Last Thursday was my friend Carol's birthday. In addition to being a fellow appreciator of Japanese candy, Carol is a big fan of kurogoma (black sesame), so I decided to surprise her with some kurogoma cupcakes. Luckily, it's easy to make almost anything kurogoma-flavored by adding a few tablespoons of black neri-goma -- a tar-like paste of pure toasted black sesame seeds -- and some roughly-crushed whole black sesame seeds.

It's not every day you get to make something that looks like it belongs in a cement mixer....

I was pondering a kurogoma buttercream frosting, but went with a matcha cream cheese frosting instead. It was a good choice: the green tea flavor contrasted with the kurogoma and the tang of the cream cheese tempered the cupcake sweetness. Also, the green made them kind of half-leprechaun, just like Carol. These were yummy! Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera to the birthday dinner, so I don't have any pictures of Carol enjoying the cupcakes, but maybe she'll leave a comment testifying to how they made all her kurogoma dreams come true...

Kurogoma Cupcakes

If you don't have access to neri-goma, omit the paste, increase the amount of whole sesame seeds to half a cup and use a food processor to grind them to the consistency of wet sand. It won't quite be the same, but it will still be kurogoma-licious.

1 1/2 sticks (170 g) salted butter
1 1/2 cups (340 g) sugar
3 tablespoons black sesame paste
1/4 cup (35 g) black sesame seeds
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 1/2 cups (310 g) flour, sifted
1 1/4 cups milk

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan over medium heat, stirring or tossing them constantly, until they are fragrant, about two minutes. (If you buy already-toasted sesame seeds, iri-goma, you can skip the previous step.) Crush the seeds with a suribachi or spice grinder until they are the texture of damp sand and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add the sesame paste and seeds, eggs and vanilla and beat until combined. Gradually beat in the dry ingredients, then the milk, and beat for a couple minutes.

Fill cupcake tin and bake for 16-18 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool completely before frosting.

Matcha-Cream Cheese Frosting

1 8-oz (200 g) package cream cheese, softened
1/2 stick (55 g) butter, softened
2 tablespoons whipping cream
1 cup (125 g) sifted confectioners' sugar
2 teaspoons matcha

Beat together the cream cheese, butter and whipping cream until creamy. Add the sugar and matcha and beat until glossy and smooth.

While browsing the Japanese-language cookbooks at my local bookstore in search of some Sunday-dinner inspiration, I found a book about flavoring salt and sugar with various ingredients, with beautiful pictures of sparkling pink and green granules sprinkled over their accompanying dishes. A few minutes later, while flipping through a tofu cookbook, I spotted a recipe for silken tōfu topped with enoki, garnished with a pinch of matcha salt. Remembering that I had made something similar before from a recipe out of the trusty Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh, and also remembering I already had a recipe for matcha salt, my Sunday dinner seemed set -- and I didn't even have to buy a new cookbook.

The last couple times I made this mushroom-topped tofu recipe, the weather was cold and I used a mixture off dark, meaty mushroom varieties like maitake and shiitake, but because I wanted something more delicate in flavor and pale enough to set off the bright green salt, this time I used only a bunch of thin white enoki. The flavor of the mushroom sauce ended up light enough to let the grassy matcha taste come through.

When preparing tofu simply, Otokomae is my favorite brand to use, both for its dense but silky texture and its unquestionably kakkoii packaging. In addition to the usual blocks, Otokomae is also sold in individual packs of three, kind of like pudding cups or juice boxes. They don't require draining and one is the perfect size for a lunchtime serving or a dinner side dish.

Tōfu no enoki an kake (Tōfu topped with enoki mushrooms)

Adapted from Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh

Makes 2 servings

1 block silken tōfu (kinugoshi-dōfu), drained and pressed*
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
10 oz/300 g enoki mushrooms, ends trimmed
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sake
2/3 cup dashi
1 teaspoon light-colored soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon mirin
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch mixed with 1 1/2 teaspoons cold water
Matcha salt, to garnish

Cut the tōfu in half and place each block in a shallow bowl. Heat the oil in a skillet and cook the mushrooms over high heat for about one minute, or until lightly browned. Add the salt and sake and cook for one minute more. Add the stock, soy sauces and mirin and cook for two minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the cornstarch-water mixture and stir for about one minute, or until the sauce has thickened slightly. Top each tōfu block with the mushroom sauce and a sprinkling of matcha salt. Serve immediately with chopsticks or a spoon.

