Darth Seder

Well, my first time making matzah went pretty well. After 2 kg of flour and nearly five hours, I had the equivalent of maybe two or three boxes of matzah, but all irregular, ugly, and real. About half were officially "kosher for Passover", meaning that they actually were finished within the allotted time. This would have been a lot easier with help, but it is what it is. Next year, I'll do a lot better.

So now I'm preparing in earnest . . .

. . . for my first seder that I'm doing myself, not just a guest at. I have a pretty basic menu for five, volunteers bringing wine and grape juice, and a haggadah ready to be printed as soon as I find my USB stick.

For the haggadah, I started with JewishBoston's The Wandering is Over. I opened it as a word file and added some art, reformatted it a bit, and added the bit about "mitzrayim" meaning "narrow places" and my own take on the wicked son.

Menu plan is:

Vegetarian "chopped liver" with crudite's (I don't know how to put an accent aigu on with this keyboard)

Salad (either Israeli or basic green)

Lentil soup

Roasted spring vegetables atop a lemon quinoa pilaf

Matzah (natch)

Macaroons with fresh fruit

Wine

I'm a little disappointed to be lacking matzah balls and kugel, but the matzah is swindling, so I need to ration it. 

The Point of Pesach

I have been in a frenzy, as I realized just how disconnected from the timecycles of Judaism I've gotten. I looked up and saw: ten days until Passover. Ten days before the first Passover I would ever experience during which I could neither travel to a family celebration in L.A. nor go to a friends' house for a Chavurah seder. Yes, we hope to video chat in to the L.A. celebration, but I need the hands-on experience, the interactive learning system the early rabbis put in place in the Mishnah over 800 years ago.

I am looking at the reality of my life here in Japan. And yes, I have been very bad about sharing it via a blog, or even regular letters and emails. Sorry again about that. I look at my studio apartment, my "fun-sized" fridge, our bed that takes up most of our room. I wanted to invite lots of people, make a big thing, teach a lot of people about Passover, and make it a magical experience. I wanted my first seder to be . . .  you know, perfect.

I am a little separated from my student teaching now (eight months, now), and even though I am still teaching, I forgot the basic lesson of failure every teacher should know.

No matter how well you lesson plan, that lesson is well over 50% better the second time you teach it.



So I am looking at what is realistic. Getting a room at the Community center and trying to cater an event for a ton of people? Out of a tiny kitchen in my apartment and with no access to a kitchen on site? Or inviting two or three people to our home for a smaller but more "real feeling" seder with wine, laughs, and a read through the haggadah (even if it's printed off the internet)? A seder that really affirms that the Jewish home has taken the place of the Temple, as much as the synagogue?

I always want to do more. I only have been to seven seders, and I wanted one to leap, fully-formed, onto a table to provide an educational, inspiring, moving experience to a large group of people with no prior knowledge of Passover. I want to know more than I do, especially all those songs that are listed in every Haggadah, which I have either never heard or never learned.

But Pesach is the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Sure, there's the historical/reconstructionist reason for that - the Jews and the mixed multitude left Egypt without time for their bread to rise, so they baked it flat and took it like lembas into the desert. But with Judaism, there's always the three other meanings (at least) below the literal. I'm not much of a scholar, but I know one of them.

Leavening puffs things up. The miracle of fermentation creates gases which bubble up, creating mysterious sounds and smells in the wheat, cabbage, grapes, milk, or whatever you're fermenting. Being puffed up, literally full of gas, is how I am most of the time. I am so blessed to have supportive, loving friends and family, who tell me often that I am great. A lot of the time, I even believe them. I am vastly contented with myself much of the time, and need to be shaken out of it.

Leavened bread is puffy, and squishy. (Don't get me started on Japanese bread - it is so glutinous that it is difficult to tear, and chews like marshmallow.) It is blown up past the necessary. But what is it, at the base? Excluding the yeast, which is included to make the puff happen by converting sugars into gases. Flour, salt, and water.



It is stark, and basic. It is bread at its least fancy. It is hard, and sharp when you break it. But it is good. It survives, and nourishes. It is a constant reminder throughout Passover of the experience we're meant to remember. The point is remembering, and telling the story. So even if my seder doesn't have a lot of courses, or if I have to make my own matzah, and so can only make the minimum, I can live with it.

