Fruit and vegetables

One thing I was told about food in Japan is that fruit and vegetables are absolutely amazing here! Seeing as I love fruit and vegetables, I was of course excited for this! One girl even went as far as to say that they are different here, and that while she doesn’t eat vegetables in America, she can’t get enough of them in Japan.

Imagine my surprise when, upon grocery shopping for the first time, I was met with wilted greens and fruit that costs more than meat.

Tubers and the like (carrots, potatoes, things like that) are of very nice quality and size, don’t get me wrong. Cucumbers are also fairly good in quality, as are tomatoes. Baby bok choy is usually fairly good in quality as well as affordable. Cabbage, too, is often very good looking and the price isn’t too bad (edit: it’s up to $3 a head like lettuce). I don’t buy onions or mushrooms or some other vegetables so I can’t compare.

Celery, however, as I’ve mentioned in another entry, is very hard to find. When you do find it, it’s very expensive. A bag of 2-3 stalks is around $1, and they are usually the yellowing, flimsy inner stalks. Lettuce, for a small, wilted head with already liquefying leaves, was $1.30 when I first started buying it. For the latter half of July and since, it’s been over $2.00 for the same head (edit: as of September it’s been roughly $3 a head). For $1 I can get a bag of 6 leaves of that same lettuce, but if I am patient and lucky at the same time, I can get that same bag for 20 cents.

How is fruit?

For about $3 I can get a small tub of pineapple chunks that I can stretch to two servings. I frequently wait for it to be half price before I buy it, however. The same with watermelon, which is now suddenly out of season.

Oranges and apples, on the other hand, can run up to $4 each. And that’s the sale price in some cases. This isn’t per pound, it is per piece of fruit. I love apples and oranges and tangerines and such, but I have yet to bother buying any since arriving here. That is a lot of money to risk on a piece of fruit that might not even taste that great. Bananas are also fairly prolific, too, but I don’t eat those at home at all, so I have yet to compare. At a passing glance, however, I can tell you that they are much riper and smaller than the ones I see sold in California.

Suffice to say that my fruit intake has been rather limited, and some of my fellow AETs are flabbergasted that I would snub my nose at expensive fruit. Truth is, when they’re affordable, I will eat apples every day just about. My favorite apples back in America average about $3 or more per pound, so I of course do not get them that frequently, but I know they are great. The apples here are nothing like the ones I normally eat, so I am not inclined to spend the money to try them.

Instead I buy vegetables, and I tend to get second helpings of them during lunch at school because they’re typically tasty! If I was more flexible in the kitchen I’d be more willing to try unfamiliar things on my own, but when it comes to trying new ingredients I’m fairly unadventurous.

That being said, when the price of lettuce shot up I was rather desperate for a home-made meal that was cold to eat and prepare that wasn’t a sandwich, since there is basically only one choice of sandwich meat here: Ham. Enter the okara salad recipe. I somehow stumbled upon a recipe for a crab and okara salad that was very simple to make, and seemed tasty. What is okara? It is the byproduct of soymilk. Once the milk is made, the leftover soy is basically a white powder, which is bagged and placed on the shelf for about 60 cents for 300 grams. That is dirt cheap in my humble opinion. I tried the recipe (found here) after finding the ingredients, and it was fantastic! I highly recommend a proper mixing bowl, however. I later acquired one after my trip home in August, and to add bulk to the salad I started buying the bags of shredded cabbage on a whim—I normally don’t like raw cabbage but at some point I started eating it when I’d find it used as bedding for my entrees in bentos, and it wasn’t as bad as when it’s in leaf form. Unfortunately I can’t always get the okara, as when I do manage to spot it on the shelf, there is only one bag. But it does freeze, so I’ve taken to buying it and freezing it when I can find it, just in case the mood strikes me and they’re out at the store.

Fun fact: My principal and vice principals were very shocked to find that I knew what okara was, let alone that I ate it more than once XD