Usually when Anime Chicago has an event, only one of us can go, or (more often) neither of us can go. But yesterday when Laila was out at the grandparents, Anime Chicago had a dinner and chat event at Gangnam Market in River West, so after I was done with work we took the Red Line and a bus the ~hour out. We were late, thanks to the CTA, but we did get there.

We went to a similar event around six months ago and I remember the food being very good--I got some kind of donburi at the time--but that wasn't the case this time. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that happened after we checked in was that we walked over to the restaurants and ran into worldbshiny! She had had a bad day at work and come in to get ramen, which she recommended to me, and we chatted a bit about her day before we left to get food. I say "left" but worldbshiny was sitting less than a meter from the restaurants, and sashagee went a bit further away to Gangnam Taco while I turned around to go to the Seven-Faced Bird (from the Japanese for turkey, 七面鳥, shichimenchō). worldbshiny recommended the ramen so that's what I got, plus a kara-age bao, and sat down at a nearby table:

( Ramen picture )
Unfortunately, we were both a bit disappointed. My ramen wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. The broth was great and the ground turkey they put at the bottom was a nice surprise, but the noodles were a little too squishy (when I told this to worldbshiny later she said she gets her ramen without noodles). Meanwhile, sashagee thought her tacos were bland and too small, just not really worth buying at all. I heard other people later say that they weren't too satisfied either, which is disappointing because I remember it being more delicious last time.

After eating, sashagee really wanted to hit the gacha machines, so we got $20 worth of tokens (ten tokens and each pull takes more than one token because gacha is a scam). I was going to do one pull on the Kirby machines but despite all the available machines, both Kirby machines were totally sold out. One of them even had three possible Kirbys out of the four results! I can see why it was sold out, but come on. I had to (sashagee demanded I pull at least one thing for myself) pull the That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime and won a crowned Rimuru that now lives on my desk. sashagee got some Hello Kitty toys, including a dessert-themed Pompompurin that's in a pudding cup that we immediately had to pick up and put out of Laila's reach because we knew she would gravitate to it (which she did). sashagee's gacha addition thus satisfied, we split up. I spent most of the time talking to mhhilker about video games and our respective Passovers before someone mentioned that the grocery store was going to close soon, so sashagee loaded up on mochi, udon, dorayaki, and various other things that are a bit harder to get in the Asian markets close to us, and when we had paid, we went back to the food court and said our goodbyes.

While we were walking to the bus stop, an autonomous food delivery drone whizzed by on the sidewalk.

Work work again. Laila is handling it pretty well considering--we had thought she would be shocked and appalled that I wasn't done with all of that dumb "work" stuff and couldn't play with her all day, but she seems to have accepted it. We'll see if she accepts me going into the office tomorrow.

We spent most of Thanksgiving at my parents' house, because sashagee's parents are both having big health troubles right now. We went over there for a bit so they could see Laila, but didn't get to go as early as we wanted because we had to wait for a refill on one of Laila's medicines--she's on a Controlled Substance for her brain troubles and so they never want us to have more than a 30 days' supply at a time, which means that we sometimes end up with annoying situations like this one. I got the new supply at 6:00 p.m. at night and so we decided since we still had to eat dinner, we shouldn't head out that same night. We left in the morning, spent the day with sashagee's parents, and then went to my parents for a couple days. We've never had large Thanksgivings because I don't have a large family--for as long as I could remember, it was only four people, either us and my sister, or my parents nerdypsychlady and me, and now it's five only because Laila is there. We ate turkey and vegetables and rolls, Laila ate mostly rolls and fruit and didn't touch much of the rest of her food, and we had cherry bars with my father's homemade real vanilla ice cream for dessert. Another lovely dinner.

On the way home, sashagee's parents very kindly took us to Mitsuwa and we stocked up on tons of Japanese food. I was most excited about the momiji manjū--basically can't get those outside of Japan--and sashagee was excited about the mitarashi dango, but we also got some Hokkaidō manjū, more furikake, some onigiri, and other treats. We did not get a lot of staples, because most of the brand of miso or rice there I can get elsewhere, but I'd have to pay blood to get momiji manjū. 🍁

We did actually participate in Glorious American Consumerism this year as well--sashagee and I both got iPads. I got one to replace my seven-year-old iPad that still works pretty well but is showing its age, and I got one for sashagee when she mentioned wanting to use my iPad for writing and me explaining that iPads aren't meant for more than one person (they have no concept of multiple accounts, for one, so everything she wrote that had backup would get populated to my phone). I got the 11-inch one, since that's what I had before, and she got a 13-inch one because that's the one my mother had and sashagee said it was a good size. And then when it came she was surprised at how huge it was (it is huge). We both got bluetooth keyboard cases for them, me to game design and her to write with. I'll report back on how well it works.

