Naoto & I are on our way to Tokyo today! I feel comfortable telling you this because we have two excellent cat nannies taking care of Presley during the day and the night while we are gone (and essentially living in our apartment, too!)
I have a couple of posts planned for this week and the rest depends on jet lag. But you can follow our adventures in “real time” over on Instagram & Twitter (@adamihasegawa). We land in Tokyo at 3PM (tomorrow…about eleven hours from the time of this writing) and would it surprise you that I’ve already planned what I’m eating at Mister Donut?
Monday was a stellar day for gardening. It was sunny, in the seventies…really just perfect. I spent over four hours at the garden, planning and planting and chatting with Mr. Brownthumb and Laura and meeting new-to-me gardeners. I have part of our plot planted, but I still have quite a bit of room to play with, so I’m planning to get a few more things in the ground this weekend.
Last week, I met up with my parents for plant shopping. I ended up buying a Pink Brandywine and a Red Brandywine (tomatoes) and a six-pack of Pinot Noir peppers. (I gave two to my dad and kept the other four.) My dad gave me a Juliet tomato and in March I started some Isis Candy Shop Cherry Tomatoes (Thanks, Danielle!) and Kellogg’s Breakfast tomatoes from seed. My seedlings are so tiny though, that I doubt they will amount to anything. (Seriously…they are so small, it’s hard not to mistake them for a weed!) I don’t think I get enough sun and warmth for growing tomatoes from seed, but I have a few more tiny plants left that I’m going to try to nurture into larger transplants.I also planted some edamame, cucumber, peas, limas, bush beans, butter crunch lettuce, and komatsuna lettuce seeds. And I still technically have twelve squares left to fill! I know that my tomatoes will grow beyond their allotted squares, so I have to plan for that, but I really do have plenty more space to grow more root vegetables, lettuces, and maybe some herbs. The start of the growing season really is the best, isn’t it? (At least until the harvest comes!)
On Saturday, Karen, Naoto and I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center and watched I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story. Caroll Spinney is the man who has played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969. I grew up watching Sesame Street and I’m extremely sentimental when it comes to my childhood, so when I learned about the movie, I was so excited to see it. Naoto was less excited, since he was robbed of a childhood with Sesame Street, but he came along willingly and didn’t regret it.
(Warning: possible spoilers to follow…at least as much as you can spoil a biography.)
Even though the movie was mostly about Caroll Spinney, it was also very much about his wife, Debra, whom he met in his early Big Bird years after a divorce from his first wife and a very dark period in Spinney’s life. Debra is also his manager and very involved in the daily life if Big Bird. They seem like a match made in heaven…you could feel the love oozing out of the screen.
Some of my favorite parts of the movie were the old Sesame Street footage and interviews with the cast members of my childhood. Luis, Gordon, and Maria were familiar faces who helped to share the Spinney story. And it was awesome to see footage of Jim Henson, who hired Spinney after seeing him sort of fail at an audition. Because Jim Henson is no longer around, Spinney retold some of their conversations through his own sweetly drawn cartoons.
I also loved learning about the behind-the-scenes details of Big Bird in China. Apparently it was a grueling production because they had such a small staff. (The film was a huge undertaking for Public Broadcasting.) At one point, when Big Bird is floating on a raft in the water, Spinney recalls that if he had fallen in, the filming would have ended because Big Bird (the costume) would be ruined. Spinney and his wife had an instant love for Lisa Ouyang, the little girl who played Xiao Fu in the movie. At the end of the filming, they didn’t have an opportunity to say goodbye to her, making their reunion all these years later a sure tear-jerker.
It was chilling to learn that Big Bird had been invited by NASA to ride on the Challenger space shuttle. NASA believed Big Bird could draw in a younger audience and get them interested in science. But the Big Bird suit was too big for the shuttle and NASA asked a teacher (Christa McAuliffe) to go instead. Both Spinney and his wife got very emotional when they told the story of this close call. (I teared up too, in spite of reading about this fact beforehand.)
The movie really portrays Caroll Spinney as a complete person–you see his challenges and flaws as much as you see his success and contributions to his craft. I appreciate that in a biography, since we are all imperfect humans.
I highly recommend I Am Big Bird if you’re a fan of Sesame Street or the Muppets and Jim Henson. It was such a sweet walk down memory lane and has made me want to watch some old Sesame Street clips again. I came home and pulled out my copy of Sesame Street Unpaved and I’m re-reading it again. (And…I’m considering borrowing Big Bird in Japan from the library so I can compare notes with Big Bird’s trip.)
