Lioness in Japan

My new house has a proper oven, though small, it can still churn out classics like roasts, lasagna, and pizza (no more expensive pizzas!).

I have never ever baked in my life so I thought of trying something really simple. I had all the ingredients in my pantry and the only thing I had to tweak was to whizz the white sugar in my blender to make it like caster sugar (a very fine sugar to make the cake batter smoother). And I was given a bunch of silicon cupcake cups as a wedding present so I used those as holders.

It only took 40 minutes, including pre-heating the oven. Voila – mixed berry cupcakes!

The berries made the cake a little moist and it tasted like how cupcakes should but I think I used a wee bit too much sugar. I don’t have a measuring cup and used my blender that has measuring marks so I think it wasn’t as accurate as it should be. But not bad for a first attempt, if I say so myself.

I think I’ll try baking bread or a chocolate cake next.

I usually make my own lunch since I work from home, but sometimes, life just gets too busy and I treat myself to a sushi lunch.

That’s a pair of engawa sushi, a white fish with a sprinkle of green onion on top, that was deeeee-licious.

And I know there are so many kinds of sushi but salmon remains my ultimate fave…I’m such a gaijin!!

The best way to end a sushi lunch is some salty nori miso soup. Mmmmm…

What’s your fave lunch in Tokyo?

Happy Chinese New Year!! May the year of the Water Dragon be prosperous and full of happiness for you!

The one thing that sucks about living abroad is not being able to celebrate Chinese New Year with my family. Despite the idiosyncrasies faced in any family gathering, I still really enjoy getting together, eating, catching up, and just hanging out doing nothing much. It didn’t feel like a big deal when I could celebrate every year without fail, but when I couldn’t, it became a huge deal.

I went through a phase where I just shrugged it off, but I honestly felt twinges of sadness inwardly, and that’s probably why the kangaroo had no idea it was such a big deal to me for years. I would go out for a CNY eve dinner with various friends, but in recent years, I started throwing CNY dinner parties at our place because the kangaroo would invariably be travelling for business during that time (post Dec/Jan travel is a must for his work).

So this year, I will be holding a joint party with another Chinese Singaporean friend but that’s next Saturday and I still wanted to do something special somehow on the eve and the universe answered.

I had a dim sum lunch with my Japanese gal pals at Tsim Sha Tsui. I would highly recommend this place — it’s authentic and cheap, complete with a Cantonese-speaking waitress.

By the way, I ate most of this plate of pei dan or century egg because it really freaked out my Japanese friends. I wonder if they think I’m gross? LOL!

Then miraculously, I was asked to play tennis and then go for Chinese hot pot after. Spicy hotpot in Japan called hinabe and my Japanese friends loved it although they sweated and teared and drank a lot of beer in the whole process.

Our Chinese hot pot dinner was at Xiao Fei Yang in Shibuya. There’s quite a bit of MSG in the soup but it was still freaking amaze-balls.

So….I was a happy Chinese girl yesterday…and today…

I love Mexican food, and to my delight, there’s a great little joint 20 steps from my house that does take-out/delivery too!

It’s called Mi Corazon and serves what I call Japanesified Mexican. They serve mainly tacos but have a chicken enchilada option and various avocado and chilli-related dishes, plus a long menu of Mexican-themed hamburgers and hot dogs. Their servings are tiny though and the little tapas-style dishes (500-1,100JPY; USD6.50-14.30)) can add up and our bill came up to slightly over 7,000JPY (USD91). It sounds pricey but we ordered a few drinks and I would say 3,500JPY per person is average in Tokyo for dinner out.

I would recommend the magarita as well. I’m not usually a fan of tequila-based drinks but this one was refreshing and juicy which numbed my exhaustion from moving house quite nicely.

Gosh another food post — I should really get my head out of my stomach, shouldn’t I?!

I’ve mentioned before that I get a lot of news about trends in Tokyo from my students and it really helps me keep my finger on the pulse because I’m going through a long phase of not turning on my TV.

