info for vegetarians
 
 
   
 
 
   
| August, 2000 |
Tokyo Vegetarian-friendly
Restaurant Guide
Diary - Living in Tokyo
as a Semi-Vegan
Recommended Readings
Written in Japanese
FAQ
Articles about Vegetarianism
written by Hiroko Kato
Online Vegetarian/Vegan Handouts
Shopping Guide
Good News & Good News
Links for Vegetarians
 
2000
August: Healthy vegan snack, vegan peach cobbler, stray cats, and so on.
September: Vegan pizza and brownie as well as experiences at several vegan restaurants.
October: New soymilk product and vegan ramen noodle, and so on.
November: Stories about the meeting with Japan Vegetarian Society chairpersons, vegan wedding meal, and experiences in Kyoto and Vietnam.
December: Attended Japan Vegetarian Society's meeting, delicious vegetarian food in YOKOHAMA China town, wasting time and money on staling foods, and trip to Penang.
2001
January: Experimenting some vegan breakfast recipes, receiving an e-mal from the reader, pondering bug's life, and so on
February: Tried a macrobiotic restaurant in Tokyo, and the trip to Laos.
March: Struggling to get a vegan flihgt meals at Malaysian Airline.
April: Having vegan wedding plates again, business trip to Cambodia and Vietnam, and busy days.
May: Nayonnaise discovery and some food disasters.
June: Life is going on.
2002
February: Attended a meeting on refugee issues in Japan held by Amnesty International Japan
March: Fresh soy milk and fasionable fake leather sneakers, etc.
April A conversation with my husband over a TV show and "Meatarians vs. vegetarians."
May A trip to the U.S. for research. Had an opportunity to attend a fantastic vegan wedding of my friend's.
July A thought on eating whale meat.


8/1/2000

It's past midnight and I've just made a chocolate peach pie in my tiny kitchen. An hour ago, suddenly I had a craving for a pie then took a night walk to a supermarket. Also I wanted to get the fresh air because I didn't go out for all day long except for a shopping to a small tofu store near by my place. Typing my laptop for hours, my legs became swollen and I felt that I was desperate for some exercise as well as for a pie.

It took me around eight minuets to go to a supermarket. There were just a few people in a store at that late hour and it was really like midnight. The items at this supermarket are relatively expensive so I had to keep my mind not to buy unnecessary things. Still I probably spent too much money. I intended to buy only frozen pie sheet but in the plastic bag I hold, there are a bag of Doritos, a can of Tom Yum Kun soup, and a block of cheddar cheese on a whim. It cost more than 1,500 yen!

The pie should have baked longer, I guess.

8/7/2000
I found the barbecue sauce of my favorite tortilla chip is vegan. Happily I finished almost a bag of the chip though I may need to concern if it is GM food.

8/12/2000
My favorite snack, healthy version. The Vietnamese fresh spring rolls with any veggie and sauce. Generally I put my leftover cooked rice on rice papers. Too much carbohydrates? You can fry them in the pan, if you like greasier taste. (And I like it!)
8/13/2000
You can easily tell the big difference between New York City and Tokyo by seeing the subways. We are so proud of the cleanness we are keeping all around the country. But I wonder if you would find a big, fat cockroach on the fifth avenue in Manhattan. Today people were making a big fuss around that insect in Ginza, the most expensive place in Japan.
8/14/2000
My "Power Breakfast" is ramen noodle. Instead of people in Hong Kong who swallow a bowl of DEMAE ICCHO with two fried eggs, I humbly put a lot of vegetables and nori seaweed on the top of noodle.
8/19/2000
Accidentally I found fabulous food court downstairs of a department store in Shibuya. That was the paradise for who are desperately seeking for American foods. Besides the variety of selection from potato chips to wheat germs, the cost was not so expensive. You'll see even large size of cereal boxes that are rarely expected to see in Japan. I was so excited to encounter Fiddle Faddle on the shelf and came back to home happily with an instant pizza mix to make my original one without cheese.
8/22/2000
Nowadays, my little ivy is suffering from nasty bugs. Taking the advice of a flower shop's clerk, I showered the plant, trying to wash all the bugs off. It seems that my solution did work but I've found that another plant was covered with another kind of bugs. I showered it too but those bugs were tough enough to stay on the leaves. So I have to pick each bug and kill it whenever I see the small white insects. It's disgusting, of course, but at the same time, I feel joy of saving my plant. Well, how contradictory it is, the life of a vegetarian who wants to be kind to all the living creatures!

8/28/2000
Two vegan recipes have joined to my menu. Yesterday I baked a peach cobbler from "Cookin' Southern, Vegetarian Style" (fascinating book!), substituting the syrup of peach can for soy milk because I'd noticed that I didn't have any milk after starting mixing dried ingredients. Anyway it worked! Cobbler was so easy to make and delicious, too. My husband and I finished it in a day and I will add this fabulous recipe to my weekend pleasure.

Another one was Baba Ganouj, the eggplant paste. Two weeks ago, I made an eggplant paste from a cookbook written by a Japanese. The taste was different from what I remember so I checked Debra's "The Lowfat Jewish Vegetarian Cookbook" and found that I needed to put tahini, sesame butter. I had to use sesame paste instead of tahini, so hard to find in Japan, but this time my Baba Ganouj was successfully made. I was satisfied with my Baba Ganouj that very close to the one I ate at a deli in NY. The next hard part is how I can find pita bread in my neighborhood?
8/30/2000
On the way to the library, I saw an old little woman who was feeding stray cats around there, though, at that place, there was the notice from the city office, saying not to feed stray cats. It reminded me of the lady living with thirty (not thirteen!) cats in Baltimore. She couldn't ignore those poor cats and saved them from the streets. Now her house is a kind of "Cat Mansion": It looked like the cats, not she, own the house. By the way, I can't remember if there were any signs in U.S., forbidding from feeding stray cats.

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Copyright (C) 2002 Hiroko Kato, Tomoko Kinukawa(designer).All rights reserved.