I want to do the most, and be petted and praised for it. I want to throw a seder worthy of Martha Stewart in a studio apartment. I want to be big, and puffed. But having a humble seder is also a way of remembering, and being literally in exile, even from the "exile" of living in the US, surrounded by other Jews, may be a more thorough immersion into the Exodus story than ever.

Plus, dining around a kotatsu makes the injunction to recline while eating pretty easy. TPR!

Tokyo Orientation

Sorry to be so long, but Tokyo Orientation is every bit as busy, exciting, frazzling, and jet-lagged as I'd been led to believe. This post may be long(ish) on pictures and shortish on commentary, but I'll try to fill in the blanks later.

The day before yesterday afternoon (August 3), we landed at Narita. The humidity, even inside, felt like about the worst Sacramento has to offer, and Boiseans could only imagine it as "bathroom after medium-length shower". I have no idea of numbers,but I'll start adding those as I A.) get used to Celsius, and B.) have a bit more time to blog.There were lines to get through to get Residents' cards, and a quick trip through customs, then out the door to the buses.

Outside was hotter, and stickier, and I have more and more respect for whoever designs Japanese air conditioners, because they work HARD. Here are some pictures of the bus.

The drive in was very nice - green outside and air-conditioned inside. It still didn't really feel like a foreign country, even with the bus driving on the left and all the signage in Japanese. Here's the drive:

 Sorry some are pretty fuzzy. I'm not that great with the camera yet. Don't ask me about landmarks or anything - I don't know them yet. It was fun listening to other son the bus asserting or hotly denying that any particular tower was or was not Tokyo Tower or the Skytree. 

We got to Keio Plaza Hotel, which is schmanzty. A lot of the ads around the place make it look like it's very popular for weddings and other big events. Here's the opening ceremony: 

We're a big group, with representatives from San Francisco, Detroit, Cleveland, D.C., Tennessee, New Zealand, Canada, and Britain. No idea how many total, but Americans are the largest contingent in Group B. (Group A came a week or so ago and Group C comes in a week or so).

I learned form a Real Canadian™ that Regina does not, in fact, have shores. The Arrogant Worms are just being goofy, as they do. I got props for knowing about the Arrogant Worms, though. Apparently they're sending a whole bunch of the Canadians to Hokkaido. Maybe they figure Canadians can handle the weather u[ there. 

Opening Ceremonies were mostly people making encouraging speeches, and we moved on to workshops.I especially liked the "Elements of Japanese for Beginners" class - the lady used a lot of the language instruction methodology I learned during my TESOL classes, especially TPK (not what you might think, thank goodness).

Again, this place is used for weddings, so I got some pics of one of the ballrooms that really shows that off:

Last night I went out with some new friends (mostly headed to Ehime as well), and did my first ever karaoke that wasn't a guy with a binder in the corner of a bar. Really. American karaoke is kind of lame. I unfortunately don't have any pictures of that, though pictures were taken. I suppose you can monitor Facebook for potential blackmail material. I sang AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill and Cher's Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves. But what I need to learn is some J-Pop. My favorite song of the night, Dream Fighter by Perfume:

The most "weirder. stranger. more Japanese" song of the night was PonPonPon:

And because you all must be desperate to know, here's the bathroom situation at a schmantzy hotel in Shinjuku:

This is a Washlet ("washing toilet"). The buttons on the side control the spray and bidet functions.You can turn the water pressure up and down to suit your comfort level. And the seat is heated. The only downside to Japanese facilities is the difficulty, sometimes, in finding "flush". Here it's the handle on the wall, and in Keio as a whole it's easy, because a lot of foreigners stay here, so everything is in Romaji or even English. It may be more challenging out in the countryside.

Anyway, I have to go prepare for Day 2. Post any comments or questions. Hopefully this will get transferred over to a new blog just for Japan, but I may wait for Nick to set that up.

Eek.

The news is in - I have been accepted for the short list of ALT candidates for the JET Program. This means that, short of a few more bits of paperwork, my fiancé and I will be going to Japan! Best extended, working honeymoon ever!

