Thursday, May 04, 2006

on being domesticated

I have a feeling I’m getting domesticated by the day. Monday and Thursday afternoons are spent sweeping the floor and cleaning the bathroom coz on those days I have the least number of classes. Mondays so far has always been my laundry day. On Tuesdays, I walk to the nearby supermarket, Uoroku to shop for groceries because they have lots of items selling for only Y90.

Whenever I get junk mails through my mailbox, I scour for the latest bargains and the cheapest deals. To compare prices, I take pictures with my handphone of the items I want. Even though the particular item may be on sale in that shop, I think I can get a better price if I take time to shop around.


Promotion on branded bags such as Prada and Gucci are advertised like our Malaysian hypermarket "Best Deal of the Week" flyers


To ensure that I do not overspend and have a little to treat myself at the end of the month, I keep track of my daily expenses in a neat little Excel file. There are columns for total daily expenditure and cumulative expenditure as the days go by. I also put little notes for unusually high figures and a separate spreadsheet for luxury items.

Back home, my specialty is soup-based dishes. Here, I have learnt to cook a whole lot more. In fact, most of the dishes here are really my first time making them. Very simple dishes too, I just apply the same rule as my soup-based dishes : just throw everything inside, and with some instincts, hope they come out edible.


Our first home-cooked meal. Koshihikari rice with fried chicken from lunch and my trademark vegetable soup


Since it’s so hard to cook for one person, I always cook enough rice to last me for 2 meals. The chilly weather helps in preserving my rice in the rice cooker, heh. But by the time summer comes, I will need a refridgerator! By the way, we bought the best rice in Niigata, and some say, Japan – the Koshihikari rice.

Niigata is known to produce the best rice in Japan, and it was mentioned that even the best rice in the world comes from Japan. So if I have a sack of the best rice in Niigata, that means, I am eating the best rice in the world!


Koshihikari, the best rice in Niigata, Japan, and some say in the world too! And oh, the one next to it is some superduper long Japanese spring onion.


I’m now thinking of ways to smuggle bring back some of the Koshihikari grains to introduce to you guys back home. And to think that I use the leftover rice of the Koshihikari to make fried rice…

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