Matcha salt

1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 teaspoon matcha

Mix the salt and matcha in a small dish or jar. In Japan, this is often served as a dip for fried foods like tempura. You can also mix matcha with sugar and sprinkle it on yogurt, cakes or cookies.

*This entry describes how to press the water out of tōfu.

You can find soft-serve ice cream everywhere in Japan. It is based on this simple equation: where you find tourists, you find vendors selling soft-serve. Where you find anything at all worth seeing, you find tourists. Every place in Japan boasts something worth seeing. Therefore, soft-serve is everywhere. This is a good thing.

Vanilla, strawberry and matcha are the standards, but the best part about soft-serve in Japan is its use as a vehicle for all manner of seasonal, regional and barely-edible ingredients, meaning that any decent tourist attraction will have its own special flavor. I like to try them all. I look it less as gluttony and more as a hobby, like collecting stamps. Except with nothing to show for it but some torn cone wrappers and a small ice cream belly.

Squid ink soft-serve ice cream.

Many soft-serve flavors I've tried have been both strange and delicious, like houji-cha (roasted green tea), shionami (sea salt), umeboshi, and tomato. Others have been less weird but just as good, like kuri (chestnut), iyokan (a kind of citrus fruit) and sakura (cherry blossom). Only one flavor was bad enough to force me to abandon the cone: ikasumi (squid ink), purchased at a stall near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. I remember it tasted almost like chocolate, but there was something wrong beneath the almost-chocolate, a shadowy squid taste lurking below the surface which drove me to abandon ship.

What makes all these flavors so easy to eat is the fact that it is soft-serve (sofuto kuriimu in Japanese) rather than regular ice cream. If I had to maneuver around chunks of frozen tomato, I don't think I'd be as happy as I am eating a cone of something smooth and yielding that tastes faintly of tomatoes. (If you are wondering, this particular soft-serve reminds me of a fresh mozzarella and tomato salad, but sweet, of course.) The cutting-edge of food is all about changing the textures of familiar foods into something more unexpected, but foams and flavored papers are nothing next to Japan's national program of soft-serving everything under the Rising Sun. I'll toast my cone of kinako to that.

It's early April, the sakura are in full bloom, and spring is in the air. Except that it's raining right now and an icy wind is blowing all the blossoms off the trees. Oh well, at least I have my shin-shōga. Shōga is your average piece of ginger, brown-skinned and sharp, and shin-shōga is its younger, springtime version, pale, thin-skinned and mild. It's this ginger, sliced and pickled, that is mounded up next to the green plastic leaf in your box of lunchtime sushi.

But pickles are only the beginning for shin-shōga. Because it has the fresh astringency of ginger without the bite, you can use it raw, and it is especially tasty when julienned and added to salads. When cooked, it loses its bright crunch, but the delicate fragrance wafting up from any dish you've added it to makes up for it. With soups and rice, you can toss in the shin-shōga right at the end of cooking and let it soften a bit in the residual heat. That's what I do when making this early-spring rice, a mix of young ginger, fresh crab and thin green onions.

Some notes about ingredients: Young ginger is a popular ingredient in other Asian cuisines, so you should be able to find it at Asian supermarkets from spring through early summer. I buy my cooked crab meat in the sashimi section of my local grocery store, where I sometimes want to cry when I see how beautiful and cheap everything is. Imitation crab meat is not a suitable substitute. Finally, the green onions in Japan are typically much thinner than in the U.S., about half the diameter; look for the thinnest you can find or just use one thick one.

Kani to shin-shōga gohan (Crab and young ginger rice)

Makes 2 servings

1 cup Japanese rice, washed and drained
2-inch (5-cm) piece of young ginger
3.5 oz (100 g) cooked crab meat
2 thin green onions

Cook the rice in a rice cooker or on the stovetop as usual. (See the directions for cooking Japanese rice here.) When the rice is almost cooked, peel the ginger, cut in half crosswise, and julienne. Thinly slice the green onion. When the rice is cooked, add the ginger, crab and green onion to the cooker or pot and stir to mix everything in. For best flavor, serve immediately.