Currently it's just at home, since sashagee and Laila went out to visit her parents in the suburbs. Both sets of parents have been wanting a weekend with Laila, but since we're switching her to a new medication we didn't want to leave her without us until we're more sure how she takes to it and if there will be any side effects. So far she seems to be mostly her normal self again, which is good--at the beginning she seemed a bit like a zombie and would barely talk, but that faded away after a couple days. Now she's back to being much chattier. B"H.

A few months ago, I signed up for SakuraCo's snack box at sashagee's insistence, since we used to get a snack box from a different company but that company went out of business due to Plague Years-related troubles. In some ways I like the old box better--for one thing, they put two of every snack in the box because they correctly assumed a lot of the boxes would be shared and so you wanted a full snack to yourself--but there is one way in which the box beat out the old one:



Warabimochi.

If you're not familiar, warabimochi is a Japanese summertime treat, with roasted soybean flour dusted over the top and served cold. Chiyoda occasionally had a warabimochi truck that would travel along the back roads playing its happy warabimochi truck song:

"Warabiiiiiiiiii mochiiiiiiiii beep beep beepbeepbeepbeep *musical jingle*

I haven't had it in over a decade--I've been able to find momiji manjū, a Hiroshima regional specialty (名物 meibutsu), much easier than warabimochi, and it was lovely. I'll stay loyal to SakuraCo just for that.

I haven't actually done that much, though. I texted a couple people to see if they were free but no one was, so I worked on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead modding content and played Final Fantasy XIV in my free time, but I also cleaned the whole house, which is a lot easier when there isn't a rampaging toddler determined to make everything messy again after you've been cleaning. They're coming home later today, through, just in time for Shabbat, and when Laila sees all the clean, uncluttered floors who knows what she'll do.

So Laila had a playdate last Thursday with another kid that we met through baby Shabbat. Exciting! Of course, the thing about children that everyone knows is that they're germ factories, and poor Mira had a cold. The playdate was only a couple hours, but that was enough time for Laila to pick up Mira's cold and then spread it to sashagee and me. My parents came to pick up Laila for a grandparents' weekend on Tuesday, before we knew that I was sick, and it's a good thing they did, because I got sick on Wednesday morning. I came home from work, worked from home that day, was sick Thursday, and now I'm mostly feeling better, just in time for Laila to come home. She was exhausted when she got home but I got a big hug.

Unfortunately, that does mean I'm very behind on my reading page, but I have a lot of tabs open so I can catch up after Shabbat (when I stay off the internet).

Yesterday evening I was feeling a little better, and sashagee was as well, and we've been wanting to go to a new Japanese restaurant that opened up on Thorndale called Kōhoku-ku Ramen, apparently a second location for a restaurant that's in New York. Sure, they have ramen, and that's fine, but I didn't want any of that. What I wanted was curry, and curry was what I got:


It turned out to be an extra-good decision for warming up, because two minutes before we reached the restaurant there was one of those Chicago squalls where there's a few raindrops and then the sky just opens up. We walked maybe half a block and got half-drenched, entering the restaurant as lightning and thunder crashed outside, and then ordered our delicious curry. And it was delicious.

They had taikyaki too! I was too annoyed that they were $8 to appreciate it--I still remember paying ¥150 each from the truck that showed up outside of Thanks sometimes--but sashagee got one.

Alright, back to drinking more tea to heal my throat.

While we've long since used up most of the food that we bought when we went to Mitsuwa last, yesterday I saw sashagee take out the shokupan from the freezer. If you're not familiar, shokupan (食パン, literally "Meal bread") is a Japanese style of bread made with more milk than normal, leading to more fluffiness. When I extoled the virtues of shokupan to sashagee, she was a little skeptical--she grew up eating American white bread and just saw particularly thick slabs of that--but bought the bread. And when I saw it was unthawed, I had to have some:


If you've had mass-produced American white bread, you know it basically has no structure. It's held together pretty much by preservatives and subjected to the slightest amount of moisture or stress it collapses into mush or falls apart completely. Shokupan is not like that, it's chewy and toothsome while being sweeter than the dark rye I usually eat. It's delicious with butter and is such a part of Japanese home breakfast culture now that all my old adult students said they ate it, even Sunada-san, who owned a kimono store and met his wife through an お見合い omiai marriage-broker-arranged meeting.

