Burnt Pizza

I hesitate to include the word "pizza" at all in this title since what I burned hardly qualifies as such.

I biked to the grocery store today in the rain to brush up my stock of edible food items. There are basically 2 main grocery store options near my apartment. There's Max Value (pronounced "makusu baru") one train stop away and "taiyo-" about an 8 min. bike ride the opposite direction. Max Value is much like a Cub Foods or Rainbow, except it carries quite a different assortment of food products. I was actually thinking outloud with my volunteer Japanese teacher last night about grocery shopping and came to the realization that they probably have many more of the same items that they have back in the states, it's just that I can't read a lot of the product labels. I couldn't even tell tonight if one particular brand of milk came from a cow or from a soy bean. Tonight I had chosen to go to taiyo- because I was in a hurry for time, and though smaller, it has in my opinion a better selection of food. Everything in the store is so close together; I feel surrounded by walls of food and that makes me feel warm inside.

I didn't always feel this way. At first, grocery shopping felt a lot more like browsing in a bait-shop. Where one would normally find the fresh cuts of beef there was sea life (sea death?) of all kinds: large and small squid, shrimp, sakura shrimp, octopus, sanma, salmon, tuna and dozens other varieties that I had never seen before. I would just pass right on by to the dehydrated, boxed food section and take my picks from the yakisoba to the dry curry or ramen. This got old really, really fast so I knew I had to change my diet or leave Japan. I next moved on to frozen dinners. This was an improvement since some of the items were sorta fresh and I could add them to rice to make it less boring. Yeah, that's pretty much where I stopped progressing in dinner quality, the frozen part. But tonight, all that came to its impetuous end like a free fall to pavement. I bought a sanma.

I really don't know anything about the fish, but I'm pretty sure I had sanma sashimi at chokkura, a local Kambara izakaya. I don't know how to cut it or even if it's sashimi grade but there it is, lying in my refrigerator. In a bag, of course. I picked it up out of the ice bucket at taiyo- with a kitchen utensil and placed it in a clear plastic bag. The advertisement over the bucket had "100 yen" with a line through it, displaying a price of 80 yen, or about 75 cents. I really couldn't resist this, even if the fish stayed in my fridge for several days and then I threw it out because it started to smell bad. I am determined to eat like a normal person (wow that sounded oxymoronic - normal to this country at least) and I will continue to buy my silvery long friend until he is properly prepared and satisfactorily in my stomach.

Another thing that has really surprised me is how little it grosses me out to be touching him. I have always loathed fishing; I hate touching the things, I hate how they flop, I hate it when their spinys stick into my hand and I hate that dense squishy feel they have once they've died on shore. But now after eating so many fish, after so many unseeing eyeballs staring back at me while I munch on their flesh, I have to say fish are becoming appealing. Not so small a role has their deliciousness played in my warming to them. Fish aren't so bad. I actually view the meat section of the grocery store with curiosity now, leaning my head slightly forward to study the various meats and lifeless bodies. Sometime soon I'm going to ask one of my JTEs to take me to the grocery store just to point out the various products and give me some insight into how to prepare them. I will take a notebook and make categories for what types of things should be boiled, fried, deep fried, steamed, toaster-ovened or grilled. I will also ask what items can be eaten whole and which ones must be disemboweled first.

Sakura ebi (the little pink shrimp this area of Shizuoka is so well known for) can pretty much be prepared in any way. I have had them sauteed along with vegetables over rice, deep fried in a large bundle (I bit away with no discretion for head or tail) and baked into battered onion rings. Brian, the ALT at the middle school here in Kambara, said he went on a boat ride with his students out in the ocean on a sakura fishing vessel. There the fisherman scooped up handfuls of live ebi and tossed them to the kids who gleefully chomped them whole, grinding them in their teeth and enjoying the lot of it. Brian had a few too and he said it was really weird swallowing them because the feelers are really long and they tickled his throat.

I didn't buy any sakura ebi this time. I had enough perishable items to get through in the next couple days already in my basket so I moved on. As to the pizza, I couldn't pass up the chance for this frozen delight. The package I bought contained what at first glance looked like pizza barges, but once I got them home I found they were of a much more "homemade" variety. The crust of each was a slice of white bread. On top of this was a thinly spread layer of pizza sauce and the cheese was speckled so thinly that half the surface was red. On top of each slice was a 3 cm x 3 cm square of bacon and one tiny slice of pepperoni. It was sad really. I wanted to bake it and eat it immediately- not because I was hungry but because I wanted to put it out of its misery. So I popped a couple of pieces in my new toaster over (had to test her out at least) and turned the dial. After a few minutes of not realizing it wasn't plugged in, I readjusted and set it to 240W. I waited 15 min. with not much effect. The cheese didn't seem to be melting, but that very well could have been because the cheese wasn't the melting kind. And there was nothing for the cheese to really melt with. I turned the knob up to the next setting of 1000W and let it sit for a couple of minutes while reading BBC News. A quick peak and a sniff told me the 1000W had done 'er in. I told myself that I like my pizza well done (my friends can attest to this) and chuckled to myself as I thought about my roommate Andy's rolls.

Hopefully next time it will be the smell of cooking sanma flooding my nostrils; may it come in any fashion.