What also surprises me till this day is that when I bring out really simple articles from the lifestyle news section, my students have the most to say about them. So thanks to this piece on macarons in NYC, I found out that ” fancy” desserts sold at convenient stores are taking Tokyo by storm.

Apparently, there were a few TV shows about conbini sweets (I picked up this habit of calling desserts, “sweets” or スウィツ in Japan, which confused me as it refers to hard candy in Singapore) that lauded conbini tiramisu and cheese cake as being high quality but are very affordable at 200-300JPY compared to department store prices that are 600-700JPY for something similar. I think they brought in a famous patisserie chef to taste these conbini sweets without being told they were so cheap and he gave his stamp of approval but was in shock when it was revealed they were sold at conbinis.

And one of my students said a conbini chain tied up with a famous patisserie chef to produce a range of desserts which were also wildly popular.

I’m not really a dessert person but I thought I would give it a go. Presentation-wise, it’s not bad at all though of course it comes in a plastic container and not a pretty cake box. But when I put it on a plate at home, it looked quite classy beyond its 200JPY price tag and decided to put this one up my sleeve as a lazy-day-dessert-option-but-still-want-to-impress-the-kangaroo idea.

Out of curiosity, I surveyed the dessert sections in all the conbini chains (Daily Yamazaki, Seven Eleven, Family Mart, Lawson) and I think Lawson does the best range with its brand of Uchi Cafe (that means home cafe) and you often find new cakes coming out every few weeks.

Aeons ago, I wrote this post on how to survive Tokyo as a Singaporean and one of the points I made was to “train” oneself not to crave chilli like a demon by way of appreciating other flavours.

But after five years slumming it without my spicy fix feels as cruel as cutting off a bird’s wings. I could live without chilli sauce but life is just so much better with it.

So once every two weeks, I’ll buy a big packet of red chilli (maybe 7-8 in one kana?) from Nissin, a foreign supermarket in Azabu Juban, which costs anywhere between 500-700JPY (USD6.40-8.90). Since this precious red chilli is imported from Holland, I can’t expect it to be mind-blowing hot but it’s got enough heat not to be wimpy and boring. It is very hard to find red chilli in a Japanese supermarket but sometimes there are small green ones that are kind of okay as well.

What I do is I wash the chilli, cut off the little stems, toss them into my Cuisinart food processor, with a squeeze of half a lemon, two soaked dates (you can replace this with sugar or honey or maple syrup), two garlic cloves, a pinch of salt, a splash of extra virgin olive oil, and a touch of water.

A word of caution: put on rubber gloves before you start as the food processor will leak a little and you don’t want your hands to touch the chilli especially if you wear contacts (it’s very painful when you remove them with tainted fingers even if you wash your hands with soap). Even if you didn’t, you don’t want your hands to get fiery hot in case you touch your eyes or face.

Just blend the lot until it breaks down all the bits and it turns a bright reddish orange pictured above. This is my little container of heaven. I eat it with rice and noodles — everything! — just like at home.

This recipe is not as tasty as a store-bought one but it doesn’t have any nasty ingredients like preservatives or MSG.

My Singaporean friends enjoyed it but my Japanese friends thought it was out-of-this-world flaming hot.

It’s the weekend and a fairly quiet one for me as the kangaroo is away on business in the US while I’m slowly digesting my huge lunch at the Singapore embassy’s bounenkai event that was held at the Tokyo Prince Hotel near Shiba-koen.

I was impressed by the selection of hawker favourites on display — satay, prawn mee, laksa, bobocharchar, fried bee hoon, briyani with papadoms and two kinds of curry. And there were also seafood spaghetti, dimsum, salad, fruit, cake, and other buffet-ish dishes. Kind of mish mash but apparently much better than last year’s spread.

I must say it felt oddly comforting to hear Singaporean accents in the air, and gosh, was it messy and gluttonous with piles of food, dirty plates, cups, and harried-looking staff — an island of Singaporeaness in the big mikan (I don’t know why some people call Tokyo a mandarin orange but I suppose it’s a tongue-in-cheek parody of the Big Apple).

