu (breaded and fried thinly sliced pork chops) is pretty common for us to have, as are gyoza (Chinese meat dumpling things) and miso soup.

One of the challenges we have is that our kitchen is tiny. Our stove is gas and not very nice. It's not one of the nice gas stoves, instead it's the type where the flame is inches away from you when you stand and cook something. Cooking anything that needs stirred often is a pain because the heat rising up from around the pan is really intense. We're not sure if the stove sucks or if we are just incompetent at using gas burners. There are also only two burners and they're really close together. There is a single grating thing resting over both of them, with massive gaps in it, so if you jostle a small pan too hard, it can slip and fall off the burner and onto the stove top. In summary, it's a huge pain and we're thinking about replacing it when we have some more spare cash.

Even with the bad stove, though, it's nice to have a change of pace in eating, even if I miss easy access to french fries. There are benefits. It's harder to get snack food we like, so both Brent and I have been eating less overall, and especially eating less fatty foods like meat (at a guess, I would say I've cut my meat consumption in at least half.) Coupled with us having to bike everywhere, we both have noticed our pants being a little looser. Quite frankly, I felt that I was eating too much meat in the States, but it's just such a common thing for Americans to do and trying to cut back didn't really go anywhere, so I've been glad for the opportunity to switch at least that part of my diet around. I say this having plans to go out to yaki niku this weekend, though!

(Yaki = fried, niku = meat.)