日報

When it comes to lunch, for me it's either pasta or ramen. I rarely make ramen, so if I'm eating out, it's ramen, but if I'm cooking, it's almost always pasta.

And when I say pasta, I don't mean a variety of pasta types; it's almost always spaghettini. Short pasta and linguine are delicious once in a while, but I love noodles, so it always comes back to spaghettini.

Lately, it's been a choice between 1.6mm Barilla or De Cecco. I used to think Italian pasta meant bronze die (rough textured noodles) and used them for a while, but for noodle dishes, the texture going down your throat is too important, so I eventually returned to smooth, Teflon-die pasta.

The great thing about pasta is that there are three main bases: oil, tomato, and cream. As long as you make a good base, you can do anything with it.

You can just throw in whatever ingredients you have in the fridge, and it usually turns out delicious. As long as you properly salt the boiling water and stick to the pasta's cooking time, it'll take shape, and that's good.

When New Year's dishes and hospitality meals increase during the holiday season, suddenly having pasta feels like a return to everyday life and brings a sense of relief.

It's easy to overeat and feel heavy during the New Year's holidays if you're not careful. Let's try not to gain weight!

I made ratatouille the other day.
I'd always wanted to make the beautiful ratatouille that appears in an important scene in the movie "Ratatouille" (the Japanese title is "Remy's Delicious Restaurant"), and I was satisfied that it turned out just as beautiful when I actually made it.

I originally thought ratatouille was a warm soup, but then I saw cold versions and stew-like versions, and I wondered which one was the "real" ratatouille. It turns out they're all real, and it's a dish where the preparation varies from household to household, like a "mom's home cooking" kind of dish. I guess it's like nikujaga in Japan.

When it comes to cooking, I tend to think there's a correct answer and overthink recipes. But when I'm told that it varies by cook and that all versions are good, I feel more at ease and can cook more freely. Well, I guess that's true for all cooking.

By the way, "Remy's Delicious Restaurant" is the Japanese title; the original title is "Ratatouille." I learned this after watching the movie, and I thought, "The movie title completely changes how you feel about it!" The dish "ratatouille" is so central to this movie, appearing in crucial scenes, that I wondered why they changed the title.

However, for Japanese people, "ratatouille" doesn't really have an image as home cooking. And if they had titled it something like "Mom's Home Cooking" or "Nostalgic Home Cooking," it would probably hurt ticket sales, so "Remy's Delicious Restaurant" was probably the correct choice.

Strawberries are suddenly abundant in supermarkets, which means my favorite season is here!

At first, they were a bit pricey at 899 or 799 yen, so I hesitated. Then the price gradually dropped to 699, then 599 yen. When I saw them for 399 yen, I started dreaming of doing something I've always wanted to try: eating nothing but strawberries until I'm full.

They're easy to eat, they're fantastic in desserts, their shape and color are adorable, they look amazing in photos and videos, and you can buy them anywhere. Strawberries are the best.

Bananas are a strong contender, sharing almost all the same qualities, but when it comes to being photogenic, strawberries definitely win out.

Okay, I've decided on next year's goal: filling an OTTINETTI bread basket to the brim with strawberries and eating them all.

Buying five packs of strawberries at once would probably make my hands tremble. But thinking about it, I've paid thousands of yen at strawberry picking farms and eaten like 40 berries. So why can't I seem to buy a few packs at the supermarket?

Just over a year has passed since I started YouTube.

YouTube was the first thing I started after setting up the company. I took to heart the wise words I heard from my previous boss, "If you build a Ginza street, even a vending machine business can thrive." With that in mind, I started YouTube hoping people would first come to know of kikkake's existence. I aimed for once a week, and though there were a few weeks I missed, I'm confident and truly feel it's become a foundation that I've been able to continue almost without a break. I'm grateful to Konagi, who handles the filming and has been doing this with me.

What I've learned after a year: Continuing is truly difficult. It's been a year where I've personally experienced how challenging it is to continuously release video content every week.

From the moment a video is shot, I'm already thinking about next week. I fluctuate between joy and sorrow over views and channel subscriptions. I constantly debate where to put more emphasis: on what we want to do or what I imagine viewers want, and I go back and forth on that decision.

As a viewer, I used to think, "Hmm, really?" when various YouTubers said, "Comments, channel subscriptions, and likes are encouraging." Now that I've done it myself, I know it's all true.

It feels like things are going better than expected, and yet not going well at all. I sometimes lose track of where I stand and feel anxious, but I've made one firm decision:

"To keep going."

I want to continue YouTube with the image of steadily pressing on, repeatedly reflecting on what I've done, and preparing myself so that when some opportunity arises, I can seize it.

During the New Year holidays, I plan to release a compilation of all the videos so far.

I was watching the news when an idol from yesteryear said in an interview, "I wake up around 5 AM, take a walk before sunrise, and the hot water I drink when I get back tastes delicious. I never would have imagined it in my youth."

I heartily agree.

I'm waking up earlier and earlier, and hot water tastes delicious. Hot water = delicious. I never thought "hot water" and "delicious" would ever be linked.

Because hot water is just warm water. If it were warm water with a little chicken stock powder in it, I could understand it being delicious, but warm water being delicious? That made no sense.

That's what I used to think. But now...

When I wake up early in the cold season, don't want to eat anything yet, and don't feel like drinking anything flavored, I drink boiled water diluted with cold water, and I feel it. It tastes delicious. Even the vibe of reading "sayu" as "white hot water" is something I've grown to like, that's how close hot water has become to me.

I'm nostalgic for my younger self who inexplicably insisted that a drink wasn't a drink unless it was cold.

I like my hot water to be warm, not hot. Not lukewarm, but not scalding either.

The more I experience different things, the more I realize how important a strong foundation is for everything.

In sports, it's the core strength of your legs and back; for a building, it's the base; for work, it's preparation. Various things then build upon that to take shape.

To make something strong, wonderful, and valuable, what's most important is that the underlying base, which is not always visible at first glance, is solid, in addition to what is visible.

When I think about what constitutes a "base" in cooking, it really feels like preparing good dashi (broth) is the most important thing.

For any dish that requires dashi, regardless of the cuisine, if you've prepared good dashi, everything else tends to fall into place.

Even when making a lot of pasta, I believe the most important thing is adding salt to the boiling water. In a way, that's like dashi too, in terms of properly seasoning the base.

I made a simple dish called Pienlo, using dashi made from rehydrated dried shiitake mushrooms, then adding napa cabbage, pork, vermicelli, and seasoning with salt. It was incredibly delicious, and it made me think again how important a good base is.