So since I don’t have glorious pictures of Singaporean fare, I’ll grace your eyes with photos of another culinary experience at Joel Robuchon in Ebisu. Although it’s a three-star Michelin restaurant, it won’t break the bank if you have lunch there (prices range from 6,000JPY to 12,300JPY; USD77 to USD158) and it’s still Joel Robuchon nosh. I think it’s 100,000JPY (USD1282) for dinner — I don’t think it includes wine — if Joel Robuchon himself is cooking it so lunch is definitely more democratic.

It truly was an exceptional meal and I had a vegetarian set specially catered for me. I suspect that our host’s secretary used her wiles to persuade the restaurant manager and I heard that it was devilishly difficult to book a vegetarian meal at any of the nice restaurants in the area.

In fact, it took two secretaries to make calls through an entire day before they locked down Joel Robuchon. Why the fuss? And who the hell am I to deserve such courtesy? Well, one of the kangaroo’s major clients in Tokyo couldn’t make it to our wedding so he wanted to take us out to lunch instead. I have a strong feeling if I called the restaurant myself to ask for a veggie meal, they would say, “Talk to the hand, missy.” In a very polite Japanese way, of course.

And it was amaaaaaaazing. Even my salad was multi-layered and complex but fresh and delicious to the palette. There were slivers of dill tossed with olive oil and vinegar and other magical ingredients and raw zucchini never tasted better. The real star of my meal was the poached egg on top of an umami-filled grilled portobello mushroom (top right corner in the picture above) which was so perfect in its well done shell of white and viscous runny yolk.

The presentation was also such a delight, especially the desserts — there were TWO desserts; well, one was probably a palette cleanser, but it sure felt like a double hit since they came one after the other. I had some gorgeous FRESH lychee (if you find any in Tokyo they are most definitely canned) with guava sorbet and then a medley of seasonal fruit. I was full but not stuffed which was also a treat in itself. I kind of loathe meals that stuff you up to your eyeballs and eating the last few courses is actually more painful than pleasurable.

The last touch was a cute bowl of candy stamped with “merci” to pop into our mouths after we sipped on coffee and tea to round up our lunch. It was a two-and-a-half hour lunch that challenged our Japanese language skills to the max as our companions didn’t really speak English. That certainly kept me on my toes though I still shamelessly took photos, but hey, I just told them I blog about what I eat so they actually thought it was amusing.

And just because I was female, I was given a loaf of sweet bread to take home with me as part of their Lady’s Lunch Special. How lovely.

Highly recommended if you have a special occasion or just to treat yourself to a fancy lunch, though I suspect mere mortals do not have dinner at Joel Robuchon…

Once in a while, I like to touch base on this blog. I’ve had this space for so long that it’s gone through some morphing. In the beginning, it was a travelogue and food review blog, but then it became more of an advice portal on how to cope as an expat/trailing partner in Tokyo plus observations of the city as a foreigner…Then I kind of struggled. It’s not cool to say your blog sucks or lost its way or got put on the back-burner. I had three blogs and it’s very hard to be good at all three, so I stopped blogging at Raw Bento and focused all my creative energy on Beauty Box.

So what’s become of Lioness? Well, shall we just have fun here? I kind of like it to be more of a personal diary actually. I put a lot of thought into thinking about Beauty Box’s content so I just want to relax back here at LIJ with no obligation to blog a certain number of times a week or a month.

For this entire year, I kept getting mentally blocked by having to think of topical issues to write about and I’m just over giving tips or trying to get all sociological with understanding Japanese culture. I still like to think about such things but I just don’t want to write about them for now. Hope you’ll enjoy the ride as I go with the flow…

I’ve been obsessed with photo collage apps on my iPhone — partly because I don’t have Photoshop so I like it that these apps crop and arrange your photos for you. Here’s a collage of what my fave eats last month. On the top left corner is my all-time fave, vegan taco rice, from Eat More Greens in Azabu Juban. Their food is just so tasty that I think even meat-eaters would love it. And the cafe has a boho-chic vibe to it rather than the dreary utilitarian atmosphere typical of veggie joints, so I tend to stop by Eat More Greens for a serving of this before my Japanese lesson on Thursdays when I’m just too busy to make lunch for myself at home.

