This year I bought two Halloween pumpkins online. They came from Hokkaido, and were about $30 each. I decided to let two of my junior classes design a jack-o-latern each. A student then drew the design on the pumpkin, and I carved it while my co-worker had them play a game. When I finished we turned off the lights, closed the curtains, and admired our handiwork. Most students (perhaps all) had never seen a jack-o-lantern before. They wanted to look inside, and wondered why the top didn’t burn. And they all wanted to smell it, and unanimously thought it smelled bad.
I celebrated my birthday a couple of days early. Haruka made a reservation at a restaurant in Kyoto that has a license to serve blowfish. In Japanese, it is called “fugu”. We ordered a set with four courses of fugu, plus rice and dessert. Our first dish was a clear jelly, with pieces of fugu meat and fugu skin inside. It is called fugu nikogori.
The next dish was raw blowfish, fugu sashimi. It is sliced thin, and looks semi-transparent. The white bits next to the green onion is blowfish skin. I told Haruka not to tell me what is was until after I finished eating it.
Third was breaded and fried blowfish, fugu kara age.
Kara age was followed by “nabe”, a hotpot soup.
This plate show the raw vegetables, blowfish, tofu and noodles.
These are then boiled in water with a large piece of konbu seaweed. The cooked blowfish looks kind of like chicken.
The plate even included the blowfish’s mouth. I planned to eat it, but it had many small bones, and it didn’t look very appetizing, so I gave up.
After, we added rice to the broth that remained, boiled it for a few minutes, added an egg, and continued boiling until the egg cooked and the rice absorbed all of the broth. Then we topped it with flakes of dried seaweed.
Last was yuzu (small asian citrus) ice cream. I didn’t take a picture.
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