And So It Goes

Merry Finger-Lickin'-Good Christmas from Colonel Santa!

It's Christmas, so here's an old photo of that symbol of a traditional Japanese Christmas: fried chicken.

No, seriously. Many years ago, the marketing geniuses -- and I do not use that term ironically -- at Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan started a campaign to convince Japanese consumers that a traditional Christmas dish is fried chicken. They succeeded wildly, not only to the point that people now need to make reservations to pick up their fried chicken on Christmas Day at "Kentucky" (as the place is nicknamed) and that they've expanded the product range to include "premium roasted chicken" on that day, but also that convenience stores and other fast-food chains have gotten into the act, also offering that traditional Christmas chicken.

Which explains why, last night, the 7-11 near my house had a table set up outside in the dark, displaying the Christmas cakes (another, albeit non-KFC, Christmas tradition) and the chicken, sold by three 7-11 employees, one in a Santa suit and the other two dressed as reindeer.

(The chicken didn't seem to be fried, but grilled, with a sweetish teriyaki sauce on top. Pretty tasty, actually.)

As for The Colonel above: there's a statute of him permanently outside every KFC in Japan, but he only wears the  Santa suit at Christmas time. (There's a purely Japanese holiday where he dons a colorful suit of samurai armor, but that's something for another post.)

Burgers in Tokyo

Hamburgers, as you might expect in Japan, are about as exotic as sushi is in the United States -- bearing in mind that these days you can find sushi at the Wal-Mart in Plano, Texas. That means that while they're not as common as burger joints are in the United States, there are nonetheless very many around.

I've always liked cheeseburgers, and even here in Japan I occasionally indulge -- and by that I don't mean McDonald's. There are a couple of places I generally go for real burgers, and I usually don't get much out of that particular rut. But lately I've had burgers on the brain for a couple of reasons.

The first reason was a surprising discovery at Tokyo's City Hall. I found, while browsing at their tourist information center, a tourist brochure from the city of Sasebo near Nagasaki, billing itself as a "Burger Map of Sasebo".  Yes, it was a map in the burger joints of this port city, which is also home to a U.S. Navy base and claims to be the place where hamburgers were first made popular in Japan (presumably to serve the appetites of the American sailors on liberty). I've even seen the name "Sasebo Burger" used in Tokyo as a brand name and identifier of a particular burger style.

My next burger encounter was a publication I saw on sale at Tower Books in Shibuya last weekend, called the Best Burger Book. This publication is a guide to the hamburgers of Japan, from Hokkaido in northern Japan all the way down to the island of Okinawa, organized by region. It has such things as profiles of owners of hamburger joints -- including the person who perhaps introduced hamburgers in Japan, at a sandwich shop up north in Sendai. There's also an introduction including the history of the hamburger (there's a photo of Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut) and the four top hamburger joints of Los Angeles (which I'm assuming they considered the center of hamburger culture in America.  Yes, In-and-Out Burger is tops on that list).

I was most interested, of course, in their listings for the Tokyo area: 35 or so different restaurants, each with an entry, a specialty burger, and location. Lots of pictures, which is helpful for me since my Japanese-language abilities are so rotten and the book is entirely in Japanese.

Naturally, I wanted to know where the burger places were, and while I could puzzle out the addresses with the aid of a map, I thought I would use technology instead: as you can see, I entered all the aforementioned Tokyo entries into Google maps and have created a "burgers in Tokyo" map. This was originally intended for my own use, but what the hey, I might as well share.