Kuro means black and mitsu means honey, so for the longest time I thought kuro-mitsu was just a dark type of honey, perhaps buckwheat, and I wondered why I could never find it in the honey section of the supermarket. In actuality, kuro-mitsu is a syrup made from black sugar (kuro-zato), the famously healthy dark brown sugar produced in Okinawa, and sold next to the other sugars on the shelves. While mass-produced brown sugar in the U.S. is often made by simply coating refined white sugar with molasses, black sugar is unrefined, resulting in chunky, sticky granules with a pronounced molasses flavor.

Kuro-mitsu is thinner and milder than molasses, making it an ideal substitute for honey, whether spread on toast, drizzled over yogurt or stirred into tea. Kuro-zato is known for its throat-soothing qualities, so I use it in my favorite sick-day tea: I boil sliced ginger in water for five minutes, let it sit for ten minutes, reheat, and pour the resulting liquid over the juice of one lemon and one tablespoon of kuro-mitsu. It's spicy, sweet and citrusy and always makes me feel better.

Kuro-mitsu over yogurt.

But there's no need to stay virtuous in your kuro-mitsu use. The dish that inspired me to buy my own bottle of kuro-mitsu, in fact, was a strange and wonderful dessert named, alluringly, Honeycube, the special of the day at a cafe in Nagoya. (Just try saying it: Honeycube. Don't you want to eat it even though you have no idea what it is?) Honeycube turned out to be a plate piled high with the most unlikely ingredients: cubes of just-toasted white bread scattered over a heaping portion of vanilla soft-serve ice cream, then topped with a drizzle of kuro-mitsu and a dusting of cinnamon. Oh, and there was a scoop of fresh whipped cream in there somewhere, too. Surprisingly, Honeycube as a dessert lived up to Honeycube as a name. The cinnamon-scented crunch of the warm toasted bread with the cool softness of the ice cream was something like eating an ice-cream-stuffed churro and led to the realization that kuro-mitsu and ice cream go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Or strawberries and cream. Or kinako and fresh mochi. Whatever -- something synergistically delicious anyway.

This realization is why, while out for post-dinner drinks at an izakaya last week, when I heard the waiter say the only dessert they had was ice cream topped with kuro-mitsu and kinako, my reaction was one of such deep and sudden enthusiasm the man scooted back about a foot in surprise and four of my friends ordered the same, having no idea what they were getting, but unable to resist my breathless excitement. It was like a Japanese hot fudge sundae. I ate every bite.

My favorite supermarket discovery this winter was daikon greens, the leafy tops of the giant white Japanese radish, sold with immature daikon still attached. They are sturdy and bitter, with a faintly spicy radish flavor, a welcome change from the usual vegetable suspects like komatsuna, spinach and mizuna, which are quite watery and mild. Usually, after thoroughly washing the daikon greens, I roughly chop them up and briefly blanch them in boiling water, adding the white radish nubs first and waiting about a minute before adding the leafy parts.

As with all vegetables I parboil, after draining I don't cool them by rinsing them or putting them in ice water. Instead, I use the traditional Japanese method of fanning them for a minute or two with an uchiwa (paper fan), which keeps them from becoming water-logged and flavorless. I use one of those promotional uchiwa handed out on the streets of Japan during the summer alongside the promotional tissue packets. (If only all advertisements doubled as kitchen and/or beauty aids....)

To season the greens, I normally just pour on a little soy sauce and sprinkle on some toasted white sesame seeds for a quick and lazy ohitashi. They'd also be delicious tossed with a miso-sesame dressing. But my very favorite way to eat daikon greens is to wilt them, raw, with a little salt, then mix them with freshly-cooked rice, where they cook in the residual heat. It's a method I picked up from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art and it brings out the warm, spicy aroma and flavor of the greens like nothing else.

