pan! a humble request for assistance [8/20/2007]

Thus far I haven't really spoken much on the topic of food, something which might be surprising to many of you because of my well-known love of all things gastronomical.  Well, I aims to remedy that a bit right here and now.

Worth noting is the rather large variety of different roll-type breakfast breads that are available, even here in our little Oshima.  My personal favorite are the "maple & margarine" rolls; it's about as close to eating a real honest-to-god pancake as I think one could reasonably come here.  "Banana & chocolate" is also a popular combination, although it's generally a little thick and hard to eat.  Tasty though.  Oh, and the "pan!" in the subject is actually the Japanese word for bread, owing no doubt to fact that the Portuguese were the first "western" civilization to come into contact with Japan.

Various flavors of tofu also exist, although so far I have only tried peanut and sesame.  Peanut's pretty solid, but sesame.... yeah maybe just stick with the peanut.

In a rather distressing turn of events, fruit is really expensive here!!  The cheapest apples that one can buy at my neighborhood Pine usually cost 480yen for a three-pack, which is about $4.50.  Crazy!  Bananas aren't tooo expensive, at least.

Okay, so maybe that's not the big crazy food lowdown that you were expecting, but really I just wanted to talk about the pancake buns, so that's way more than I was going to write originally.  I don't really have any pictures of fun stuff, so I'll save other food descriptions until I get some.

The last thing I would like to talk about is the aforementioned "humble request for assistance".  You see, I'm not much of a cook.  I'm certainly willing to try things, but ideas and suggestions would definitely be helpful.  In my house I have a toaster oven, two-burner gas stove, and a rice cooker.  Oh, and a not-very-spacious refrigerator.  I'm looking for stuff that's pretty simple, but it doesn't have to be caveman style or anything like that.  If you are going to send me a recipe or idea or something, I only ask that you make it a separate email with an appropriately descriptive subject.

Thanks for the help! I'll try to keep my eye out for maybe some more interesting food stuff and snap a picture or two.  Perhaps after Nagao-sensei beats me in ping pong I'll take a few pictures of the okonomiyaki.  Supposedly we're all going to play today...

Let's battle!

future love and all that jazz,
-greg.