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The burger-and-soda icons mean a standard burger joint, the martini-glass icon means a bar, and the bed icon means a fancy hotel restaurant. Don't blame me, those were the categories the book used. Some highlights include:

• 7025 Franklin Avenue, a cozy place in Shinagawa which resembles an oversized American living room, complete with fireplace. This was Liz's favorite (or, since Liz is Canadian, favourite). I'm not entirely certain what the source of the name is, though my browsing through Google maps convinces me it's connected to that address in Los Angeles, which is the location of the Magic Castle Hotel in Hollywood.
• Seasons Bistro, attached to the Four Seasons Hotel. Yes, it's marked by one of those little red beds: other hotels with restaurants attached include the Peninsula Hotel, the Westin Tokyo Hotel, and the Hotel New Otani. As you might expect, the burgers are priced accordingly, with the Seasons Bistro offer being a truffle burger at ¥3150 (about $32 or so).

I've only just started, and I've only eaten at a few of the places on this map, so the entries are still a bit sketchy. But over the next several months (diet willing) I hope to eat at most of the places on this map (except the hotel restaurants, of course) and I'll flesh out the entries as I do. If I make it a habit, I suspect I'll be a bit more fleshed out, too.

More Songs Posts About Buildings and Food

Another late start, as is usual for me on Saturdays. First, I stopped by my old company’s offices in Tamachi to drop off some paperwork – technically, I’m still a part-time employee there, even if it’s one (1) hour a week – passing by a group of Japanese Christmas carolers inside Akabanebashi Station. Not completely fluent – no surprise – and while I have no proof, I suspect this wasn’t a Christian thing, but a hobbyist thing, kind of like people in the U.S. who sing Latin Masses for fun even if they’re not churchgoers.

Paperwork dropped off, I went on to the GA Gallery in Yoyogi to see another architectural show. The GA Gallery is the bookstore/exhibition space for a publisher of big glossy books and monographs on modernist architecture – in a small modernist building, of course – and they regularly put on exhibitions displaying models, conceptual drawings, and presentation posters for contemporary projects and proposals. A few months ago, for example, they had one on the latest work of French architect Jean Nouvel, highlighting his designs for the huge new Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Today, it was a catch-all covering recent proposals/projects by modernist Japanese architects. This included a competition entry proposal by architect Arata Isozaki for a massive mixed-use development project in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), Vietnam. The project, called the Diamond Island New Urban Quarter Development, I quite liked the look of, including the look of how some of the residential units were stacked on top of it each in oddly overlapping ways.¹

I headed back to Yoyogi Station and did my biweekly browsing of the magazine rack at the big Kinokuniya Books nearby (bought three) and browsed the travel guides for Italy – I’m considering a Spring vacation there – and by the time I was ready to leave it was dinnertime and I was hungry. I crossed the pedestrian bridge to check out the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on the other side, maybe to buy a snack or a box to bring to the office on Monday but it was still jampacked with an incredibly long line.  Still, the sign on the door said they open at 7 AM, so if I really wanted a doughnut, I should come back early Monday morning as a long detour on the way to work.

So, wanting dinner and not wanting to wait until I got home, I headed back in the direction of the GA Gallery, to check out a place I’d passed earlier, a French bistro calling itself Bistro d’Artemis. It’s small stand-alone building – rare enough in this densely built urban center – tucked on an odd-sized lot under a highway not far from Yoyogi Station. Maybe 20 seats total, informal-looking, open kitchen, windows and walls covered with an assortment of authentic-looking bistro signs, menu in French. Seeing this had given me a bit of a craving to try cassoulet², so, stymied in my attempt to buy a doughnut, I went back for that. You might ask, “A choice between some sugar-laden American fat bombs and what is probably authentic (this being Japan, probably disturbingly so) French bistro food? You had to think about this?” Yeah yeah, I know.

Inside the Bistro d’Artemis, it was very Gallic – though I don’t know if the average Paris bistro has a four-meter (15-foot) tall glass-enclosed wine rack with attached ladder built into one wall. In any case, I ordered what I believe was some variant of Navy Bean Soup (as I say, the menu was in French) steak tartar, and cassoulet, along with a small carafe of red house wine. I’d never had steak tartar (it was good) and the cassoulet was pretty much how I’d remembered it. Of course, I’ll need to run further experiments to be sure, or maybe I can try some of their other specialties, like boudin noir (blood sausage, if I recollect, but my French is more than a little suspect). I'll have to bring my friend Sonja, who is very much into French food, being, you know, French.³  I'm sure she'll love it.