Nameshi (Rice with greens)

Adapted from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

Makes 2 servings

1 cup Japanese rice, washed
1 cup daikon greens or other bitter leafy vegetable, washed
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cook the rice as usual. (See the directions for cooking Japanese rice here.) While the rice is cooking, chop the greens into 1-inch pieces, including the immature radishes if attached. Put into a bowl and sprinkle with the salt. Rub the chopped leaves with your hands, squeezing them and dispersing the salt until they are slightly wilted. Drain any accumulated liquid.

When the rice is cooked, add the wilted greens and radish pieces, then lightly stir the rice until the greens are evenly incorporated. Replace the lid and let sit for a couple minutes before serving.

The only solution is to delve into one of the many Japanese-language recipe magazines crowding the bookstore shelves. With this in mind, a year ago (a year ago!) I bought 15分でごはん! (15-minute meals), a collection of quick recipes published by a popular food magazine called オレンジページ (Orange Page). Once upon a time, I set out to make some kind of lotus root-ground pork dish because the instructions looked easy (the picture of the finished dish actually looks completely vile), but never did. Yesterday I decided if I was ever going to conquer a recipe, it should at least be something I would want to eat. So I flipped through the now rather dusty and dented magazine once more and picked out　白身魚の梅あえのっけ丼 (white-fleshed fish with plum dressing over rice). After about an hour with my dictionary and with the aid of the step-by-step pictures, I had a list of ingredients and the instructions pretty much figured out. Minus the rice-cooking time, it all came together in the promised 15 minutes, and nearly as easily as if I had been cooking from a recipe in English.

The resulting dish was simple and light, the flesh of the kanpachi turning buttery beneath its dressing, brightened by the bits of tart umeboshi. This would be a perfect summer meal, much like my beloved maguro no tataki don, but with a hot bowl of wakame soup, it worked equally well as a mild winter night's dinner.

A note on ingredients: The original recipe suggests using tai (sea bream) or other white-fleshed fish; I instead went with the less expensive kanpachi (amberjack), an oilier, less delicate fish. I think this would work equally well with hamachi, maguro and even salmon. Use whatever you like to eat as sashimi.

Kanpachi no ume-aenokke don (Kanpachi with ume dressing over rice)

Makes 2 servings

2 cups (400 g) cooked rice
3.5 oz (100 g) sashimi-quality kanpachi (or substitute the fish of your choice)
daikon, 1 1/2 inch (4 cm) piece
1/5 bundle of mizuna, rinsed and dried
1 large or 2 small umeboshi
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste

Peel the daikon and cut into matchstick-sized pieces. Cut the mizuna into 1-inch (3-cm) lengths. Remove the seed from the umeboshi and dice the flesh. With a very sharp knife, slice the fish into 1/2-inch (1-cm) width pieces.

In a bowl, mix the olive oil, salt and diced umeboshi. Add the daikon, mizuna and fish, then toss together using chopsticks, distributing the dressing evenly. Taste for seasoning and add more salt if necessary. Scoop the rice into a bowl and top with the fish and vegetable mixture, making sure each serving gets a good amount of umeboshi. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.

This scandal has made the Nattō (Nonsense) Diet my second favorite Japanese fad diet, bested only by the Dark Chocolate Diet, which is still going strong, judging by all the new dark chocolate products popping up in the candy aisle every week. My favorite is the Meiji Chocolife Line, which seems like it should be eaten while wearing a velvet smoking jacket and sitting in a leather armchair somewhere. I aspire to live a chocolife....

It's wintertime and buri is king. Buri is yellowtail, that pink-edged sushi staple also known as hamachi. But buri is a grown-up hamachi that has eaten too much over the holidays and is now cloaked in a warm layer of yummy fat that it swears to god it is going to shed once the weather warms up and it can make it to the gym. For now, buri is buttery. Raw, it nearly melts in your mouth. Cooked, it is meaty and flavorful, especially when coated in a dark miso marinade and grilled, which is how I eat it about once a week during the winter.

Hatchō miso, favored by those in the central part of Japan, is so dark it is almost black. Hearty, salty and strong, this is not the sweet, pale stuff most often served at Japanese restaurants abroad. I remember my first bowl of miso-shiru (miso soup) here in the heartland of Japan. I felt like I had been punched in the tongue. But, you know, in a good way.

