Inspiration Saturday: Rather Be (in Tokyo)

I know I mentioned a while ago my intentions of rebranding this blog, and I'm still planning on doing that.  I'm just still in the consideration and procrastination phase.  But I'm already thinking about some of the things I'd like to write about.  One of those things is music.  I'm not a huge music aficionado, but I think everyone lives their life with their own soundtrack, and every song means something different to each person, depending on when, where, and how they heard it.  Exploring all of the ways we identify with music, and the sometimes surprising reactions I have to music, continues to fascinate me.

So perhaps consider this a kind of sneak preview of the things I'd like to write about in the (hopefully near) future...

For many years, I had a morning ritual every school day that included spending a little time watching music videos, flipping between VH1 and MTV to pass the time before I needed to walk out to meet the bus or (for the last few years) drive myself to school.  Now, when I'm working from home, I occasionally like to indulge in some melodic nostalgia and do the same channel surfing.  That's how I found this music video about halfway through, which caught my eye when I recognized the Yamanote train line.  I immediately went to YouTube to watch the whole thing, and I've since replayed it several times over and had the song stuck in my head.  And so, I pass it along to you, "Rather Be" by Clean Bandit, featuring Jess Glynne:

Tokyo!  And not just Tokyo, but some of the lesser-known but extra-special bits that maybe not everyone will recognize.  The fish market, which I've wandered around quite a bit of in search of our favorite conveyor belt sushi restaurant; the Yamanote line train, which my dad loves and even downloaded an album of ringtones from; and the quintessential yakitori on the grill serving straight-faced businessmen (before the burst into song), which just rings so true.

It's enough to bring my always-latent desire to return to Tokyo up to sigh-inducing levels.  But since that won't be happening any time soon, I should probably just focus on making something out of the yarn I bought the last time I was there from Avril yarn store in Kichijoji.  And maybe drink a cup of Karel Capek tea, which I've been hoarding and drinking only on very special occasions.

Are you also from the TRL generation?  Do you have any favorite music videos?  Do you ever watch them now?  Alicia from Woolen Diversions is having a hopefully great time on her honeymoon right now, but I'm sure she'll have lots of inspiration from Costa Rica when she returns.

Inspiration Saturday/Tokyo tales: Memories of the Matcha Mitts

I know inspiration usually comes at the start of a project, but in this case, I'm taking my inspiration from something I finished last year.

Yup, I'm never letting go of that Tokyo trip.  I've told you about some of the yarn, sushi, and donut-esque desserts, now I'm remembering my Matcha Mitts, the cuffs I knit as part of a swap themed around tea while I was there.  My spoilee had a preference for mitts, and I thought ones with a lacy leaf pattern would be like tea leaves.  Especially in a lovely light green yarn with a touch of sparkle from Heavenly Fiber.  So I packed up my DPNs and took my WIP on a whirlwind tour of Tokyo.

In front of the wishing tree at the Meiji shrine, I didn't purchase my own wooden tablet for posting a wish, but hopefully some of the magical powers of that Camphor tree were imbued into those few stitches:

At the train museum, they had these interesting stained glass windows about life on the train, and one of them depicted a little old lady knitting on her commute.  In solidarity, I had to bring out my own:

I was able to finish at least one of the mitts during my trip, but here is the completed pair:

And now they are off having other adventures somewhere else, and as you've read for the past few weeks, my current WIP has been having slightly less exotic, but nonetheless tasty (pancakes!), adventures being knit while I travel around Austin.

For more inspiration, go to Woolen Diversions.

Tokyo tales: Love Sweets Antiques

Okay, I'm back to reliving some memories of my trip to Tokyo.  I was browsing through my iPhoto and felt the need to share.  I also know that I should offer up some more yarn-finding advice for others who might be optimistically typing in 'yarn + Tokyo' into Google like I did.  I'll try to do that as well, but here's a totally non-crafty, but totally cute, bit of Tokyo love.