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Notes:
¹I looked it up when I got home, and sadly, it looks like the developers rejected Isozaki's proposal in favor of a much blander proposal by a German architect named Albert Speer. No, not THAT German architect named Albert Speer: this one is his son. Speer the Younger’s much duller proposal for the project, in my opinion, looks like it would fit in, say, Berlin – East Berlin, that is, before the Berlin Wall. Blah.

²A cassoulet is ”a rich, slow-cooked bean stew or casserole originating in the southwest of France, containing meat (typically pork sausages, pork, goose, duck, and sometimes mutton), pork skin (couennes) and white haricot beans” says Wikipedia.  The first and only time I had ever tried this was during my vacation in Paris, and I was still unsure about how authentic it was. If that sounds strange (“How could you be worried about whether you got authentic French food in FRANCE?!?”), it’s because the cassoulet I had was frozen.

Really. Short version: while in Paris, I was listening with my iPod to an episode of the radio show This American Life (previously recorded, of course) featuring an American expatriate named David Sedaris who’d moved to Paris to be with his lover, not because of any inherent love of the place. In fact, he bragged that he’d never been to any of the obvious landmarks such as the Louvre (“Why go to the only place in Paris that won’t let you smoke?”) – which struck me as a really annoying reverse snobbery, but neverthemind. In the course of the show, Sedaris mentioned the Pantheon. Nope, never had been inside, but he knew about it because it was across the street from a frozen-food store he frequented.

Now, it so happened that a few years ago I had heard a radio news story about a relatively new chain of stores in Paris that sold frozen foods – but high-quality frozen versions of classic French dishes, or so the report had it. I filed it away mentally, but had no recollection of the name of the store or where to find one – now, with Sedaris’ mention, I now had a landmark and knew exactly where to find one: across the street from the Pantheon, just down the road from my rented apartment in the 5th. So late one afternoon during one of my rambles I aimed myself in that direction.

The Pantheon, it turned out, was fairly large, so “across the street” covered a LOT of territory, meaning that I had to almost completely circle the Pantheon to find it. But there it was: Picard, a modern and spacious store with wide aisles and nothing but frozen-food cases. I went in and browsed, but since the store also had one entrance and one exit (through the cashier stands), I felt somewhat impelled to actually buy something rather than run the risk of having to explain to a cashier I had to pass that no, I wasn’t actually shopping, I was merely playing tourist in a frozen-food store. So I picked up a frozen duck-sausage cassoulet, frozen broccoli florets, and raspberry sherbet for that evening’s dinner. And you know what? It was good.

³Okay, technically she's American, but her parents are French and she spoke French at home in rural northern California where she was raised. so it's pretty close.

A Doughnut (Actually, 12 of Them)...

After puttering around the house, I headed out to Shinjuku on Saturday afternoon, having nothing really better to do and curious about this new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop that had opened the day before. It turns out to be in what used to be a two-story Italian restaurant at the foot of the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, the walkway that leads over to Takashimaya Times Square. (Here's the map, or you can use this satellite photo to get a sense of the location: it's on the left side of bridge in the center of  the photo, though the location is obscured by the office building) So it wasn't a little hole-in-the-wall, like I expected.

I expected it to be crowded, what with the novelty and all, but there was a huge freaking line of a few hundred people snaking around in front of the building, behind the rope lines next to the traditional good luck floarl arrangements new businesses always put up, with security guards directing traffic (foot traffic, this being a pedestrian mall). The line even extended out onto the pedestrian bridge. The doughnut machine was working full blast, and they were selling box after box of the things. I looked into the place, and thought, despite my plan to maybe buy a box on Sunday night to bring into the office on Monday morning, I had to try it again right now. Yes, I had a lingering toothache -- perhaps a sign I ought not to be eating doughnuts to begin with -- but doughnuts are soft and not likely to cause any real pain, and it was a little late to be worried about tooth decay now anyways.