I realize this post is a little like that "Thing: 😐, Thing, Japan: 😲" meme, but shokupan is really good. And having tried it and realizing how tasty it is, sashagee is now looking up recipes and thinking about how to make it, so I may yet end up late, running out the door with a mouthful of toast.

Been a long time since I used the Farmer's Market Dinner tag, but this is really the first thing I've had in a while that qualifies.

The farmer's market has a lot of repeat vendors, of course, and Nichol's Farm has shown up a lot in previous farmer's market dinner posts. Last week when we went, we found that they inexplicably had a bunch of gōyā (Okinawan ゴーヤー, "bitter melon") and were talking about it to another customer. I told sashagee that we had to buy one and I'd cook with it and she agreed, and when I brought it up to the counter, the farmers asked me if I knew what it was. I told them that I used to live in Japan and I had made gōyā chanpurū before, they were surprised and asked that I show them pictures when I was done and tell them how it went, so that'll happen next farmer's market.

Traditional gōyā chanpurū has pork in it, like most Okinawan cuisine, but while we didn't have any beef hayashi like I wanted--sashagee wasn't feeling well most of last week and didn't make it to the store like she planned--we did have ground beef, so I used that instead. You can see the rest of the recipe here, and we fortunately had the rest of the ingredients on hand--and for extra farmer's market credit the eggs came from Green Fire Farms, and honestly the tofu might have come from Phoenix Bean Tofu since they're a huge national supplier even though at the farmer's market they only sell ready-to-eat meals. I sliced the gōyā and salted it to remove some of the bitterness, cooked the tofu, then then cooked the gōyā, then cooked the beef, then put in everything else, topped it with katsuobushi that I had stuck in the back of our pantry, and served it:


I thought it was amazing. Gōyā is extremely bitter, but the egg and the meat and the soy sauce all together helped mitigate the bitterness on any particular bite. sashagee did not agree--she took a few bites and then said that it just wasn't her thing. Laila was in the middle. She'd eat some, and every time her tongue touched a bit of gōyā she'd make a brief face...and then she'd take a few more bites until it happened again. I'm proud of her for continuing to try even though there was something in it she clearly didn't like.

I made a whole pan of it and it looks like it's almost all for me! I can't wait.

We had a lovely brunch with dinaraua and went to baby Shabbat--which was more like baby playtime since the coordinator was on vacation--but this post isn't about that!

After sashagee's parents came and picked up Laila and we finished up with brunch, we hopped on the bus and got home around 2 p.m. We had maybe 20 minutes or so to rest before we had to get out and walk to the bus. Originally, my idea for getting out to Arlington Heights was to go downtown and take the Union Pacific NW line. Then I discovered that there was a Clybourn stop, which would save us from having to take a trip downtown, and then when I put the directions in google again it turned out there was a stop at Jefferson Park, which is even easier to get to, so one quick walk and one late bus which retroactively obviated the need for a quick walk, we were on our way. We got to Jefferson Park with plenty of time, took the outbound platform, or what we thought was the outbound platform. There was no signage up on the platform, and my confusion was justified because multiple other people came up to us and asked us if we were on the to Chicago or from Chicago side. We were on the right side, though, and the train came right on time, we traveled for forty minutes, and then arrived in Arlington Heights.

Downtown Arlington Heights is extremely suburb, with a little district of 100% restaurants right in front of the train station. The streets were all pedestrianized as well, with seating taking up most of the sidewalks and the streets blocked off from cars, so we walked around for a few minutes while we waited for maptekar and her boyfriend to arrive. It turned out they only live ten minutes away so we didn't have to wait very long, and when they arrived we went on another walk around. When we stopped at a map, I looked at the food listings since sashagee was pretty thirsty and I noticed a place called "Mochinut." sashagee has been watching a Youtuber lately called Kimono Mom, a former 舞妓 maiko trainee who now is has a daughter and does Japanese food content on Youtube, and she just recently had a video about mochi donuts! I suggested we go there and everyone agreed, and we walked through a few side streets to find it on the edge of the map. There were no matcha donuts, unfortunately, but there was an ube donut, so sashagee got that and I got the honeydew donut. My donut tasted like a glazed donut, with a nice bit of mochi chewiness, but sashagee's did have some ube sweetness in the frosting. Donuts done, we hopped in the car and drove to Mitsuwa