I did a lot of extra walking when I was wandering on my own through the city.  I wanted to see everything I could, so I often passed up some possible metro connections to take the longer route to the closest train station.  The bonus of the train is that you stay above ground, plus map reading those lines is a little simpler than the underground.  And in cases where destinations were just a single train stop away, I often just skipped public transport entirely and took to my feet.

This resulted in my getting to see a lot of randomly cool things (and I'll be honest, a lot of randomly boring things as well).  It also made me feel even less guilty about indulging in whatever food I felt like trying.  And as soon as I spotted this cute little storefront on my way from Harajuku to Shibuya (at the junction of Aoyoma Dori and Omotesando), I knew I wanted to try whatever it was they might be selling.  From across the street, I couldn't be sure what they were, but they sure were colorful.

What they were were donuts...sort of.  Love Sweets Antiques (that's a Japanese-only site, FYI) fulfills every expectation of cuteness, with plastic donuts dangling from chandeliers and piled up next to a big white rabbit.

The non-plastic donuts you actually eat come in little octagonal boxes and are kept refrigerated.  All I had to go on in choosing my sweet was color, so I chose the pretty purple.  That turned out to be blueberry.  Rather than fried dough, these rings have a base of sponge cake, with a mousse on top that's set a little bit like a panna cotta (with bits of actual blueberry in mine).  They don't really fit any definition of donut I've come across before, but they are circular and delicious, so it doesn't really matter.

I wandered a little down the street and found a place to sit for a few minutes to eat my sweet with one of those tiny plastic flattened spoons similar to the ones you get in fancy gelato places.  Revived nutritionally and aesthetically, it was time to continue the journey down to Shibuya to find another Tokyu Hands location.  But hopefully more on that in another post...

Tokyo tales: Searching for sushi

What, you thought because it's 2013 you had heard the last of my Tokyo trip?  Nope.  It's going to be a long while before I can get back to Tokyo, if I ever do, so I'm going to make the memories of this last trip last as long as possible.  I apologize in advance for any jealousy cravings, and hope that you may at least be comforted by the fact that I'm giving them to myself by writing this.

There were a few things on my list that I knew I wanted to do when Dad first proposed another trip to Tokyo.  And one of those things was sushi at the Tsukiji fish market. It's bustling, it's colorful, and it has the freshest sushi around.  For those who are truly dedicated, you can get up before the crack of dawn and be one of the hundred or so members of the public allowed into the inner sanctum of the market to witness the tuna auction.  But for the rest of us, you can make your way to the outer edge of the market in the late morning and find a great lunch while hitting up a highlight of being a tourist in Tokyo.

On our last visit, we had found this wonderful conveyor belt (or kaiten zushi) restaurant.  Basically, plates of wonderful sushi just travel around the room while hungry diners grab the ones they cannot resist.  At the end of the meal, your total is calculated by counting up the plates you've collected.  Different colors of plates add up to different values, so a particularly posh piece might be on a gold-trimmed plate while a more humble offering is presented on a plain blue plate.  This particular restaurant is called Sushi Zanmai, and it's a chain that recently made news when the owner made the winning bid on the most expensive tuna auction at Tsukiji ever.

There's obviously a fun factor, especially with the belt wrapping around the preparation area of the sushi, so you are watching the rice being rolled right in front of you as the finished pieces go by.  But it also means that you can pick and choose what you are most interested in trying without having to navigate a set menu with other options.  You can be as adventurous or as safe as you choose, selecting only what you recognize, or taking a chance on something mysterious yet delicious-looking.  And no language skills are required, you simply see, grab, and eat.

I'm not sure why Dad thought it would be so easy to find this place a second time.  The Tsukiji fish market is a packed few blocks of small little alleys filled with fish as well as produce and other offerings.  And particularly on the weekends around lunchtime, it's also filled to the brim with people playing tourist as well as choosing their counter of choice to park and eat.  We both knew we would recognize it when we saw it, but because we came to the market from a different direction than our first visit, remembering directions like 'it was down the third street, on the right' were not as helpful as they might have been.

