日報

My former senior colleague gave me a pasta maker.

I once went to their house to make homemade ramen. At the time, I bought and brought a super cheap pasta maker, but as soon as I started kneading the ramen dough and was about to make the noodles, the machine fell apart. I ended up cutting the noodles with a knife, which is a bitter memory.

Maybe trying to make ramen with a pasta maker in the first place was a mistake, but perhaps remembering that incident, they gave it to me as a gift for my new venture.

I usually don't buy these kinds of tools myself, but since I received it as a gift, it makes me want to try it out, so I'm very happy.

Pasta, ravioli, ramen, udon... what should I make first? Thank you, Sugano-san!

When I cook, I often refer to cookbooks, recipe websites, and YouTube, and among them, I frequently watch Naoya Higuchi's YouTube channel.

Rather than typical recipe explanations, his videos delve into single cooking tools or single seasonings, like "How to choose a frying pan," "What is salt?", or "What is olive oil?", explaining them in detail, including their underlying principles.

This person is quite logical. For example, he might say, "Olive oil contains a lot of oleic acid, which is a monounsaturated fatty acid, so it's less prone to oxidation. That's why it's suitable for raw consumption." He teaches principles I've never known before, which is educational and enjoyable to listen to. It helps me understand cooking from a deeper level, making me realize, "Oh, so that's why we do things this way." So, I highly recommend his channel.

He recently released a book, and it arrived at my home today, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

About 10 years ago, I used to knit a lot. I made scarves, gloves, and even sweaters, so I think I was pretty serious about it.

It's something you only realize once you try it, but if you knit exactly according to the pattern, it turns out perfectly. I thought it was something more artistic, but it's actually closer to building a model kit; it's quite linear, and I remember thinking at the time that it felt more like a task than I expected.

Also, I used to think that knitting didn't use the language part of my brain, since I could talk while knitting.

After that, I started cooking, and I have the opposite feeling compared to knitting. Before I started cooking seriously, I thought I could just follow a recipe and it would turn out fine.

Fundamentally, it should be a chemical reaction and thus theoretically manageable, but even when I followed recipes, I often burned things or couldn't make them taste good at first.

On the other hand, once I got used to it, I started making delicious food even when I just winged it, and stopped burning things. It's hard to put into words, but I feel like I'm getting better at it.

And I don't talk while I'm cooking. I'm busy cutting, frying, and plating multiple dishes simultaneously, so I don't have the mental space for it.

Knitting and cooking had similar images, but it's interesting how they turned out to be opposite once I tried them.

I watched a video about how "words influence human perception."
Apparently, there's a tribe in a certain region that only has three words for colors: "black, white, and red." It's said that these people have a weaker ability to distinguish colors.

In Japan, we express rainbows with seven colors, but apparently, some countries express them with three. I'm sure that for people in those regions, it genuinely looks like three colors. Up to this point, this was about "color perception."

Listening to this discussion about color perception, I thought the same could be said about the sense of taste, "gustatory perception."

The "sweetness" of strawberries, the "sweetness" of cake, the "sweetness" of baked sweet potatoes—they're all supposed to be different kinds of sweetness. But because we use the same word "sweet" to describe them, it might be harder to recognize their differences.

It's a bit difficult to create new words to replace "sweet," but by slightly changing the expressions, like
"roundly sweet" for strawberries,
"strikingly sweet" for cake,
"richly sweet" for baked sweet potatoes,
I think the richness when eating or making things might increase. So, I'm thinking of giving it a try.

Sweet alcoholic beverages... hmm... maybe "smoothly sweet"?

I love driving.
Ever since I was little, I've always gone everywhere by car, near or far. I even drive to飲み会 (drinking parties) and drink non-alcoholic beverages. There's something I've come to realize from all this:

"Using a navigation system means you don't learn the way."

When I use a navigation system to get to a destination, I can go there many times and still not remember the route. But if I go there just once without using navigation, I usually remember it afterwards. When using navigation, you might think "turn left at the next traffic light," but without it, you're more likely to process various pieces of information, like "turn left at the Tengenji-bashi traffic light, which is past the big hospital." I wonder if that's why I remember it better – because I'm actively thinking. And recently, I've been feeling something similar with cooking.

"Following a recipe means you don't learn the cooking process."

Of course, when I cook something for the first time, I have to look at the recipe because I can't make it otherwise. But for dishes I've made a few times, if I'm brave enough to risk making a mistake and try to recall the steps without looking at the recipe, I often find that I can then make it without any guidance from then on.

Learning starts with imitation, but at some point, you need to be able to think for yourself, and that's when you make a big leap forward. This is something that, if you think about it, is obvious, but when you're desperately trying something new, you often forget it.

Still, I really don't like to fail, so I tend to look at recipes anyway.

I made ginger pork for the first time.

It's not that I've been avoiding ginger pork my whole life; in fact, I quite like it. But for some reason, I'd never made it before.

I tried to think of a reason why I hadn't made it, but nothing came to mind. If I had to guess, it's probably because when I go to the meat section, the top contenders for what I want to eat—like tonkatsu, karaage, hamburger steak, or gyoza—always overwhelm me, and ginger pork just never gets its turn. Is that what it is?

Considering it was my first time, the ginger pork turned out delicious. It's amazing how simply adding ginger to the classic Japanese seasonings—soy sauce, sugar, sake, and mirin—makes it proper ginger pork. I wonder what it would be without the ginger? It would probably be tasty with garlic instead of ginger too.

For much the same reason, I plan to try making menchi katsu soon, as I’ve never made that before either.