So I joined the line on the bridge, just ahead of a young Asian-American couple (Vietnamese, I think -- their conversation kept veering between Valspeak and an Asian language I couldn't identify). The woman seemed particularly excited to see Krispy Kreme again ("Like, when I'd see the sign lit up when I'm driving on the freeway, I'd take the exit and go in").

I waited about forty minutes -- I was actually killing a little time, as I'd called my friend Sonja and she was coming out to meet me for dinner -- and would have waited longer if I hadn't taken the offer to jump the queue: as I was nearing the door, a Krispy Kreme employee came up and offered to let people go straight in to the register selling boxes to go, if that's all they wanted. Geez, a dozen doughnuts at once...but what the hell. The Asian-American couple followed me, because by that point in the line they -- well, mostly she, I think -- had worked themselves up from wanting two to wanting a full dozen. I snagged my box and went out to sit on a nearby planter.

While fresh doughnuts are good, there is such a thing as too fresh: my doughnuts were probably, due to demand, straight off the line, so the first doughnut I ate then and there -- okay, two doughnuts -- were far too soft, sort of being mushy and falling apart. Once I gave a few minutes for them to set, as it were, they were good, if incredibly sweet.

Today's Statistics:
Cost of a Krisy Kreme doughnut (Original Glazed) in Tokyo: ¥150 (tax included)
Cost of a dozen Krisy Kreme doughnuts (Original Glazed) in Tokyo: ¥1,500 (tax included)
Number of calories in one Krispy Kreme doughnut (Original Glazed): 200
Grams of fat in one Krispy Kreme doughnut (Original Glazed): 12

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Less Pain

The pain from the toothache has subsided, but it's still there, just at a low throb, probably helped by the pain pills they gave me (something called Voltaren, which sounds like a villain from a cheap Saturday-morning cartoon). Hopefully, the antibiotics the dentist also prescribed gave me will keep anything from getting out of hand and destroying my root system; unfortunately, antibiotics have side effects. If you know already, I don't have to tell you and if you don't I'm not going to, and I'm going to leave it at that. Tuesday can't come soon enough.

Apropos of nothing, at lunch today, I mentioned that I'd heard Krispy Kreme Doughnuts was coming to Tokyo, somewhere in Shinjuku. One of my co-workers, who has an interest in American junk food, as it were (he has family living in Hawaii he visits fairly frequently), took the trouble to look it up after lunch, something I hadn't bothered to do. First, he discovered that the company blocks access to the Krispy Kreme website -- making me wonder what the hell the IT department does all day and what the hell kind of guidelines are they using -- and stymied, called his wife at home and had HER look up the information for him -- making me wonder exactly how interested HE is American-style doughnuts.

It turns out that today is opening day: another of my co-workers, who sits behind me, turns out to have seen this on the TV news, complete with story that Krispy Kreme apparently gave away 500 boxes of doughnuts inside Shinjuku Station last weekend as part of their promotion. Man, my timing stinks. Teeth problem or no -- too late now to worry about that -- I may check them out this weekend.

Today's Statistics:
Number of Krispy Kreme franchises in the United States: 360
Number of countries with Krispy Kreme franchises: 11

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Cigarettes and Pizza

Cigarettes...
Did a bit of Christmas shopping today – mostly of the window variety – at my favorite big-box electronics stores in Akihabara. Biggest item I actually purchased (rather than lusted after) was a hard-drive case, which hopefully I can use to hold the hard drive of my old (and now, non-booting) Apple G4 computer and recover some files.