After several loops around, we had almost given up hope.  But we took a chance and made our way down what we had thought was an alley we had already tried.  The tuna gods were smiling on us, because within a few feet we found ourselves in front of the sliding doors of our sushi destiny.  Behold!

Along with the satisfaction of finding something we were looking for, there was another reason I was glad to have stumbled back upon this place.  It had, both on our first visit and again this time, a particular piece of sushi that had become my own personal legend.  I even have a handmade magnet featuring a picture of it on my fridge.  It's in the center of my little sushi collage, and here is my best description of it: a piece of nigiri sushi (where it's just a little log of rice topped with a piece of fish) made with salmon, which is then roasted slightly using a kitchen torch (like the kind that finishes off a creme brûlée).  That makes it an aburi, for anyone who wants to expand their sushi vocabulary.  This particular piece is also topped with what I think is a squirt of mayonnaise and some chopped chives or green onions.

I have yet to encounter it anywhere else, though I am now one step closer in identifying it, so that should help if I ever seriously attempt to find it stateside.  The trouble is, knowing that I can never fully replicate the quality or the experience, part of me thinks that I'm better off confining my heavenly aburi sushi to Tokyo.

Tokyo tales: I scream for...

Amazingly enough, I didn't eat any frozen yogurt while in Tokyo.  My Google research tells me that there probably are one or two places that do the self-serve weigh and pay thing, but there were plenty of other things for me to seek out, so rather than yogurt, I indulged in some ice cream.

Whether it was served as dessert after dinner in a restaurant or scooped into a cone as a vacation decadence in the middle of the afternoon, there was not a lick of the stuff that I regret.  Here's the collage of ice cream:

First, in the 'served as dessert' category: In the bottom righthand corner, a dainty scoop of vanilla bean to go with some fresh fruit, the finishing touch to a yakitori dinner in the hotel our second night.  The top center is a matcha ice cream that came after another dinner of grilled meats in a restaurant where you take off your shoes and sit on the floor.  After an hour or two it gets a little uncomfortable, but it's worth it for the creamy green tea dessert.  And in the top lefthand corner, that is a frozen apple which has been hollowed out and filled with an apple sorbet.  I ate everything but the very core.

And then, the specifically sought after cones.  On the left is an unabashed afternoon snack of dark chocolate sorbet topped with a grapefruit sorbet, which came from Grom in Harajuku.  You would think that after having ramen for lunch we'd have more restraint, but no.  It was delicious.

In the remaining two photos, we found ice cream in a surprising (to me) place: Baskin-Robbins.  It was next door to the Burger King that offered up the intriguing pumpkin burger so near the hotel.  As with the fast food, the novelty is in the available flavors more than anything else.  In the center photo, my cone is on the left, with a scoop of red bean ice cream atop BR's own version of matcha.  I love the strangeness of getting something so sweet and creamy from beans.  And the color is pretty too.  Dad's is in the right of the same photo, I believe it was an espresso chocolate chip.  

And then in the photo on the right, another trip to BR.  A seasonal pumpkin on the bottom, and an intriguing apple pie and tea ice cream on the top.  That was totally unexpected, but really delicious.  I wish I could get that scooped in the US, because apple pie is so American and all.  The pumpkin was also surprising, because while I expected it to be like a pumpkin pie flavor, it was far more a pumpkin-caramel combo, which while unexpected was absolutely delicious.

I also bought powdered ice cream mixes for matcha and red bean flavors to attempt to make myself stateside.  But I doubt they'll be anything more than a good reminder of the true greatness of the frozen desserts enjoyed in Tokyo.  Nostalgic scoops are better than none at all.

