One Night In, One Day Out.

On Friday night, we decided to stay in and try our hand at making homemade pot stickers or, as they are called in Japan, gyoza. I used a recipe from a cookbook my Mom gave me as a gift before moving. It is titled, Let's Cook Japanese Food!, by Amy Kaneko. The gyoza wrappers were purchased from the local Japanese grocery store. There were so many options! I ended up buying two packages, one large and one small sized. I chose them based upon the fact that they were both almost all sold out. The most popular must be bought first, right? (I use this logic all the time when choosing an ingredient whose packaging only describes what it is in Japanese.) Once the pork was mixed with the other ingredients, we set up a station on the kitchen table for assembly. Thank goodness Louis was willing to help fold!

Once finished, we had 40 folded gyoza ready to be fried. Of course, it wasn't until there were only 3 gyoza wrappers left when I realized how to fold them the "correct" way so they would look pretty... sigh.. A close up of two of the "pretty" ones is below. We ended up cooking a dozen or so, and put the rest into the freezer for another day. Not only can these go straight from the freezer to the frying pan and be ready in minutes, but they can also be boiled in water or added to soup.

While at the store earlier that day, I also bought a few things so we could "make" sushi rolls, also known as makizushi. In our experience, the sushi found at the restaurants is normally served as nigiri sushi. Nigiri sushi is a small piece of sushi pressed onto rice. Although delicious, I had been missing the  western-style sushi rolls you can get in the US. So using my go-to shopping logic, I chose a package of nori, the seaweed wrapper for the rolls. I also bough some pre-made white rice, tempura-cooked shrimp, and salmon nigiri pieces. We then took our store bought ingredients and rolled them up with avocado, cream cheese, and cucumbers! Our gyoza and sushi dinner was really tasty, even if it wasn't perfectly authentic (as you notice the bud-light on the table in the picture below...).

On Saturday we headed out and took a train to the Ueno station. One you walk out of the station, you cross the street and are immediately at what I can only describe as a large, outdoor campus. Here there are paths that lead to the Ueno Zoo, Tokyo Museum of National Art, National Museum of Western Art, Botanical Gardens, Tokyo National Museum, and our destination for the day, the National Museum of Nature and Science. I am sure that there is a temple and shrine or two located in this huge park that I am not mentioning as well. The park was large, with plenty of small cafe's to stop in for lunch or dinner. They even had a Starbucks. I can see how one could spend the entire day or even a few days there. 

As I mentioned, we visited the Nature and Science Museum. It reminded me of the Field Museum in Chicago, although much smaller. While there, we went to a special exhibit on chocolate. We got to learn about the entire history of chocolate, or at least as much as we could infer from the pictures as the entire exhibit was in Japanese. Oh well! I got to pretend to be the face on a candy bar, see sculptures made entirely from chocolate (see the fish below), and view yet another example of Japanese discipline and curtesy. Even with so many people in a small space, they all formed lines and waited patiently so they could see each part of the exhibit... amazing... Thankfully Louis and I are tall so we were able to walk through the exhibit in an efficient manor, seeing each part over the heads of those waiting in the lines. 

I can't wait to go back to see the zoo and art museum, but maybe not until the spring. I think walking around the large park will be much more comfortable once the warm weather returns.