Pizza Margherita and Peperoncino Pasta

Pizza Margherita and Peperoncino Pasta
Pizza Margherita and Peperoncino Pasta

Tonight’s dinner was homemade Pizza Margherita and Peperoncino Pasta, made by my wife. As I’ve mentioned many times, she is an amazing cook and we eat like kings at home. The other night we went out to a local Italian restaurant which was rated pretty highly on Yelp, but the food was just too salty for our tastes. I think maybe that left my wife unsatisfied since she really wanted Pizza Margherita. So, she made us a homemade pizza pie! It was great!!!

It got me thinking a little about how American and Japanese palettes are different. I’ve come to realize that I don’t like too much salt on my food anymore, but here in the States it is common for food to be pretty salty. There are always salt shakers on the tables in restaurants, and they get used really often! After eating Japanese and Japanese-style food for years now, my taste buds are not used to so much salt, so lots of times the standard restaurant fare is just too much for me. To be more specific, the type of saltiness I am used to comes from shoyu and miso, and not regular table salt, so it is a more complex flavor. I guess it is rare for us to say about a Japanese meal that it is too salty, but we might say that there is too much shoyu in it. I hope that make sense.

What is also a little uncommon about our meals is that often times there is no meat in the meal at all. Honestly, I don’t notice much of the time because the food is really delicious. It is such a normal thing to have a meat component to a meal in America and I think we’ve been conditioned by the meat industry that we need to have meat as a main component for every meal, whether it be breakfast sausage or bacon, turkey or ham in our sandwiches, or chicken in our pasta. It might be hard to believe, but there are delicious meals without any meat in them! I don’t mean to be preachy, but I do think we as humans should realize the impact our over-consumption of meat has on our environment, as science is showing us more and more in studies. I think it is really good, though, that people are becoming more aware of these studies and are choosing to be more mindful of where their food comes from, and the resources that are required to produce our food. The sharing of information on the Internet has a lot to do with that.

Longing for Gravity

Longing for Gravity – You are on a mission to Mars. Because of the length of of the journey, you will never be able to return to Earth. What about our blue planet will you miss the most?

One of my favorite types of photography is landscape photography, especially landscapes that feature beautiful or interesting clouds. Although I am sure I will be able to view unlimited amounts of photos via electronic communication, I will miss being able to actually take them and post-process them. These days, the post-processing (in Lightroom mainly) is maybe 80% of the fun of photography for me. I see the camera as just a tool to capture the light, so I can get that light into the computer to do the post-processing. Although I am sure there will be interesting things to photograph on Mars, I’m sure it will lack the diversity of our home planet.

You can see some of the photos I have made at my Flickr page or Instagram feed.

This post was prompted by The Daily Post from WordPress.

森恵「接吻 -kiss- (ORIGINAL LOVE)」

Megumi Mori’s cover of 接吻 -kiss- by Original Love is so good! I hope you agree. It’s a great pop song.

After watching/listening to this, I decided to try to learn it on guitar, which is kind of a problem since I don’t know how to play guitar! But why should that stop me? With that in mind, I picked up Koa’s guitar, watched a couple beginner videos, and learned a couple of chords. As thousands of hopeful guitarists before me, I learned how to play E major and A major and then strummed along to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”. That was actually quite fun and satisfying!

Anyways, it is kind of a goal of mine to learn a few tunes on the guitar so why not start now? It should be a fun experience. Who knows, someday I might be able to play 接吻 like Megumi Mori! (the singing though is impossible…)

First Day at the Pool

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Today was the first day at the pool for us this year. It was just Koa and I who decided to go — Mariko was out at the Farmer’s Market and Bay stayed home to read — so Koa didn’t have anyone to play with in the pool. I swam for a bit, and played with him, but I’m sure it’s a lot more interesting to play with his friends! Still, it was fun and we got some good exercise. We got there at 2pm, and there was a nice crowd of people there. Not too much that we didn’t find chairs, but at around 2:30 it seemed like the rest of the neighborhood decided to drop by. When we left at 3pm, there were cars parked on the street and no empty chairs to be found. I need to remember to arrive before 2:30!

Also, I continue to be enamored with my Panasonic DMC TS2 camera. It’s a waterproof/shockproof camera that captures some good pictures and video, and with the magic of post-processing, you can get some fun images out of it. Plus I love the peace-of-mind knowing that I don’t have to take care of the camera as much as a dSLR. I think it is definitely worth it to have one of these rugged point-and-shoot cameras in the bag at all times!

Snapshot Stories

Snapshot Stories – Open the first photo album you can find – real or virtual, your call – and stop at the first picture of yourself you see there. Tell us the story of that photo.

Tamago Sushi Shirt
Tamago Sushi Shirt

For this Daily Prompt I opened up my Flickr stream (which hasn’t seen a whole lot of activity these days, and found this photo I took of myself wearing a sushi shirt. The shirt was a gift from my oldest brother, who visited Japan recently with his son. It’s pretty cool, isn’t it? If you are not familiar with sushi, this one is called Tamago, which means Egg. It’s a good kids’ sushi actually, but my wife and I also enjoy it, usually towards the end of a sushi meal since it is sweet.

I don’t have a lot of photos of myself since I am usually behind the camera and I don’t particularly like selfies. So… when I do take photos of myself, my face is usually hidden!

You can learn more about Tamagoyaki at Wikipedia.

This post was prompted by The Daily Post from WordPress.