Tokyo tales: Slurping ramen

Most people associate ramen with the dried blocks of noodles that can be bought by the crateful, with packets of sodium-overdosing flavor.  As with most things, these are just a shadow of the true amazingness of 'real' ramen.  A rich broth with soft noodles, crunchy bean sprouts, fall-apart meat and a softly-boiled egg...mmm.  Just how good is it?  Well, it's probably the one thing I ate the most while I was there this time around.  There were four separate ramen meals, each unique:

1.  Train Station Ramen

On our first day in Tokyo, we wandered around Akihabara and found the restaurant supply district (which deserves its own post later) near Ueno.  At Ueno station, we decided that whatever time our bodies thought it was, it was certainly time to eat something, so we popped into a noodle shop for sustenance more than anything else.

Just a plain miso broth with some pork.  Maybe I had just forgotten how good this stuff really is, but this tasted so much better than something from a train station has any right to.  It was definitely worth the few splatters I caused from my relearning chopstick skills.

2.  Vending Machine Ramen

Next was another ramen of convenience.  After a hard day's work, Dad didn't feel like venturing far from the hotel for dinner.  Thankfully, the Westin in Ebisu happens to be right next to a shopping square, and there is an underground path allowing you to access the shops and restaurants without ever actually going outside.  We found this in the basement level, it looks like the kind of place that would be packed for lunch on a work day.

What made this a little interesting was the way you ordered.  Rather than attempting broken English and pointing with a waitress, you push the buttons on this vending machine, which spits out tickets for each item and takes your money ahead of time.

I opted for the basic ramen, plus my favorite toppings of egg, pork, and bamboo.  And a small beer, the beverage of choice with a steaming bowl of goodness.

3.  The Favorite Ramen

There was only one planned ramen stop on this trip, to the 'favorite noodle shop' located in Harajuku.  It's just around the corner from Kiddy Land, an awesome toy store with several floors filled with Hello Kitty, Disney, and other toys.  It's pretty much a given at this point that for any time spent in Tokyo, one day has to be devoted to Harajuku for shopping and ramen.

This is an almost creamy pork broth, rich from the bones boiled for hours.  Otherwise, it features the same highlights of noodles, sprouts, egg, and pork.  We also shared some dumplings, and I got an almond jelly dessert as part of a set deal.

4. Cheesy Ramen

The final night in Tokyo, we didn't really have plans for dinner.  So I Googled around for ideas in the area, and read about this place, Tsukumo, that did cheesy ramen.  I didn't know whether to be intrigued or horrified.  What I knew I was, was hungry.  Dad approved of this culinary experiment, and it was an easy find just a few blocks from the Ebisu train station.

They start out with the rich pork broth, possibly with some of the parmesan rinds going into that process as well.  And the noodles we know and love.  Then, a 'Made in Italy' cheese grater takes a huge hunk of the stuff and grates it in a heaping pile into the soup.  You add your plate of extras (egg, pork, etc.), and ta-dah!

Man, I cannot tell you how good this was.  Seriously.  It sounds a little weird, but the cheese melts beautifully into the broth and noodles.  The only comparison I can make is to a french onion soup.  So delicious.  I'm quite pleased with myself for this find, but really that's the beauty of Tokyo, it almost doesn't matter where you happen to walk into, chances are you're going to get something good to eat.

Well, with the exception of when you walk into places that aren't restaurants, of course!

There you have it, another tale from Tokyo.  It's taking me a while to get to everything, but I hope you're enjoying it, because I love getting to relive it weeks afterwards.  Stay tuned for further installments of craft stores, food, and more.

Tokyo tales: Avril yarn store

Just before I found Karel Capek tea, I found Avril yarn during my day of wonder in Kichijoji.

I used this helpful post as well as their website to guide me, and found that as long as you just trust that you are walking in the right direction, you'll get there eventually.

Once inside, now that was the hard part.  I'm terrible at making decisions at the best of times, and these were not good circumstances for me to be decisive.  The walls are lined mostly with cones of different yarns that are sold by weight.  And along with having some pretty yarns in and of themselves, the main feature of Avril is combining the various yarns to create a chunkier art yarn.  So you have some nice 'base' yarns in lots of colors and gauges, and then some sparkly novelty kind of strands to mix in.  Pretty much everything is in Japanese, and I wasn't brave enough to ask if anyone spoke English to translate for me, but I was able to discern the gauge because each yarn had a card offering details on meters per 10 grams.