If you're not familiar, Mitsuwa is an American branch of a Japanese supermarket company. Most of their stores are on the west coast, but there's one here because Chicago has a Japanese consulate, so there is a large group of Japanese natives who only live in America for 2-5 years for their diplomatic postings. There's a Japanese-language newspaper, a school that uses the Japanese curriculum for diplomat and staff children, and Mitsuwa, which has a grocery store but also a bookstore, a food court, a bakery, and a hair salon. They used to have a travel agency--it's the travel agency my parents used when they came to visit us in Japan--but it doesn't seem like they have one there anymore. We have a lot of Asian grocery stores nearby us since Argyle Street (where a lot of Vietnamese people live) is within a couple miles, but there's some items they don't have. Mitsuwa does.

When we first walked in, maptekar pointed out the Kinokuniya Bookstore on the left so that's the first place we went, since sashagee wanted to get some stationary. They grabbed a book off the light novel shelf and asked me what it was and then to read the Japanese title: 地上最強の男：世界へのヘビー級チャンピオン列伝 (chijō saikyō no otoko: sekai e no hebī kyū chanpion retsuden, "The World's Strongest Men: Biographies of World Heavyweight Champions") while I tried not to listen in on the aisle next door. Someone had cornered a poor shop employee and was telling his tale of woe--it sounded like he had had a falling out with his Japanese wife and she had moved back to Japan with the kids, which basically means that he'll never seen them again. Japan has no laws about dual custody and barely any family law, and it's common even for divorced Japanese men to have no contact with their children, much less foreign men--ex-Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has no contact with his youngest son since he is divorced. I can see why the guy was talking to a book store employee about it, because the Japanese embassy won't help him and probably doesn't even see it as something that needs help. The kids are with their mother, so what's the problem, they would say. It would be too disruptive for them to change countries again. Time for him to move on.

I looked for a copy of ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 yokohama kaidashi kikō but didn't find it--no surprise, the last volume was published in 2006 so there's no reason they'd have it in stock--and sashagee bought the English volume 2 of My Happy Marriage (the only one they had) and some thank-you cards that said "Thank you berry much" with art of blackberries and vines on them. Then we went over to the grocery store.

As I mentioned, we have a pretty good selection near us, so I was really only looking for things that we couldn't buy locally. We got shiso furikake and yuzu ponzu sauce almost right away, and in the snack aisle sashagee found the rum raisin sandwich cookies that used to come in our Japanese snack box (and for one third the price that website is charging). The real excitement for me, though, came when I came around an aisle and saw that they had Hiroshima momiji manjū! They're the signature snack of Hiroshima Prefecture, maple-leaf shaped pastry with red bean inside, sold everywhere in Hiroshima and in a bewildering variety too. The best ones I've ever had were chocolate-coated and soaked in bourbon, and on Miyajima there are ones with apple or chocolate or custard filling, but even finding them in America is nigh-impossible. I guess you can order them on Amazon if you want to pay $5 per manjū instead of the $4 I paid for eight of them. That's only slightly more of a ripoff than the $30 that Amazon is trying to charge for 高野豆腐 (kōyadōfu, "freeze-dried tofu") but which Mitsuwa was selling for $2.39. sashagee picked up some rice crackers and more cookies, a loaf of shokupan, mitarashi dango and a salmon riceball, and we finally went over to the alcohol section and she seized on a bottle of shiso umeshu. Then we checked out and hit up the food court.

Much of the food court was closed since it was almost the end of the day, but we slipped in just under the wire. sashagee, maptekar, and I went to a stall called Tokyo Shokudo that had a lot of standard-style Japanese food. I was drawn to the curry and I talked maptekar into getting some too, but her boyfriend really wanted ramen and managed to get into Ramen Santōka as the very last order. By the time we sat down every stall in the food court had shut down and most of the people had emptied out, so right after we ate, we left and went back to the downtown near the train station.

