Welcome to Hirochan's World

I noticed there are a lot of Thai restaurants in Washington for some reason. By and large, they are authentic and provide good food. Thin Pan is one of the good Thai restaurants located in downtown Kirkland. I always order pad thai, stir-fried rice noodle. Ronnie's favorite is lemongrass chicken. He likes green curry as well.

Soondubu or sundubu is Korean-style tofu stew served in a sizzling-hot pot. Since winter time in Washington is long and cold, it is very nice to have an extremely steamy hot pot or what we call nabe in Japan. At most Korean restaurants, we can chose how spicy we want the sundubu to be. I always order seafood sundubu with no spice. I assume kimchi, a spicy pickled cabbage dish, is the most popular Korean food in the U.S. I, personally, cannot stand kimchi, though. What I want to point out is not all Korean food is so spicy. When I went to Seoul, Korea, I enjoyed a bag of roasted chestnuts and coffee milk in a triangle-shaped package.  The other Korean foods I like are chapchae, potato noodles; jajangmyeon, noodles with a black bean sauce; jeon, many pancake-like dish; and kimbap, a sushi roll. I like Korean seaweed as well. Korean seaweed is prepared with sesame oil, therefore it is softer and stickier than nori, Japanese seaweed.

We went on a day trip to La Conner April 12th, 2008. It is a popular place for tulip field viewing in spring.  To be honest, I don't like tulips very much. I think tulips are sort of disgusting looking when the petals open up. But we picked the perfect day because it was really warm and sunny. We are a little bit too early for full blossoming, though. Overall, I enjoyed the trip. I hope we go back again this year. I posted more photos on Flickr .         

"This is milk.  Milk must be like this."             -by Hirochan I wondered why milk in the U.S. does not taste as good as the milk in Japan, especially Nokyo milk. Even whole milk in the U.S. tastes too weak for me, as if it were diluted. I can find reduced fat milk, low fat milk, or fat free milk without any problems. The problem is finding good-tasting whole milk. However, after I moved to Washington, I was finally able to find THE milk:  Smith Brothers Farms  whole milk. This local milk company is awesome. Our milkman delivers farm-fresh milk every week door-to-door. Once I had their fresh milk, I knew the difference. It tasted exactly as I expected. I am sooooo happy because having real milk made my life in the U.S. much easier.  Here comes the milk truck to deliver fresh milk day after day.  Honk! Honk!  

Hand roll sushi is different from regular rolls or nigiri. You do not have to use expensive ingredients and it is easy to prepare. All you have to do is place each item on a dish such as egg, can of tuna, imitation crab, avocado, cucumber, pickled white radish, natto, and so on. Then we can pick whatever we like and put it on a sheet of seaweed, roll everything up, and eat it. It is fun. I used to fix hand roll sushi every Friday for Wu family, my Taiwanese host family who lived in Irvine, CA. They loved it, especially the kids enjoyed making a roll by themselves. So why don't you have hand roll sushi party tonight?

Since I am Japanese, I love rice. I mean I love pure carbohydrates such as white rice, white breads, and all kinds of noodles. On the other hand, as an American, Ronnie tries to cut carbo as much as he can for his diet. But he likes Japanese food and sometimes we enjoy rice.  I recently cook rice with a ceramic pot. It works much better than using a rice cooker in my opinion.  This time, I fixed an omelet with a filling of ketchup rice and a lunch box bento version for Ronnie-kun.

Chawanmushi is one of my favorite Japanese dishes. It literally means tea cup steam or steamed in a tea bowl. Chawanmushi is an appetizer which consists an egg custard with numerous ingredients such as shrimp or crab meat, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, and so on. It is generally considered to be a difficult dish to prepare, so if I say I am good at making chawanmushi, people might think I am an expert chef! It is tough to see if the egg is steamed at the right heat, or it loses its smooth texture. Actually, I messed up several times, but once I got the proper heat and time, cooking chawanmushi is not difficult at all. Ronnie loves this dish, too. He does not quite understand the difference, though. Every time he just says "umai!" whether the egg comes out well or not. That is my sweetheart Ronnie-kun.