Tabletop cooking!

The climate here at the far end(I'm being nice today) of the Chiba peninsula is such that we can cookout 9 months of the year. Bundling up against the fierce wind is sometime required, but February cookouts are not out of the question.

Yesterday we came across a little stove that reduces our reliance on charcoal to cook "yakitori", the popular mini-kebabs that almost all foreigners learn to love. I had my first skewer (don't go there) within hours of arriving at Narita in 1987 and have never stopped loving them. You can see the Iwatani Robata gas oven above on our picnic table. It is very easy to set up and get cooking. Of course the difficult part of yakitori is what happens behind the scenes. Cutting the chicken and other delights into "skewerable" sizes is a labor of love, but each person can build their own "kushi" at the table. If you use bamboo skewers you should soak them in water for a long time to reduce the possibility of them burning. This little oven comes with rests for the skewers which fold down out of the way if you just want to grill meat and vegetables .

I suggest using longer metal skewers with the heatproof handles. It may require a little more clean up, but you could then cook safely without the skewers catching fire. As you can see from the picture to the right the stove will flare up from time to time. For this reason yakitori chefs are required to hover over their masterpieces, turning them constantly.

As I mentioned before, wind is a factor in outdoor cooking and as you can see from the next photo down, care must be taken when using the grill as the wind will send flare ups flying.

If you visit my honest to goodness nothing but food and drink blog, you can see some of the other culinary crimes we have committed outside. My favorite being apple pie baked in a Dutch oven perched on a small charcoal brazier.

http://gourmetjapan.tumblr.com/ .

Bumper Stickers, Philosophy and Twitter.

One does not often see bumper stickers in Japan. Apart from the small window sign that tells us that there is an immature, regurgitating, human life form in the vehicle. Japanese cars go pretty much unadorned. You do see the little colored leaf that tells us if a driver is a "newbie" or incredibly old and shouldn't be on the road any longer. Hint, the green and yellow ones mean they still have pretty good eyesight, but not the best of judgement. Now that I have insulted well over half of the Japanese nation, nothing personal of course, lets move on. Why would Japanese not be inclined to commit amateur philosophy on their cars? Simple, he says, required classes!

You remember, quite fondly I'm sure, required classes. Those entry level courses often taught by bored graduate teaching assistants to indifferent under grads in cavernous, poorly heated classrooms. I'd be interested to hear which one was your least favorite. Japanese have required courses, but I'm sure "Introduction to Western Philosophy" isn't one of them. Oh, please, I still remember the excruciating hours listening to that guy drone on. Not a grad student(who would get a post graduate degree in philosophy in the first place), but a full fledged Ph.D deigned to enlighten a room full of disinterested adolescents! However, as scintillating as they were it wasn't the lectures that made us into a nation of one line philosophers-it was all that reading in preparation for the exams and condensing the wisdom of the ages to forms usable in essay questions. Then came the late '60s and a large segment of the population wanted to get all philosophical in traffic and the bumper was no longer enough; entire life philosophies started to appear. (Disclaimer) My Volkswagen van had absolutely no painted flowers. Of course this trend spread to the masses whose last required class was 8th grade English and that was the end of any form of civility.

I haven't been stuck in traffic in the US for many years, but judging from some of the Twitter philosophy I see; I'm sure things have only coarsened and worsened. So the next time you see one of those little green/yellow(wakaba) or brown/orange(koreiba) stickers on a Suzuki mini car, just remember; it could be a hell of a lot worse.

Don't forget to let me know which was your least favorite required course.