Another dark-food favorite of mine is kuro-zu, brown rice vinegar, which is the good-boy vinegar to Hatchō's bad-boy miso. Extremely mild and supposedly extra-nutritious, kuro-zu is hyped here as a healthy drink and all-around tonic for what ails you. I like to sprinkle it on raw vegetables. If you can't find it, about half the amount of regular rice vinegar is a suitable substitute.

And finally, if you don't have any buri nearby, you can try this recipe with salmon, black cod, swordfish or other meaty, oily fish.

Buri no Hatchō yaki (Miso-marinated grilled buri)

Makes 2 servings

2 buri fillets
1 tablespoon dark miso, preferably Hatchō miso
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon kuro-zu (brown rice vinegar) or 1 1/2 teaspoons rice vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons mirin
Chopped green onions or pickled ginger shoot, for garnish

Make marinade: In a shallow container, stir together the miso and soy sauce until smooth, then add the vinegar and mirin. Taste for seasoning and add more soy sauce or mirin as needed. Put the fillets in the marinade and coat completely. Cover the container and put in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. (Or, if you live in an unheated Japanese apartment, just leave it on the counter while you assemble the rest of your meal.)

Grill the fillets on a grill or in the broiler for 6-10 minutes, flipping halfway through cooking. Test for doneness by pressing the fish with a finger or chopsticks. It should be firm with some give, like a medium steak.

1. Cramming chopsticks (komi-bashi)
Using the chopsticks to stuff food into and already-full mouth.

2. Dragging chopsticks (yose-bashi)
Using chopsticks to move or pick up a plate or bowl.

3. Piercing chopsticks (sashi-bashi)
Piercing food with one or both chopsticks in order to pick it up.

4. Raking chopsticks (kaki-bashi)
Holding a plate or bowl up to your mouth and using the chopsticks to rake the food into your mouth.

5. Hesitating chopsticks (mayoi-bashi)
Indecisively hovering your chopsticks over various dishes before choosing.

6. Scooping chopsticks (yoko-bashi)
Holding the chopsticks together and using them as a spoon.

7. Crying chopsticks (namida-bashi)
Letting soup drip from the tips of the chopsticks.

8. Striking chopsticks (tataki-bashi)
Tapping a bowl with your chopsticks to get someone's attention.

9. Licked chopsticks (neburi-bashi)
Licking off food that is clinging to the chopsticks.

10. Seeking chopsticks (saguri-bashi)
Poking around in soup with chopsticks, looking for its contents.

11. Pointing chopsticks (yubisashi-bashi)
Pointing at someone or something with your chopsticks.

12. Carrying chopsticks (mochi-bashi)
Picking up or carrying a dish in the same hand that you are holding chopsticks.

13. Roving chopsticks (utsuri-bashi)
Eating only non-rice dishes. It is polite to alternate a bite of a non-rice dish with a bite of rice or sip of sake.

14. Probing chopsticks (kara-bashi)
Touching food with your chopsticks, then putting it down without eating it. To do this indicates distrust toward the one who provided the food.

15. Groping chopsticks (koji-bashi)
Using your chopsticks to poke around in a pile of food, looking for your favorite item.

And that's only fifteen of the taboos! Though I've been told I am a polite and proper user of chopsticks, I am still a frequent offender of numbers 3, 9, 10, 11 and 12, though I've probably done everything on this list at some point. But obviously I'm not the only one whose chopstick etiquette is sadly lacking -- a school in Japan has begun testing chopstick skills as part of its entrance exam. I'd like to think I'd pass such a test, but my roving, pointing, groping, cramming chopsticks tell another story.

Nattō. Fermented soybeans. You've probably heard of it. It's a divisive comestible, in that way only things that are called "food" yet smell like rotting feet are. While nearly everyone in Japan will lecture you on the health benefits of eating nattō (lowered risk of osteoporosis and cancer and blood clots and obesity and maybe...death?), there are actually a fair number of Japanese people who find the stuff repellent. The thing that makes nattō so disgustingly special is its texture, which manages to be at once slimy, slippery and stringy. This is a byproduct of the fermenting and aging process, during which the beans are soaked, fermented under heated conditions, then aged at a much cooler temperature. Meanwhile, Bacillus subtilis natto, a rice straw bacterium, does its not-so-subtle work and a pile of sticky, odiferous beans results.