I experimented with various combinations, including a color-changing one-ply yarn in various shades of brown along with a strand of what sort of looked like sprinkles to perhaps make a chocolate cupcake cowl.  But in the end, doing something like that had the downside of doubling the cost, so instead I chose to just take 40 g of a heavy fingering (maybe DK) yarn that reminded me of Noro in the coloring, along with a little grab bag that had a short amount of a pre-made art yarn concoction that seemed to complement it.

In one of the crafting department stores (I hope to outline a few in a later post) I found a plain black in the same gauge also from a Japanese yarn company, called Puppy.  So these will likely be combined to create a shawlette, with the tiny yardage of art yarn going towards a knitted flower or other embellishment, possibly to act as a closure for the shawl.

I highly recommend a trip to Kichijoji and this store.  It was a really interesting experience to find something  that felt very much like a local yarn store in the US, with people knitting in the side room, etc.  The other yarn  sources I was able to make it to were all more like department stores, so this was absolutely worth the journey out, especially because Kichijoji itself turned out to be such a gem of a little town for wandering and shopping.

You know, when you next happen to be wandering around Tokyo wondering what to do with yourself.

Tokyo tales: Fast food adventures

Japan has so much amazing food.  Sushi, ramen, yakitori, steak.  So maybe it's a little heretical that I actually sought out fast food on this trip and ate it not once, but twice.  But stay with me here, I did have a reason.  Before this, it had been about two years since I had actually eaten a burger and fries.  So it wasn't that I couldn't survive two weeks without pink slime.  It's that there are things that these plastic palaces only put on the menu in certain places.  And I find that intriguing, seeing and tasting what has been designed for this particular place and this group of people.  It tells you something about what they eat in 'real' food.  And it's kind of fun.

Fall was in full swing while we were there, including Halloween decorations.  I had always seen Halloween as an American holiday, but I guess it's another one of those cultural exports we're sending around the globe.  But in Japan, pumpkins aren't just for carving into jack-o-lanterns or even filling pies.  They can also be put on burgers.

Burger King has a limited edition BK Pumpkin, a 'harvest time' burger, basically a bacon cheeseburger with slices of roasted Japanese pumpkin.  I believe that technically that's a squash, but let's not get picky.  I was very intrigued when I read about this, because I love pumpkin in all of its sweet forms and regularly stir a little puree into puddings, oatmeal, and baked goods.  I had also had some raw sticks of pumpkin amongst the veggies at another more traditional Japanese dinner.  And so, it was the season to try this out.

See the pumpkin?  You can also order a 'Bomb Pumpkin' to get ten slices on this, or in fact any, burger.  But I think two slices was adventurous enough.

Actually, this was pretty good.  Well, the bacon cheeseburger part was, like most fast food, not as satisfying as it smelled, but the pumpkin part was good enough to make me think that I might try and add some to my own sandwich sometime.  Something about the bacon and the pumpkin together was good.  Who knew that pairing was out there?

And then, for lunch one day, we popped into a McDonald's.  Nothing against Burger King, but for my generation at least, they just don't have that deeply, disturbingly engrained connection.  McDonald's had the happy meals, so when I think of quintessential fast food, that's where I think of going.  This is not difficult to manage, since there is one literally on every corner in certain neighborhoods, particularly in the vicinity of public transportation.

And each of these locations, unlike the locations in the US, has an Ebi Filet-O.  Basically, it's a shrimp burger.  Shrimp ground up into a patty, coated with Panko and fried up, with lettuce and a sauce derived from Thousand Island.

I think this was more interesting, just because it was a completely different kind of burger.  Again, it was still fast food, so it could have been better, but I would eat another if I found myself locked in a McDonald's around mealtime.  And again, it made me want to try it myself at home, though I'm not sure I want to actually fry it, and I'd be worried about baking it and overcooking the shrimp.