On Saturday, we had our official “Garden Kick-Off 2015”. We served coffee and donuts at the garden and new and returning gardeners came to check out their plots and get started on the planting season. It was very cold (and I was sorely underdressed) but the rain held off and we had a productive morning cleaning up around the garden and giving mini orientations to new gardeners. It was the most people I’ve seen at the garden at once in a long time, especially since last year I hardly saw anyone. I planted some flowers in a general community garden planter (two kinds of zinnias and alysum) and Naoto dug out a space on the hill for pumpkin and loofah growing. It was a good working day at the garden, but there is still a lot more to do in the coming weeks. On Thursday, Laura and I prepped our plots for square foot gardening. Although I am not going to do by-the-book square foot gardening, (I am not using the special soil mix and the tomatoes I plant will never only need one square foot!) I wanted to try the grid to help me plan the garden better and get more variety out of our plot. I just hammered nails in every foot along the side of our garden bed and used string to mark the grid. The string won’t last very long, but it should stay through the planting season to assist with organization. So far, we’ve transplanted the chive that we inherited in our plot (I dug it out in 2013 and it’s been languishing on the balcony in a too-small pot ever since. I decided we have room for it in our garden again.), transplanted some winter-sown broccoli (too many for 1 square foot—oops!), and planted beets and daikon. Four squares down, twenty-eight more to go! It’s been rainy the past couple of days, but this week I will be going back to plant some more once I have drawn out a plan for the rest of those squares!
I bought these hiragana* stamps two years ago in a tiny scrapbooking store near an izakaya where Naoto and I shared dinner with his family. When I bought them, I didn’t realize how frustrating they would be to use. Every time I wanted to write something, I had to ask Naoto to spell it out for me. So I put them away in the spare room and forgot about them until recently. Every once in awhile I’d see them sitting on the shelf, taunting me and the money I’d wasted. But, now that I’ve had some practice during my Japanese class, I’m using them! I’m still pretty slow, but I can usually pick the right sounds for the words and names I’m trying to write. (Though, I still have Naoto check my work to be sure!) Here’s a peek at the whole set. (Some of the characters may be upside down because I put them away haphazardly last time.) When I use them, I have my textbook open to the hiragana chart so I can refer to it as I sound out the word. (I don’t have my hiragana sounds memorized yet…) It really does remind me of learning to read as a kid. I’m slowly getting better with practice, so I’m trying to stamp a random Japanese word on outgoing mail for the rest of the month. (I’ll let you know how that goes!) I have “arigato” (“thank you”) down thanks to writing a few thank yous lately.
*If you don’t know what hiragana is, this site does a nice job of explaining it. It’s basically the Japanese phonetic script–each “letter” represents a vowel sound or a combination consonant/vowel sound. There are forty-six sounds. In some ways, they are easier than English because each sound only makes that sound. (Unlike in English where we have the long e, the short e, the silent e…) But, the letters are difficult to decipher sometimes and very challenging to write, I think.
I know it sounds cliche, but where did April go? I feel like I blinked and here we are in May and my mail pile is growing!! A lot of people who haven’t written in awhile reappeared in my mailbox in April. (Just to be clear…I am not complaining. I am the most patient of pen friends because there are times I take forever to write, too!) After a bit of a dry March, it’s good to find letters waiting for me again. Now I just need to spend some time this weekend catching up on my pile.
How did your Write On/National Letter Writing Month go? I sent out forty-one pieces of mail: twenty six letters, eleven postcards, three international, and one mini-package. (So far this month, I’ve mailed seven cards, thanks to Mother’s Day!)
In other (awkward) news, I joined Kathy and Donovan (and Katie!) at the Letter Writers Alliance Clubhouse for the Virtual Letter Social last weekend. I had a great time writing part of a letter (pictured at the top) and chatting stationery, pens, postcards, cocktails, 1970s organs… Thanks, Kathy and Donovan, for inviting me!
Along with Made in Japan, we saw Off the Menu, another movie presented with the Asian American Showcase at the Gene Siskel Film Center a few weekends ago. Off the Menu was only an hour long, but Naoto and I have been talking about it since we left the theater. The film explores Asian Americans’ relationships with food and how their traditional foods have evolved over time in America. There were six stories featured in the movie, and each one brought a different layer to the conversation. After the movie, a panel of Asian American chefs from Chicago discussed their reactions to the movie. It was all so interesting that Naoto and I had a great dinner discussion about Asian American food culture.
The filmmaker, Grace Lee, begins the film telling her own story of growing up in her Korean family in Missouri. She talks about having a basement refrigerator that held the kimchee and other “stinky” traditional Korean foods, hidden away from their “Wonderbread existence” in the Midwest. (I wish I had written down the exact line from the movie because it was brilliant.) This was in the eighties, long before kimchee and other traditional Asian foods became the popular fare they are today. (Have you seen this book on fermented foods? It’s one of many published in recent years.)
