Had some emails recently asking me if I had a garden this year, so I decided to make a video response and show you what I have going on this year at the Hamel Homestead.
Charles Hamel
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The wife and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary yesterday and went out for a nice meal together. Since it was a weekday it was not convenient to find someone to watch the kids so we took them with us. Earlier in the day I had asked my wife where she would like to go and eat, normally she chooses a sushi restaurant, but this time she wanted to go to a yaki niku place (grilled meat).
I spent five years of my life living a vegetarian lifestyle, but changed that eating habit a few years ago.. I am still not big on meat and only eat pork now and then. I still never eat beef and chicken is very very rare. But I think every once in a while it is ok, besides Japanese portions are much much smaller than the huge thick steaks that are common in the U.S. and other Western countries.
Most of the time my family and I follow a Macrobiotic type of diet with lots of grains and vegetables. Mostly we eat brown rice and vegetables for our normal meals and a few times a week will have fish or a small portion of pork. We choose to eat this way for health reasons.
Living in the place where we live it is very simple to eat locally, in fact on a weekly basis one of the local farmers are giving us vegetables, in fact just today we got a huge sack full of potatoes. And just 2 days ago received two cabbages and some leeks. Rice is bought from a farmer friend, and is almost always this years or last years crop.
We refuse to buy products that come from other countries most of the time, and also don’t buy things that are not in season. Some things you can’t help, like tropical fruits for instance, Hokkaido doesn’t grow bananas, they tend not to work very well in the extreme cold 
.
The 19th wedding anniversary dinner was at a place called Gyukaku which means (cow horn) and is a chain restaurant that has locations all over Japan. It was the first time that we had eaten at this place and I was excited about trying out the cuisine.
We started off with some kimchee and rice, the kimchee was not quite as good as the kimchee at Korean Village, but it wasn’t bad either. The daikon (Japanese radish) was the best part. Next course was the raw meat that we cooked ourselves on a grill of coals in the middle of the table.
The next course was a raw cabbage salad in a very tasty house dressing. Then came an assortment of pork cheek, pork roast and beef tongue. (I skipped the beef tongue). A plate of mixed vegetables which included corn, cabbage, onions, and mushrooms were next.
After finishing all of this we were still hungry and ordered the kids some ramen, while the wife and I had scallops in butter and garlic cloves in a house sauce. The scallops were excellent and the garlic cloves tasted like potatoes.
For dessert the kids and I had a chocolate mousse over a scoop of vanilla ice cream while my wife had a custard pudding with brown honey sauce. We left fat and happy and lost the kids to dreamland on the way home. If I wasn’t driving I probably would have drifted off to dream land myself.
Dinner was good, and we had a great 19th wedding anniversary, but we are still on the search for the great restaurants of Asahikawa. Take care all.
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This past weekend was the wifey’s birthday so instead of putting myself through the torture of picking out a gift that she probably wouldn’t like in the first place we deemed Saturday her day. The deal was that she could do anything that she wanted all day, and I would act as the Taxi driver and baby sitter while she enjoyed herself.
The first place we visited was the $1.00 store or here in Japan we say the hyakuen shop (100¥ shop) where she had to pick up some candle making supplies. The next place we went was Nitori, which is a Japanese version of Ikea. I have had a cold recently and wasn’t feeling well, although I patiently waited without sighing or saying a word until she was finished.
The next place was a restaurant that she chose to have a Korean dinner at called Korean Village which happens to be right across the street from the English school that I work part time for. We had eaten there before and already knew that the food was good. Last time we were without the kids, but this time they got to enjoy it also.
My wife ordered some kind of Korean spicy soup that had rice mixed in with a spicy broth and vegetables. My oldest son ordered a bacon and potato pizza, while my youngest had a kids plate with an assortment of kids foods. (sausage, spaghetti, fruit..etc) I had some spare rib meat marinated in a spicy miso sauce that I grilled myself in the middle of the table.
Korean Dinner
Later on we ordered another assortment of chicken, pork, and beef to grill in the middle so the kids and my wife could sample the grilled meats taste. Of course sides of rice always come with dinner, and I had to order an assortment of spicy Korean Kimchee which came with Chinese cabbage (hakusai), Japanese radish (Daikon), and Cucumber (kyuuri).
The dinner was delicious but I ate too much as always. When we went outside it was pouring down rain, which has happened quite frequently this year. After loading up the kids there was a magazine that I wanted to get, so we headed over to Yamada Denki, which is a electronics store, but has a book store in it also.
We have been in the market for a new video camera, and have been pricing various ones and reading reviews on which is the best. While I went to get the magazine I wanted, my wife said that she was going to go look at the video cameras. After I met back up with her she had picked out a video camera that she wanted so we decided to get it while we were there.
Tsuruya-san likes the new video camera
The video camera is a Sony HDR-XR500V which features a 120 gig harddrive (no more tapes to mess with), Full High Definition (1080) and Blue Ray capabilities, GPS which tags your videos with GPS coordinates, touch screen, night vision, and hundreds of other features I have only began to explore. I also have a Pure Video Flip Video camcorder that I use for this blog frequently, but it was frustrating my wife because it has no zoom. I like the flip video because it is ultra portable, and if it get’s damaged is not a big hit to my pocketbook.
It was a good day, and I think that she fully enjoyed herself and the Korean Dinner, now I have a huge manual to study so that I can learn to use this camera effectively.
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