soaked almond and sudachi juice raw dessert

One thing that I can say for sure about living where I do for two years is that I've become pretty domesticated. On a normal day, biking and cooking seem to take up the majority of my time when I'm not at work. Yesterday, Caitlin and I spent the day doing both of these things as we ended up making a desert using only uncooked ingredients. My camera was sitting around so I decided to show how we created it.

The first step we took was to soak about three cups of almonds in water overnight. My mom had included these in a recent package and I wanted to make some kind of raw meal with them but had not really thought about what I wanted that to be exactly. I had a lot of raw honey and coconut oil so I figured that a dessert would probably work out best. After coming across this website we decided to go for a Key Lime Pie taste, replacing the limes with sudachi- a locally grown fruit that looks like a small lime and has a similar flavor.

After soaking the almonds overnight in filtered water (soaking like this is a common way to soften nuts before blending or whipping them in a food processor), we took off the skins in order to have a smooth yogurt-like consistency after they have been whipped. This is what the almonds looked like after a night of soaking and with no skins:



I ended up whipping the almonds in two batches for about five minutes per group. I never really measure ingredients when cooking so I just added water to the mix as the food processor was running in order to get the consistency right. It looked like this when I was done:



Next, I poured the contents onto a strainer in order to separate the almond milk from the whipped mass. I don't think this step is very crucial but it's nice to have some almond milk to use for my coffee or something like that.



Now that we had the base for our dessert, we went to the store and bought some fruits to mix with the whipped almonds to give it the taste that we wanted. Caitlin squeezed about 30 sudachis and exctacted about a cup of juice that would serve as the main flavor of the pie filling.



To make the crust, I blended a bag (250 grams) of prunes with some more (uncooked) almonds, cashews, a half of a banana, and the juice from one lemon. Any time I had ever made a crust with prunes or dates it has been really good and this time was no exception. After finding a container to use, I pressed the mixture into a crust.



Next, we blended one avocado, one mango, a half of a banana, the sudachi juice, some uncooked coconut oil, and several large spoonfuls of raw honey together in the food processor. The mixture was then combined with the whipped almonds to create the raw pie filling.



The final step was to simply pour the filling into the crust and enjoy the sight of a totally uncooked, all-natural desert.

I put it in the freezer (which some people would say takes away the pure 'raw' title) in order to harden the filling and just had my first taste of it this morning. I didn't feel bad eating this desert for breakfast because it's mainly just fruits and nuts...but I'm sure I'll be eating this at the end of every meal this week because it turned out so good.



So, that was one of a few things that we made yesterday. If you have any questions about the recipe you can email me (brad.direnzi@gmail.com) or, better yet, buy a raw food cookbook if you really want to get into it.

life these days

Well, I have two months left of work here in Japan and I can tell that things will be busy until I depart. Plans for each weekend seem to fill up quickly as most recent events have been geared toward outdoor things, as they should be in spring. About a week ago my friend Rika and I took advantage of some nice weather and hiked to the top of Shikoku's (and Western Japan's) highest point on the summit of Mt. Ishizuchisan in Ehime Prefecture. It was steeper than anything I've been to around here and I enjoyed the challenge of climbing up the metal links draped along the sides of its cliffs.



Hiking in Japan is mostly done by retired couples though it's not too rare too see college students out with their school clubs. There is a sacred importance of nature here that's well exhibited when your're out on a hike...something that's a bit hard to put into words which can compare it to hiking in places outside of Japan. The same respect that Japanese people place on things such food, bathing, and language is also shown within their view of places like Ishizuchisan.





On this day, we were out from 11:30 to 5:30, finishing just in time to bathe in a local hot spring onsen and eat some dinner. After a campfire beside the Yoshinogawa River, sleep came pretty quickly.



The whole next week was reserved for my junior high schools to prepare for their Sports Day on the weekend. I wasn't able to go to the actual event but definitely participated in more than enough of the practices. My students really liked being outside even though they were jumping rope for hours and hours on end.



On Friday I cut out of work a bit early in order to bike 80km across Tokushima and attend a friend's 25th birthday party the following evening. We all ate some great things cooked over hot coals and I drank someone else's expired sangria which tasted exactly like really sweet soy sauce. It was a beautiful night with great people and most of them ended up on a giant fort/castle/playground thing where we hung off of rope nets and looked for constellations in the sky. I don't think that too many were identified at that point in the evening.





On Sunday morning I woke up without feeling too bad, quickly remembering that I was faced with another (at least) four hour bike ride back home. I left around 2:00pm and this time I followed a path between the highway and the river and was cooled off by a bit of rain along the way. Biking back east was much easier than the opposite direction because it's mostly a downhill slope.