With her voice sprinkled throughout, Lee shares the stories of the six people. A few stood out for me:
The first, Glen Gondo, is a Japanese American who is known as the “sushi king of Texas”. His business provides sushi services for the largest grocery chain in Texas. He has a research and development team (headed by two Korean chefs) creating sushi rolls for the American palate (or maybe more specifically the Texan palate?)–sushi with barbecue sauce, sushi with jalepeños, sushi with crumbled Flamin’ Hot Cheetos on top. The film asks the question, “Is this really Japanese sushi if you water it down so much for American tastes?” Lee is sort of taken aback when she sees that alongside the Japanese sushi are spring rolls and pot stickers. Lee points out that those aren’t Japanese. Gondo replies no, but they are best sellers. Lee admits that sometimes she questions eating Korean food made by non-Koreans. Naoto and I exchanged glances during this moment in the movie because we are totally guilty of this! Our favorite Japanese restaurants are owned by Japanese (or Japanese-Americans.) I think this is partly due to the fact that Naoto enjoys speaking to the chefs in his native language, but also that it feels more…authentic? (I should also admit here that I am very much a traditionalist. Sleek, trendy sushi restaurants have never been my scene.)
Next, the Kawelos, who are catching octopi, a traditional food in Hawaii where most of the food is imported. Hi’ile, the daughter, is trying to reconstruct an 800 year old fish pond to keep the tradition of catching fish for her community alive. Hi’ile and her father share that food is “mana“, a native Hawaiian term with an abstract meaning…power, an energy in everything, a life force. Naoto, who grew up in Hawaii, even had a hard time explaining it to me. I sort of took it as food connects people and generations in a way that nothing else can and keeping that tradition of catching fish alive in Hawaii was Hi’ile’s way of connecting Hawaii’s past with its future.
And, in the most touching part of the movie, Lee visits langar at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. This temple was the site of a horrible hate crime in 2012 when a white supremacist stormed in to the temple and killed seven people. It is so amazing to see all of the women in the kitchen at the temple cooking and the men serving a huge meal to people sitting on the floor. Although langar is centered around the food, it really is about the community preparation and sharing of the event. I got a little teary-eyed when they talked about how a neighboring temple came in and prepared langar for them in the days after the shootings. A simple gesture, but I can just imagine how cared for and supported the Oak Creek families felt in that moment.
Food, how we share food, is mana.
P.S. If you read my Made In Japan post, there is an update to Tomi Fujiyama’s story:
The Grand Ole Opry invited Tomi to play! I have to think the movie influenced this decision, right? She is playing on the Opry Stage TONIGHT. The show begins at 7PM and it looks like Tomi will hit the stage during the 8:45PM (Central Time) segment. (Scroll down on this link to listen to the live stream on WSM 650 AM. Naoto and I will be listening!)
Over the weekend, Naoto and I attended two movies as a part of the Asian American Showcase at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Going to see a movie is very rare for us. I don’t think we’ve been to a movie together since 2006, so seeing two movies in two days was a pretty incredible feat for us.
On Sunday we saw Made in Japan, a documentary about Tomi Fujiyama, a Japanese country music entertainer who was the first Japanese person to sing on the Grand Ole Opry stage. She performed at the Opry’s 39th anniversary party in 1964 along with Johnny Cash and many other legends of country music. She received the only standing ovation from the crowd that night.
The documentary covers Tomi’s lifetime from her childhood in post-war Japan all the way to her current performances and continued dreams to perform once more on the Grand Ole Opry stage. The filmmakers have an obvious love for Tomi and her passion for country music. Towards the end (and this is somewhat of a spoiler, so read at your own risk or skip to the next paragraph) the film is a little bit political, for lack of a better term. It is clear that the filmmakers are disappointed in the direction of the Grand Ole Opry, which was bought out by a large company with investors and is now commercialized. The Opry stage is no longer a place where the music is the focus and up-and-coming musicians get invited to play. It is no longer a place where timeless country music is performed. It has become, according to the film, a tourist attraction, a place where ticket sales trump the music. The Opry has no interest in hosting Tomi because she doesn’t fit into the “new direction” of the Opry. But I feel like the movie ends on a somewhat high note, pointing out that Tomi played on the Opry stage during the best years, when the music was first and foremost.
I’m so glad we decided to go to this showcase. (I’ll talk about the other movie we saw soon. It was about food and brought about a lot of feelings.) This was our third time attending events at the Siskel Film Center and we are always so impressed with the movie offerings, the theater, and the people there. Next month they have special screenings of Hayao Miyazaki films and the documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. I have a feeling there will be more movie dates in our future!