But my cowering at the sight of nattō wouldn't do. I refused to be bullied, especially by something made of beans. Beans are small. Beans are innocuous. Beans are even kind of wimpy. So I armed myself with a fistful of green onions and a bowl of hot rice, excellent allies in any Japanese food showdown, and set to work.

Although I entertained thoughts of wimping out and starting with the black soybean nattō, which is supposed to be less strongly flavored, I decided to instead go for an all-purpose brand that had always caught my eye when I peeked fearfully at the nattō section of the grocery store. It came with small packets of tsuyu and karashi (mustard). I planned on using the tsuyu and forgoing the mustard, as its strong flavor might overpower the nattō-ness of my nattō. I chopped up some green onion and took a deep breath before lifting open the Styrofoam lid. It would be the last nattō-free breath I would take all day.

And there it was. You don't really need to ask why I was so afraid of nattō, do you?

The deep stink of fermented protein filled the kitchen. But the slippery adventure was only beginning -- I still had to mix my nattō, stirring it around with a pair of chopsticks to make it even more stringy. I wasn't too clear on why this was the desired result, but in the spirit of no-holds-barred nattō consumption, I did it.

After mixing, the beans looked even worse, foamy and viscous, like something you might find on the underside of a lily pad or see in a movie about spawning aliens. Undaunted, I piled them into the small bowl of hot rice, sprinkled on the tsuyu and covered the whole mess in a thick layer of green onions.

And finally, I put the first stinking bite into my mouth. I chewed. It was nutty. Slippery. There was a faint taste of rot, but it was rot I knew I could come to accept and maybe even love, like a very stinky cheese or a friendly zombie. After a couple bites, I added to some daubs of karashi to the mix and found the occasional burning bites even better. Toward the bottom of the bowl, I needed something more, so I pulled out my final Japanese food ally, the mighty umeboshi, and alternated the last bites of beans and rice with nibbles from the tart pickled ume. It was exactly right. I cleaned the bowl.

I had bested nattō. Or had I? My entire apartment reeked of the stuff for the rest of the day. I declare this match a tie.

If you aren't in the habit of reading the weekly Japanese candy reviews on my other blog, you should check out the special New Year's entry, which includes a wagashi wallpaper you can download.

This is the week you have to stop denying autumn is over. Wrapped up in a new wool coat, you ride your bike in the frosty morning, snow-dusted mountains on the horizon, burrowing your chin deeper in your scarf. The leaves have fallen. Your scary fume-spewing kerosene heater is out.

But it's okay. This autumn was a good one. Especially that persimmon tart.

Kaki flood the markets in autumn, especially in this part of Japan, which is famous for its persimmons. (It's even rumored that perhaps the name of my town, Ogaki, once meant "big persimmon." Which I think is far cooler than the present meaning: "big gate." Boooring.) The kaki sold raw is almost exclusively amagaki, the rounder, more flat fruit which are eaten while they are still firm; in the U.S., they are often labeled as "Fuyu persimmons." The longer, more pointed kaki, shibugaki -- which are terribly astringent until they soften completely -- are typically dried and sold later in winter, especially around New Year's. The best part about this kaki glut is that it makes it possible to buy one persimmon for less than 100 yen (about $1), something you can't say for apples. Thus, when the tart-baking urge struck, it was kaki I reached for.

A simple tart, it is nothing more than thinly-sliced fruit, sugar, butter and a sprinkling of spices in a basic crust. When baked, the persimmon pieces soften and meld together to become, after cooling, something gently chewy, kind of like a Japanese yōkan or a very soft Fruit Roll-Up. With some vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, it will be so good you might, like me, be forced to make another one a few days later. Or, if the amagaki season has already ended, daydream about it through at least a couple cold bicycle commutes.

Kaki no taruto (Persimmon tart)

For dough:
1 stick (115 g) cold unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups (155 g) all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 to 4 tablespoons ice water

For filling:
3 persimmons, peeled, seeded and sliced 1/8-inch thick
1/4 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/2 stick (55 g) cold butter, sliced thin

Vanilla ice cream or sweetened whipped cream

Make dough: Blend together flour, butter, and salt in a bowl with your fingertips until most of mixture resembles coarse meal, with the biggest lumps about pea-sized. Drizzle 2 tablespoons ice water evenly over and gently stir with a fork until incorporated.