On the top right corner is a snap shot of my dessert at three-star Michelin restaurant, Joel Robuchon, in Ebisu. Before you think Beauty Box has boomed and I’ve transformed into a lady of leisure, I (or rather, the kangaroo and I) were given a lunch treat by his client for simply getting married – haha! We should do this more often!! This place deserves a post of its own with pictures of each course…

And the bottom picture is of a tall juicy veggie burger at a cute cafe near Toritsu-daigaku (in Meguro-ku) called Takiey Dining Cafe & Bar. If you are wondering what the heck a couple of gaijins were doing outside the JR Yamanote line, we were house-hunting.

The kangaroo was dying to indulge in some MOS Burger which is not my favourite so we met in the middle and chowed down on these made-from-scratch burgers instead of scary I-don’t-know-what’s-in-the-meat fast food ones. You can see we are practicing marital harmony from our first month of being married.

For just 1200JPY, you can choose from a slew of toppings when you opt for their “make-your-own-burger” set lunch. I had guacamole, fried egg, veggies, tomato, and jalapenos – amaaaaazing. We are obviously discarding our pre-wedding regime of no carbs — I guess now the chase is officially over and we are letting ourselves go (and our waistlines!)…

Setsuden means saving electricity in Japanese, and as I mentioned in my previous post on “cool” products, it’s really important for Honshu to decrease its power consumption because there may not be enough energy to go around.

I don’t think I go all the way to save energy but I do try — I unplug appliances if I don’t use them and if I go out or go to sleep, I shut down my computer and use fewer lights, plus I try to use the fan instead of air-conditioning in the morning and afternoon, so I only use air-con at night.

So one of the frequent ways I cook meat for the kangaroo is to slow-cook stews and curries. Many people are fascinated how a vegetarian could willingly cook meat for a partner so I’ll elaborate here.

Basically, I don’t like touching meat so I buy meat that is already cut up (except for chicken) which tends to be thinly shaven slices for stir-fries or bbq or big hard chunks. I also try to cook two servings at a go so I cut down on having to cook meat daily. I also don’t taste the meat dishes but I remember the amount of various seasonings necessary for various meat dishes from the time I ate meat. I also try to make dishes that are good with or without meat, eg. sweet & sour stir fries, tacos and green curry are those that are easy to chuck in a meat component without compromising on flavour in either dish.

Anyway, let’s go back to the topic at hand: I used to slow-cook meat stews in my rice-cooker for 6-8 hours, but thanks to my new Shuttle Chef pot, I don’t need to use ANY electricity. My mum has two back home but I think it’s called Magic Pot in Singapore.

The kangaroo’s ex-colleague gave this Shuttle Chef to us as a wedding gift — how thoughtful!

Look at this baby….All you need to do is to boil your dish for 10 minutes and then leave the pot in its insulated case that will gently cook your stew (and slow heat is always key for good tender stews) for two hours, then boil for ten minutes and then cover it up again for another two hours.

Unfortunately, I had to re-boil the stew twice instead of once which meant a total of 12 hours to get the consistency I wanted. I also left the meat in the Shuttle Chef for 3-4 hours at a time, instead of the stipulated two because it was just too watery after just two hours. At the end of the second round, the meat was soft but the stew was still like a thin soup and not a gravy, so I boiled it a third time. I wasn’t annoyed by this at all since I did this on the weekend and because it took so long (it finished cooking at midnight), I kept it for dinner the next day.