Though I've got only two months left here things are still feeling very normal. My neighbor Theo and I are now teaching a weekly hour and a half long 'Travel English' class (the definition of that title being completely open to our interpretation) where we finally see that there actually are some young people that live in our town. In some other current news, over a hundred swine flu cases in Japan were discovered very close to where I live and there are rumors that schools may close in order prevent its spread. Another fellow teacher and Naruto resident, Sarah, was told this morning to stockpile two weeks worth of food in her apartment just in case she is quarantined. Flu paranoia was sparked pretty quickly when news of it came about here. I'll make an assumption that it's because I'm foreign, but a lot of people are straight up asking me if '[I] have swine flu.' In reality, this is just a more prioritized question that prefaces the usual inquiries ('Do you have a girlfriend?', 'Can you eat Japanese food?', etc.). Although I can easily deal with answering one addition to the same ten questions that I'm asked over and over again, one thing that might actually put me over the edge these days is the amount of times that I have heard "YES WE CAN!!!" screamed in my direction. These three words have also become a guaranteed way to strike up laughter when delivered with a loud voice (usually by a class bully) as a response to ANY question posed by a foreign teacher. Not that people know any better, but I would not like the man that has brought about a pride in my country that I never even knew that I had to be trivialized as so many other things seem to be here. But at this point, as I always have done, I just have to make myself laugh at the ridiculousness of all of it.

So, I'll be busy planning my travels for August and September when Caitlin and I head to Beijing to ride the world's longest train route ending in Moscow (well, maybe technically speaking the Trans-Mongolian route is not actually the longest). After Moscow, it looks like we'll be flying to Poland and then making our way to the Czech Republic where we've got an ex-host family to put us up for a bit. Then we my leave things pretty open and stick around Eastern Europe, but that much has not been thought out thus far...

OK, time to watch some Flight Of The Conchords episodes.

(p.s. Happy birthday, Grandma!!)

kyushu roadtrip

The first week of May in Japan is Golden Week- a time where most Japanese people have a bit of time off from work and can explore their country or travel abroad. This year Caitlin, Dianne and myself took an adventurous road trip from Tokushima to the southern island of Kyushu- the only one of Japan's four main islands that I've never been to. We had four or five days to explore by car and spent them economically by camping out for three of these evenings (two of them for free and with permission at an abandoned campsite). We all wanted to spend a significant amount of time outdoors exploring some parts of northern Kyushu and I think that we got a good feel for things here even though we were visiting for a relatively short period of time.




After a lot of driving and a ferry ride to the city of Beppu, we came upon a place called Ubayama Farm which seemed as if it was a kind of local tourist spot although there was not much there except for green pastures and cows. Since Tokushima's land mass is about 80% mountainous, being somewhere like this where there is space to take your shoes off and walk on the grass feels incredible. I really never thought that I would miss something so simple as this but living in a town that is sandwiched between mountains and the ocean has made me appreciate coming from a such a wide-open country. We pulled into the campsite right at dusk after following some signs that took us to an overgrown lot with a huge plastic cow and some crazy looking tents that were either used for storage or for people to sleep in. One of these tents contained unicycles and scooters and another contained a pile of hay that we eventually used to make a campfire. An old woman pulled up in a car as we were setting up and gave us the go ahead to camp here even though she told us that the place had been closed for two years. She then gave Dianne an egg as a present (which I think was sitting on her dashboard) and wished us a good night. After going out for a nice meal at a local restaurant, we gathered some wood and had some drinks by the campfire while playing acoustic guitar and singing songs about the lack of foreign visitors in Shikoku. The only line I really remember was Caitlin saying something about me always sitting in my apartment and listening to Pink Floyd.



The next day we ventured out to Mt Aso. A lot of people had recommended me to visit here and we all liked hiking around the eerie volcanic scenery. We camped at another spot next to the mountain and saw a lot of bike gangs who were also on Golden Week road trips. That night we attempted to go out to eat in a smaller town near Aso and were denied four times in a row by restaurant owners as they saw that we are foreigners. Though I am really, really used to xenophobia at this point it is particularly annoying when you are simply trying to eat dinner and are given lame excuses for non-entry when it's 8:00pm and the restaurant you're attempting to patronize is clearly still in operation. But, of course, letting things like this roll off of your back is the best way to deal with it or else you'll spend all your time with the frustrations of feeling like you are perpetually crashing a party upon entry to some Japanese establishments.


After our day of hiking in Aso we checked out Takechiho Gorge and found that we were not the only people to make the day trip here. The scenery was awesome but the Golden Week crowds that a lot of people had warned me about kind of made wish that I was alone on a mountain again. And the larger the crowd that I am in here is usually proportional to how under dressed I feel...not that I worry about that too much.


We spent another night at the abandoned campsite, as the old woman came back to welcome us ("Konban mo, ne?" or "Ah, so you're staying another night?") with good wishes but, unfortunately, no egg. We made another campfire and cooked fish and vegetables wrapped together with aluminum foil as I drank Budweiser and thought about my return to America.

Our final day was in Beppu. We visited the infamous co-ed outdoor mud onsen and it was everything that I thought it would be. Bathing outside in the mud made me feel amazing and I wonder why this practice isn't more common (or maybe it is and I'm just not aware). I would love to go back to Beppu one more time before leaving Japan.


We were then on our way out of the spaciousness of Kyushu and back to the rugged terrain of Shikoku, our home. Back to work, back on my bike, and time to get used to the warm air of summer.