When you squeeze a small handful of the dough, it should hold together without crumbling. If it doesn't, add more ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time, stirring after each addition until incorporated (keep testing). Don't overwork the mixture or add too much water, or your dough will be tough.

Form dough: Divide the dough into 4 portions. With heel of your hand, smear each portion once across your work surface in a forward motion to help distribute fat. Gather dough together with a pastry scraper and form it into a disk. Chill, wrapped in plastic wrap, until firm, at least 1 hour.

When you are ready to assemble the tart, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). On a lightly floured surface roll out dough into a 13-inch round and fit it into a 10-inch tart tin, trimming the excess. Arrange the persimmon slices decoratively on the pastry shell, overlapping them. Mix the nutmeg and ginger with the sugar and sprinkle on top of the fruit. Top with butter slices and bake for 45 minutes or until the crust is golden and the persimmon slices are lightly browned. Serve with ice cream or whipped cream.

The streets of Miyajima were lined with stands selling deep-fried fish cakes stuffed with all manner of wonderful and terrible things. On a stick! I tried the gobo, which was kind of like a squishy, fish-flavored egg roll. Delicious, if you're into fish cakes.

Oysters were also everywhere in Miyajima: harvested in a factory near my hotel, displayed in glass cases in restaurants and, most delectably, grilled right there on the street, their charred, seaside smell impossible to resist. Drawn by the long line of people snaking toward it, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant with a store-front oyster grill.

We had to order those, of course, and I also got the oyster donburi, which apparently was once featured on TV. It was possibly the best rice bowl I've eaten in Japan. The oysters, soft and slightly bitter, were mixed with egg-laced dashi and spread over the hot rice like a warm wool blanket, the juices soaking into the rice until every grain was shiny and plump with flavor. With pickles and a clear soup, it was a truly satisfying autumn lunch.

But there was still dinner to worry about. Luckily, Hiroshima is the home of Okonomiyaki-mura, a building boasting a collection of restaurants devoted to Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. In Osaka, okonomiyaki is a sort of pancake batter fattened with shredded cabbage and meat or seafood, often cooked and served from a hot grill panel in front of you. The resulting savory pancake is somewhat like a frittata in texture. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is layered, a thin sheet of batter below a hefty pile of shredded cabbage below thin strips of meat below a fried egg, with a thick nest of soba or udon noodles compressed somewhere in there.

The movements of the okonomiyaki maker were swift and precise as he turned and fried and pressed. I ordered mochi and extra green onions on mine, so beneath the green shower of negi and the sweet, sticky sauce painted over the top was a chewy nugget of hot mochi, soft and yielding as cheese. I think the little boy sitting at the counter near me summed it up when he yelled twice, "Umai!" ("Delicious!"), as if what was in his belly was so good, he couldn't keep it to himself.

Even the most elegant, expensive restaurants use waribashi, which seems a bit incongruous to non-Japanese eyes, like a fancy French restaurant handing out plastic-wrapped spork, knife and napkin sets. But the rampant use of waribashi is actually based on a deep-rooted religious belief which prevents the sharing of chopsticks with another person. Shinto has among its many concepts of defilement and purification the belief that anything which touches a person's mouth carries with it a bit of that person's character and if used by another person, could pass on a spiritual contamination that no amount of Listerine could ever wash away. Even within families, each person has their personal pair of chopsticks. You might say sharing chopsticks is like sharing underwear; no matter how thoroughly washed they were by the previous owner, it would never feel quite right.

So how to avoid contributing to the growing mountain of trashed waribashi every year while maintaining a spiritually pristine mouth? Carry your own chopsticks in a chopstick case! The one I use is small and imprinted with rabbits, but there are other, less girly versions available, like this slide-top box.

A final note about waribashi etiquette: it is considered somewhat rude to rub the freshly-broken chopsticks together because it implies that the waribashi are cheap and, therefore, that the restaurant is cheap. But a final note about chopstick etiquette: there are approximately one thousand ways to handle chopsticks in a way that is considered rude.