Tororo (the Japanese yam, Dioscorea opposita)

Posted on May 5, 2013 in Home Meals | 0 comments

The other day, it was 20 c degrees. Yes, it’s hot for May! After 4 days, it was -6°C. And now (May 4th) it’s 20°C again! Harsh weather!
At our home, the temperature is supposed to be maintained at 21.5°C all the time, but when the temperature outside goes up so suddenly, the gadget doesn’t work accurately and our basement suite goes down to about 18-19°C. It’s been like this for the last few days, and my hubby can’t recover from his cold because it’s kind of chilly down here. We say staying cold is the origin of all sickness, in Japanese. We miss the Sun! (Even thought it’s right out there!)

The other day, Ms K gave us a nice piece of fruit tart all hand-made! Thank you so much! It was so beautiful and delicious. We were so impressed when we found out the base was also baked by her!

 

I’d like to talk about tororo. I just bought it here in Canada for the first time. It was $5.93 for 1 kg. A bit expensive?

I love tororo and the yamakake gunkan (tuna sushi and tororo) is one of my favorite sushi dishes.
We saw it sometimes in HK, but we rarely see it in Canada. So I really missed it.

In HK, when I saw tororo on the menu, I had to order one. The item I liked the most was Neva-neva Don at a restaurant at the Japanese Club. Neva-neva means slimy-slimy. ^^ It was a dish of tororo, natto and  molokheiya over a bed of rice. All neva-neva! So healthy and delicious! I want to eat it now….

Examples of how to eat tororo:

I usually ate it at my parents’ or at restaurants and I’ve never really bought some myself and served it. It should be served just grated, I imagined. But wait. It’s a potato and it should be cooked. Can I eat it raw? Its name is Nagaimo (long potatos) or Yamaimo (mountain potatoes), it must be a potato but maybe it could belong to some radish!? Then it can be eaten raw. So I checked. Yes, it was a potato (as it claims)! You can cook it, but we can eat it raw. Great! It must be a good food for raw food eaters as well!

I grated it and put it on somen. Craving it for a long time makes it even more delicious!

It’s a potato, so it’s a carbo. But it stimulates the digestion process and is good for stamina, it is used for Chinese traditional medicine as well. This sliminess is called mucin and it is good for activating your cells/blood stream, anti-aging, your skin, causing a quick recovery, loosening up constipation! Sounds all good!
Reference: J-Medical

My Bilingual Blog!

Posted on May 4, 2013 in Internet | 0 comments

I started blogging in English and now you can read my last 44 entries in English!
The switching button is on the right side bar.

It takes double the time, but it’s good for me to get more used to writing in English, and my husband can read my stuff and then I’m making more possibilities for my non-Japanese speaking friends and families (it’s only the possibility. Whether they read them or not is another story… The door on this side is open for you!). At this point, my basic purpose is fulfilled. But as I imagined at the beginning, I only get a few hits on my English version. Too bad.

But at least I like doing it. There are not many people out there who are doing their blogging in more than 2 languages. So it’s an amazing thing! Nobody else but my hubby and some lovely friends are supporting me for my English blogging, so I’ll try not to forget that and do my best for myself.

Braxton Hicks

Posted on Apr 26, 2013 in Living, Pregnancy | 0 comments

Today it seems like the spring has suddenly come and the temperature went up to 20 c degrees! Much warmer than my home in Japan and close to HK temperature! The snow is almost gone and the roads are sandy and dusty now.

When the temperature goes up suddenly, our house’s auto heater gets confused or something and our place gets colder… it’s the fate for basement residents?

We went out for a branch to IHOP. It was Friday, but it was crowded like Saturday. The waiter with a tattoo was a friendly guy and gave us funny drawings of Micky Mouse on my pancake and my husband’s waffle. ^^

 

It’s another finding about being pregnant.
I heard the expression of a tightened tummy or a bloated tummy, but I never imagined it was like this! It’s totally different from the feeling of eating too much and being bloated with food or gas.

Apr 22
I felt my tummy tightened. When I was sleeping in bed in the early morning, my tummy suddenly felt tightened and hard. It was softer before. I was surprised, but no pain. I wondered what happened, but it got soft again. Was I just imagining!?

Apr 23
When I went to bed, my tummy tightened again. It’s abnormal. When it’s hard, I don’t feel the baby moving. It stayed like that for 30 seconds or so. And then it got softer. It repeatedly happened like 5 times within a hour and I got worried. But no pain, and when it’s not tightened, I still felt the baby moving. So I quit worrying and tried to sleep.

Apr 24
I checked on my book and on line about it, I ended up finding it was a normal thing. It’s called Braxton Hicks in English.
Online, it said,
At 28 weeks pregnant you may notice shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, and scattered Braxton Hicks contractions. These contractions are normally painless and consist when the uterus hardens for a minute then releases.
Yes, I’m on 28 weeks now. They know it very well.
In my book, this Braxton Hicks was explained a lot on the section of 8 months. I’m still on 7 months, so I hadn’t read that part too carefully… (yes, it’s an excuse.)
Anyway, I’m relieved.

And last night, I felt the baby had hiccups. It was like every 2 seconds, some little spasms were happening in my tummy constantly and continued for more than 1 minute. I got worried about this too. But after checking in a book, I found out it was fetal hiccups. So interesting.

Noorish

Posted on Apr 25, 2013 in Restaurants | 0 comments

Apr 13 (Sat)

My Hubby’s cousin, M, came to Edmonton for work last week, so we went out for dinner together. But my hubby was too busy and couldn’t make it… too bad.

Noorish is one of her favorite restaurants in Edmonton. For me too, even though it’s only my 2nd time. (This was my first time.）
I was going to have a Laughing Buddha’s Bowl, and so was she, but they were out of it already this evening. Too bad. So I had Miso Noorish ($17) and she had the special of the day: Spinach gnocchi in a sweet pepper rosè with asparagus.
Mine had a lot of sweet potato. It was filling and pretty good. The sauce was supposed to have a hint of miso, but it was difficult to taste it. Hers was pretty small. Not enough in my opinion.

Dessert was a piece of Rocky Road ($9.5)! It was very nice.

She had a The Ultimate Jing Treasure ($24) , which is a drink of jing herbs with benefits derived from Chinese medicine for thousands of years! It contained cocoa, so it was easy to drink. But expensive! She is enduring hard work. She needs it for her health.

We talked a lot about how we were doing, families, healthy foods, being a mum, traveling and etc. I enjoyed chatting with her over the delicious meal.
At the end, she gave us a box of “raw” chocolate. OK, normally chocolate must be somehow cooked, I guess… yes, usually the cocoa beans get roasted to make chocolate. I checked online and raw chocolate is made without the beans roasted, so that nutrition such as calcium, magnesium, protein, fat, fibre, iron, zinc, copper will remain and get absorbed well enough. The chocolate had some salty hint as well (sea salt) and was tasty. Thank you very much, M!!