There you have it.  Japanese fast food.  And if you're ever there, make sure you ask for ketchup at the counter, otherwise you're going to have to eat your fries naked.

Tokyo tales: Karel Capek tea shop

It's so hard to know where to start in regaling you with tales of Tokyo.  But I suppose all of the best things start with a nice cup of tea.

I'm currently in a tea-themed swap on Ravelry, so it was on my mind throughout the trip.  I had a few ideas for places to find a few bags, but funnily enough, my favorite find came once I was in Tokyo.  The first day we had to wander around, my dad and I went to a department store that mostly carries electronics, but also had a floor of books and magazines.  I love Japanese magazines because, apart from interesting fashion editorials, they tend to come with fun freebies like little tote bags.  While browsing through these for the best free gift, I found one magazine that was more like a catalogue for a Karel Capek tea shop.

For those who don't know, Karel Capek was a Czech author.  He's most famous for coining the term 'robot', but I think he's worth reading for more than that.  For example, The Gardener's Year is a short and sweet little book that is hilarious for those with or without a green thumb.  Though he's not a household name, he apparently made enough of an impression on Utako Yamada, a Japanese children's book author and illustrator, to name her tea store after it.

Now in it's 25th year, there are multiple locations around Japan, mostly in the Tokyo area.  I decided to venture out slightly to Kichijoji to visit the original.  It's a few stops by train outside of the city center, and there's also a great yarn store here (more on that later).  Getting there is like getting anywhere in Japan for a foreigner.  It requires a some research and a little luck.  Their website provides a little map sketch for each location (this is the translated page for Kichijoji), which when combined with an additional map of the area gave me a sort of idea of where I was going, several blocks from the train station.  Mostly, though, it was luck that had me turning onto the correct streets.  And thankfully, on the corner of the final street there was a building with a sign for ASA, which was also on the online sketch.  After walking half a minute I spotted the telltale signs.

Inside it was positively bursting with teas that each smelled delicious and had the most precious packaging ever.  Plus, you are greeted with a small sample cup of tea and half a biscuit to snack on.  I tried Milk Caramel, and it was so good.

It was so hard to decide what to bring home with me.  The mugs were lovely, but I knew that they wouldn't be the easiest things to pack.  Plus, the tea was expensive enough on its own.  In the end I settled for a sort of sampler pack with about a dozen flavors, and a reusable shopping bag.  I should have gotten one or two more, because they were the best deal and are a very cute way to remember the store.  I plan on carefully cutting the tea bags for later display, because the illustrations are worthy of wall space.  They also have a lot of really cute brochure and catalog things.  Really, this is a feat of merchandising genius mixed with good brew.

In search of more bags, I tried to visit their location in Ginza, but unfortunately it was being renovated at precisely the time I was in town.  I did find them again in Jiyugaoka, after a lot of wandering around with no idea what I was looking for.  They didn't have any bags at this location, it was a bit smaller, but they did have another flavor of tea, Marron (like a chestnut, seems to be a popular fall flavor here) so I decided to splurge and get a tin of this one.  I've brewed one cup of it so far, and it's very nice.

It's going to be tough drinking these teas knowing that I can't really get any more, but I'm going to try and just enjoy what I have and hope that online ordering becomes easier.  Until then, happy memories and a few aww-inducing photos like this one.

Domo Arigato, Japan!

I'm back!  Not only was I allowed back into the country, but so was my suitcase full of tea, yarn, fabric, Hello Kitty, and other goodies.  I have many tales to share, of searching for yarn stores, slurping Ramen, and doing it all with a camera around my neck.  Because there's no pretending you're not a tourist in Tokyo, best to just embrace it.

I arrived back home yesterday afternoon, so for Halloween I was a jet lagged zombie.  And between that, returning to work and starting NaNoWriMo today, I'm just not prepared to break all of the awesomeness down for you yet.  I'll try to whip something up tomorrow to start the series off, but for now, my update is just that I'm back.  Hi!