When in Japan, Learn to Make Tortillas

My friends, the time has come. The time has come to stop living a life without tortillas. I don’t even know how I made it this far. You see, back at home, the humble tortilla was a part of my daily life. Nearly every night I dragged one across the flame of my gas range until it warmed and softened, blistered and charred. I’d tear off strips and christen each with a few drips of Tapatio or Sriracha. Sometimes I drizzled the whole thing with truffle oil and a sprinkle of garlic powder. It's a reliable comfort food on it's own, and even better when wrapped around any number of tasty bits and pieces. I know I said all those nice things about rice, but the truth is you can't wrap that shit around anything!

I was golden for about three weeks after Cathy personally delivered a jumbo pack of flour tortillas, along with two cans of beans (refried and black), to my apartment door in Kanazawa. I rationed as best I could, while still dutifully sharing the bounty with my equally needy BFIJ two doors down. We feasted on pork fajitas, chicken shitake burritos and spinach and cheese quesadillas. We sliced avocados, sautéed onions and peppers and topped every chile and cumin scented creation with a dollop of plain yogurt. And then they were gone.

Then one day I realized: I can make tortillas! The ingredient list is short and basic and they don’t require an oven. Truly authentic tortillas call for lard, but I found plenty of recipes online that substitute easy-to-find vegetable oil.

Despite the lack of lard, I set out to make the tortillas as authentically Mexican as possible. I balanced a cutting board over the kitchen sink to create a countertop, rolled out the dough with a tall-can of Kirin and cooked them in a nonstick frying pan. With every roll of the can, Mexican grandmothers everywhere felt a sharp, stabbing pain in their hearts. They clutched their chests as the dough met the Teflon. Their daughters frowned, diagnosed them with heart burn and sent them off to bed with a handful of Tums. Lo siento, abuelitas.

It took a bit of fiddling with the heat and the thickness of the dough, but by the end I had a short stack of chewy tortillas, bubbled up in places and properly spotted with char marks. Perhaps they weren’t the best tortillas in the world, but they certainly seemed to be the next morning when I wrapped one around a heap of scrambled eggs and avocado. Not bad for a ghetto rigged operation conducted by a Jewish girl in Japan at midnight on a Thursday night.

Things I Miss: Episode 1: Brunch

Something was missing from my Sunday mornings. I couldn't quite figure it out. I did a mental checklist. Hangover? Check. Obscene laziness? Check. Book and magazine reading in bed? Check. It took a couple months, but I finally nailed it. Brunch! There is no brunch!

In Japan, breakfast is not usually a public affair. A typical morning meal is eaten at home and consists of rice, miso soup, grilled fish and pickled vegetables. The rice might be topped with a raw egg or, horror of horrors, natto: fermented soybeans with the consistency of snot and the smell of rotting kittens (I know, I'm sorry, but doesn't that sound like it would be the worst and the saddest smell?). Natto is the antithesis of brunch. Natto is bad. Brunch is so so good. There is really no better way to spend a weekend afternoon. All you need is a collection of your favorite messy haired friends and a plate of fluffy biscuits suffocating under a healthy (I do not use this adjective literally) blanket of sausage gravy. Extra points for a Formica table, bottomless coffee and delirious fits of laughter inspired by lack of sleep and the events of the night before.

I brought up the topic of brunch with Yoko, my BFIJ (Best Friend In Japan), who agreed that something had to be done immediately, if not sooner. We would have to forgo the Formica, the bottomless coffee, the biscuits and gravy, the restaurant, the pretty much everything I mentioned above, but damn it! There would be brunch!

In recent weeks, it seems all we do is have brunch. We are good at brunch. Last week we whipped up some excellent pumpkin spice pancakes, but there is one particularly simple meal that has us smitten. First, split a baguette of crusty bread. Then send a smear of soft butter, studded with chopped garlic, down both sides. Next, sprinkle with shredded cheese. Japan has no respect for cheese, so we are forced to use a flavorless and processed pre-shredded "white cheese." You should use a mix of freshly shredded Parmesan and mozzarella or Havarti or Gorgonzola or one of the other delicious cheeses that you are lucky enough to have access to, you bastard. Pop the bread into the toaster oven to melt and crisp around the edges. Meanwhile, fry some sunny side up eggs with salt and pepper. Make sure the yokes are nice and runny so you can stab them with your fork, let the velvety orange mess drip all over your bread, and make noises while eating them that are more appropriate for the bedroom than a brunch. Oh, but don't eat yet. You forgot the fresh basil, silly. Tear some up and scatter it across the bread before topping with your perfect egg. Shake a little Tapatio over the top, serve with a fruit salad, and you're in the business of brunch. Take that, natto.