Setsuden beef stew recipe (makes two servings):
1 white onion, chopped
5 cloves of garlic
2 servings of beef chunks
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 tomato, chopped
Splash of red wine
Splash of balsamic vinegar
1/4 tsp sea salt
Pinch of black pepper
Dash of dried rosemary
Dash of thyme
Dash of taragon
Dash of chilli powder
1 bay leaf
2 cups water

The kangaroo absolutely loved it but he is very easy to please so I’m thankful I don’t need to really rack my brains on how to keep his palate satisfied. Enjoy! Let me know if you have a good stew recipe or two to share.

It’s been a while since I posted something Singaporean on my blog so today I’m going to talk about what is possibly Tokyo’s best Singaporean restaurant, Hainan Chifan at Ebisu Garden Place. I think Singapore Seafood Republic in Shinagawa is pretty good too so let’s put both of them at a tie — if you are homesick, just head over to either place, and they’ll fix you right up.

This dinner felt like a “food tour” for my non-Singaporean friends, because in true Singaporean style, we over-ordered due to greedy eyes and grumbling tummies. Brooklyn-based Singaporean food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan says it like it is, “Ask any overseas Singaporean and they will tell you they miss the food more than the people.” How true – ha.

Of course we had Tiger beer and you’ll be surprised to know that it’s considered a premium lager loved by Japanese and other foreign folks. Tiger is kind of like super cheap beer in Singapore and it will give you a banging hangover — at least that was how I remembered it five years ago.

Satay – authentic.

Stir-fried garlic kangkong, or kushincai in Japanese, which was a universal take on any stir-fried Chinese veggie, so I would say it was good.

Tauhu goreng – very yummy but it didn’t really look like how I remembered it to be which is a more liquidy sauce. This looked like it had rendang sauce on it but it was a scrummy peanut sauce over a fried tofu and cucumber salad.

“Black” carrot cake (black sweet soy sauce fried with radish cakes) — delicious but not very authentic because of the bean sprouts and other veggies.

Lontong – hmmm, this was good but it tasted like laksa. I think they used the laksa pre-mix to cook this dish but it sure satisfied my laksa cravings…I wouldn’t hold this against them because they do look very similar and it’s a restaurant in Tokyo, not Singapore, so no Singaporeans injured themselves while eating this (no head bashing against the wall nor did we pass out from indignation).

Chicken rice — apparently the star of this restaurant. I did try it ages ago when I first arrived in Tokyo so I can say it’s pretty authentic and my other Singaporean friend in attendance can vouch for it too.

Prawn noodles — authentic. I didn’t have this but my friend said it was quite close to the real deal all things considered. But yeah, they slipped in a boiled egg to make it more Japanesey and labelled it as prawn “ramen” (because most ramen bowls have boiled eggs). I wonder where they got the prawn stock from or if they made it from scratch…

Fish head curry — this was more Chinese style than the super sour and spicy assam type fish curry. Again, I don’t eat fish so this was just what my friend said. And it was good.

Goreng pisang — you can’t go wrong with deep fried banana fritters and this was a winner with everyone around the table.

Durian ice-cream — it was my favourite though it didn’t have a pungent durian flavour. It was probably made with durian candy sticks and toned down for the delicate Japanese palate.

And a very sad looking mango pudding in the shape of a Merlion — this is like the default “Chinese” dessert in Japan which is kind of awful if you ask me.

Bur bur cha cha — brave but “not quite there”, which means it wasn’t very authentic. It was basically coconut soup with bits of beans and jelly strips or mochi things…I couldn’t tell.

Anyway, it was fun “educating” our foreign friends on what Singaporean cuisine is like. As an expat, you sometimes accidentally fall into the position of a haphazard ambassador for your country. This question always tickles me, “Why does carrot cake have no carrot in it?” and people are always amazed that the Little Red Dot is smaller than the JR Yamamote Line. The kangaroo thinks it’s pretty special he’s dating a Singaporean because there are only three million of us on the planet. Singapore is a quirky place if you think about it…

What strange things have you had to explain to foreign friends about Singapore?