Of course, this brings more work to the table. In addition to wedding planning, working out, teaching, studenting, and doing PACT ( which is just zooming up. Eek.), I need to begin to think about what will come with us, what will be stored, what sold or donated. I need to get back to Japanese study, hopefully. So it's triage time. PACT and JET paperwork take precedence over all else. If I can manage the self-command to actually make that happen, I'll be good.

Before we begin . . .

So we've taken our "before" pictures (which, eek. I always managed to be better placed to not look quite so heavy before), and are getting together all the things we'll need to start p90x next week. We're waiting one week for orders to be delivered and for DF to get back from a week of out-of-town business. In the meantime, I mean to run and maybe do the beginner's bodyweight workout from Nerd Fitness, and try to stay sane during another run-up to PACT week.

It's a little scary, looking at all this, but frankly, most of the nutrition stuff is stuff I've been looking at, and turning over in my head for a while. And knowing it's only for 90 days, then we'll reevaluate on the honeymoon, makes it less of a "I will never eat that again, never no-how" kind of thing. I know some of my friends are completely anti-wheat in all its incarnations, for example. I can't agree with that, but I do eat way too much of it. Our cleanse taught me (in just four days!) that I can get by with one carb a day. Heck, it's a step up from the "no grains, beans, legumes, etc" of the cleanse.

Yesterday, I made a mess of Cauliflower rice, which I then tossed with quinoa and just a bit of brown rice (about .5 cauliflower, .35 quinoa, .15 brown, long-grained rice), which will be our base for stuff this week. I'll probably do a "fried rice" with egg at some point (maybe as a breakfast! mmm!), and some stir-fry or curry-like thing later in the week.

Fitness stuff upcoming

So we are on the last day of a four-day cleanse I found via a beautiful food site - My New Roots. While I haven't yet been able to make her (admittedly wonderful-looking) Life-Changing loaf of bread satisfactorily yet, but may try again soon. Anyway, this cleanse ended up being pretty much just fruits, veg, and seeds prepared wonderfully. I won't be sorry when it ends tomorrow, but I have discovered a few winning recipes I intend to keep:

Winter Kale Slaw
Parsnip "Rice"
Coconut-Date Bites
Baked Apples

But wait! You cry. If anything, you're too crazed with baked-apple frenzy! And you're not incorrect. But the recipe above is nearly as lovely as my butter-and-brown sugar drenched delicacies, with nothing but apples, coconut, raisins, and spices. I won't leave the dessert-y ones forever, but the lighter ones could be a dessert or breakfast, anytime!

This cleanse was, on a whole, a way to shock our systems and get going into a more serious eating and exercise plan. This may well turn into a cooking and fitness blog now, not that food hasn't formed the vast majority of my posts so far. Apart from keeping going with school one and school two, that should form a majority of my plans for the near future.

Next up: Put new recipes (these and others) into My Fitness Pal so I can easily keep track of what I'm eating. If things go the way we plan, we'll have to be a bit calorie-conscious for the next, oh, 90 days . . .

Blackberry 3-Pepper Jam

I've been meaning to make some spicy fruit jam to serve as an appetizer on cheeses. In a fit of inspiration, I got some mystery peppers at the Co-op, and some frozen blackberries. Here's what I ended up with:

Roughly 3 cups of crushed blackberries

Roughly 1 cup crushed strawberries

1/4 cup lemon juice

1.75 oz powdered pectin

About 3/4 cup (8 smallish) minced hot peppers, half seeded

About 1 tsp crushed red pepper (from pizza delivery)

About 1/2 tsp ground white pepper

6 cups organic sugar.

(I'm not going to include processing info- refer to the Ball or Better Homes and Gardens Canning Books or foodinjars.com for processing info.)

Thaw and crush berries. Add peppers, lemon juice, pectin and bring to a boil. Add sugar, bring to a boil again, stirring constantly. Cook for a few minutes ( I may have overdone it- again- I did about 4 minutes), stirring constantly.

I got 4 half-pints and 6 quarter-pints. Taste-testing of what remained in the pan indicates a sweet, complex jam with a nice, slight burn on the back of the taste. I'll see how it develops.

Recipe adapted from multiple sources, primarily this one.