UPDATE: The Opry invited Tomi to play! I have to think the movie influenced this decision, right? She is playing on the Opry Stage on April 28, 2015. The show begins at 7PM and it looks like Tomi will hit the stage during the 8:45PM (Central Time) segment. (Scroll down on this link to listen to the live stream on WSM 650 AM! Naoto and I will be listening!)
Last month, Naoto and I lived out his dream of eating at Frontera Grill, Rick Bayless’s hard-to-get-into restaurant in Chicago. We made the reservations back in January so by the time March 14th rolled around, I wasn’t the least bit interested in going, especially considering it was St. Patrick’s Parade Day in the city and drunk people were stumbling about. But, we went anyway and didn’t regret it. The food was amazing, the cocktails blew my mind, and the service was impeccable. My favorite dish was this Mexican street snack of jicama, cucumber, and pineapple. It’s shown above on the right, along with my tasty Meyer Lemon Margarita and our guacamole. The street snack was so fresh and crisp and juicy…I really could have just eaten a whole meal of it alone. It seemed easy enough to make at home, so on Easter, we tried it out as an appetizer for Easter dinner at Karen’s.
Spicy Jicama, Cucumber and Pineapple Snack
(inspired by Frontera Grill’s Jicama Street Snack, which was inspired by Mexican street snacks)
Cut the cucumber, jicama, and pineapple into sticks (like french fries). Place on a large rimmed baking sheet and drizzle with the juice of the four limes. Toss to coat. Sprinkle with chili powder and sea salt and toss again. (Be gentle, the pineapple is fragile!) Serve, standing up in a few glasses. (Old fashioned glasses work nice for sharing, or you could do individual servings in tiny juice glasses.) There should be some leftover juice on the tray. Drizzle it over the prepared servings and sprinkle with a little extra chili powder or Tajín and salt. Serve immediately. The jicama and the pineapple were by far the most popular, but I think the cucumber adds a savory touch. Plus, all three textures work really well together to make a perfect appetizer or snack. I do believe this is going to make it into the next Hasegawa Happy Hour menu!
I’m behind in my ramen reporting! We tried Oiistar back in February, before we went to Furious Spoon. Oiistar gets really good reviews from food writers in Chicago and it’s made it on several “best ramen in Chicago” lists. It was the first ramen shop in the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood. It definitely has a “hipster feel” to it, for better or for worse. It’s casual and there are individual tables, a counter, and communal seating to choose from. The owner describes his menu as having French and Italian influences, and you can definitely see that in the menu along with some Chinese and Korean. There are old black & white Looney Tunes cartoons projected onto the wall and the music is old school and loud (but not too loud.) It was freezing and snowy the night we went, so we were both in the mood for a hot bowl of noodles. We started with drinks and I will just say this: my review of this restaurant may be unfairly colored by what you are about to see…My drink, the house-made sangria, was served in a mason jar glued to a candlestick. This thing was enormous and clunky and just plain embarrassing. It was so top-heavy that I kept thinking it was going to fall over and spill everywhere. And it stood up so high on the table that it almost blocked my view of Naoto! Everything else in the restaurant was normal…I just have to wonder what in the world the restauranteur was thinking when he chose to serve his (perfectly delicious) sangria in this monstrosity. Okay…back to the food. We ordered buns as appetizers. They arrived at our table with our ramen, which was a huge bummer because it was impossible to enjoy both at the same time, as ramen noodles are best when eaten right away. Pictured above is the Tempura Shrimp bun, which is a fried shrimp with chili mayonnaise, fennel slaw, and sesame seeds on a Chinese-style bao bun. It was delicious and something I would order again if we venture back here.
For ramen, I got the oiimen (pictured at the top) with pork belly, egg, scallion, mushrooms, spicy oil, and garlic. Naoto got the kimchee ramen. The ramen was solid, but the texture of the noodles didn’t wow me. They are made in-house, which is supposed to be a huge plus. All of the other ramen places we had tried until that point have them shipped in from Sun Noodle. (In the meantime, Furious Spoon opened with their own homemade noodles and, after eating Furious Spoon’s noodles, I think Furious’s noodles are better.) But the flavors and the pork and the soft boiled egg in Oiistar’s ramen were delicious.
I would love to go back and try some of their salads and snacks. They offer a bruschetta topped with pickled shrimp, fennel, balsamic and olives that sounds intriguing enough for a repeat visit. I just won’t be ordering another ridiculous sangria.
Naoto & I are on our way to Tokyo today! I feel comfortable telling you this because we have two excellent cat nannies taking care of Presley during the day and the night while we are gone (and essentially living in our apartment, too!) 
kimberly ah 