It wasn't quite time for our train yet and maptekar suggested getting a drink, but what we settled on was ice cream. We went to Kilwin's originally but while we were looking, the others all decided they'd rather get froyo, so w went to the other dessert place, which I just learned in looking it up is a local place called Berry Yo. They had the little sweetened mochi bits, which was all I really wanted. Then we went to the train station to wait for the train and...it never showed. Ten minutes after it was supposed to arrive, they made an announcement that the next train was coming in 57 minutes. Five minutes later, maptekar offered to drive us home, and we took her up on her offer. They told us about their upcoming housewarming and we said we'd keep inviting them to Shabbat brunches, we went back to her boyfriend's house, changed cars, and she drove us home, ending the saga.

We'll be back. There were too many things there we just can't easily get anywhere else not to, and it was actually easier to get to than I expected. Other than the train snafu at the end, which we couldn't have predicted, and there's also a bus that's supposed to go right by Mitsuwa from Jefferson Park as well if we wanted to take that. We just need to figure out the schedules.

( food pictures! )

Security guard: "Good morning, [dorchadas]!"
Me: "Good morning!"
Security guard: "I was starting to think they didn't have you work here no more."
Me: "They sent us home for like three months."
Security guard: "Oh my G-d. "

I'm back in the office! Tuesdays and Wednesday from now until the next change happens. We'll see when that is.

( We did things over the weekend! )

That was the slogan of the Thai restaurant I used to go to in Hiroshima City whose name I no longer remember and which Google can't find. Time marches on.

( Rice )

All in all, a harder farmer's market dinner. Maybe next time I should make my own onigiri, though I can't get rice at the farmer's market so it wouldn't go in one of these posts. With Argyle so close I can source all the ingredients there and make them myself with pickles and miso on the side. That might be a good post.

It's been a while since I posted just about daily happenings.

The biggest news in my life right now is that sashagee is all moved in! We rented a truck on Saturday and, with her parents' help, picked up her heavy furniture pieces and brought them over (we'd already moved most of the smaller stuff during the week). Her bookcase is going to go in between my two bookcases, we turned the futon she was using into a bed back into a couch and put it opposite my couch in the sun nook, her dresser is in the bedroom, and the rest of her stuff is scattered around the living room. We replaced the old, tattered comforter I had on my bed with hers (which has a cover!), added her collection of pillows to my own, and we're currently deciding what to do about her rice cooker. In other words, the normal things that couples who have their own lives do when they move in together. This is the first time for both of us, though--the last time I moved in with someone she was literally just out of college and I wasn't far behind, and sashagee has previously only had people move in with her--so we're negotiating over where everything goes and which things of ours we're going to keep in an environment where we're both used to having our own space. It's a process. We'll both need to let things go that we like, but hopefully not too much--she was renting a room before and I have a two-bedroom condo, so there should be plenty of room for her stuff in here.

Also, we bought a new couch!


I've been wanting to put a smaller couch into the office for a while, since my master plan was to take the TV out of the sun nook, add more chairs there, and turn it into a conversation space while making the office the place we can go to play games or watch movies. And now it's done! It's a little cramped in there, admittedly, but my corner computer desk is off to the right out of frame and there's enough room for sashagee to sit (or lately, lie down) on the couch and play her playstation while I sit at the computer. She convinced her brother to start playing FFXIV with us, so yesterday we spent the morning all on voice chat playing together. It reminded me of those late-night Karazhan runs that were the real reason I stuck with WoW for so long even after the story descended into complete nonsense.

We learned that even though I don't have a PS4, I could still create a Playstation account and use the phone app to connect to voice chat.

I've been in breakfast turmoil for a while. Traditionally I eat Japanese-style breakfast, with salmon, miso soup, pickles, and rice, but for the last couple months sashagee hasn't been able to stand the smell of pickles, fish, or cooking rice, so I've been set adrift. Some days I'll have an omelet and waffles or toast, occasionally I'll just eat a bunch of vegetables, and for one week I had Israeli breakfast, but I'm getting antsy. I need to find something else to eat--maybe a big salad? I do have eggs and nuts and spinach and vegetables, so a big salad with some pita on the side sounds good for today. What I really want is to be able to go back to eating fish again and get all of this frozen fish out of my freezer, but I can't do that until sashagee goes back to work and she's currently not on the schedule. Hopefully she'll be able to go back to work soon, both in the wellness sense and in the given shifts sense.

As I'm writing this winter has truly come to Chicago--big fat fluffy snowflakes are falling outside my windows. It's probably not going to stick, but it's lovely to watch. It's a great start to the week.