On the way home, near Kawasaki Station, I also returned to a little store I’d stumbled across a few weeks ago while wandering through a nearby residential neighborhood. It’s across the street from LaZona, the huge and sleek new shopping center there, just a tiny storefront on the edge of side street: I discovered it as I was taking a shortcut through the neighborhood trying to get to LaZona. The store – whose name I don’t recall – had a Philippines flag on it, which is what got my attention. Curious, I went in, and sure enough it was a Filipino food store, presumably serving expatriate Filipinos.¹ I browsed a bit, looking at the various offerings (adobo sauce mix, snack foods, Coca-Cola made with sugar instead of corn syrup, etc.) and bought some items. I’d come back today to pick up a few more items, including some gifts for a co-worker.

The co-worker, a mostly American-raised Japanese guy I’ll call T.H., is a heavy smoker, and when I go the States, he always asks me to pick up some packs of Marlboro cigarettes for him. Yes, they sell Marlboros here, but they’re domestically manufactured and according to T.H. they taste different from the U.S. versions. When I’d been in the Filipino food store the last time, I noticed that they sold Marlboros, with the labels indicating that they’d been manufactured in Manila. I asked the store owner if they tasted differently than the Japanese versions, and she shrugged and said, “I don’t know, I don’t smoke. But people want them, so I sell them.” I bought a couple of packs, and gave them to T.H. to try when I came to the office on Monday.

Later that day, T.H. came to my desk and simply said, “More.”

So, a few more packs today.

...and Pizza
Dinner was inside the LaZona mall, at the local branch of California Pizza Kitchen – yes, they have them here – which I’d also stumbled over last month. I had a Five-Cheese Pizza, a cup of Tortilla Soup, and a Coke. I also got a coupon good for ¥500 off on future visits to this and other American-franchised restaurants in Japan owned by the same company, which, according to the list on the back of the coupon, turns out to include Tony Roma's, the Hard Rock Café – and the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. That's right, that theme-restaurant chain based on the movie Forrest Gump. Gad, there’s a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company in Tokyo?  Why would a country that sets such store by fresh – even raw – seafood be in the market for the American-style deep-fried whatevers of an American seafood chain? The mind boggles, and I guess I have to check it out for myself. Not to eat, probably, just to look. Though given that I have –  of my own free will and more than once –  eaten at T.G.I. Friday's and Outback Steakhouse, I ought not be snobbish here.³

Notes:
¹As I understand it, Filipinos here largely work as domestics for the wealthier expats. The bulletin board at the expats’ favorite grocery store (National Azabu in Hiroo) shows a lot of that, based on the Help Wanted/Jobs Wanted postings there. So goes the economic progress of Japan: thirty or forty years ago or earlier, Japanese working as domestic servants for wealthy – or even not so wealthy – expatriates based in Tokyo would seem perfectly normal. Now, it’s unimaginable that any Japanese person would need to.

This was brought up for me when I browsed through a Japanese phrase book I bought from a bargain-book catalog and came across several pages on Japanese phrases to use with your domestic servants, including a section entitled “Interviewing a Maid” (including sentences like "Will you take care of children?" (Kodomo no sewa o shite kudasaimasu ka?) and "Can you cook Western food"? (Anata wa seiyō-ryōri ga tsukuremau ka?)).

“Buh?!?” was my instant reaction, because I knew, without even thinking about it, that it was wildly out-of-place. I looked at the copyright page, and sure enough, the book was copyrighted 1969, with a last printing date of 1991.

²I once told T.H. about this seafood theme restaurant chain, found across the United States, and he refused to believe such a movie-based restaurant actually existed, or that these places all have fake bus benches out front where Bubba Gump impersonators sit and pose for pictures. “Come ON, you’re making that up,” he said.  I wasn’t, and I had to take a picture of the branch at San Francisco’s Pier 39 shopping center at Fisherman’s Wharf on my next visit to the States, just to prove it.

³Lest you think that every brand name of the American culinary arts here – including, of course, McDonald's, Domino's Pizza, and KFC (aka "Kentucky") – involves either pizza, burgers, or all things deep-fried, I should also point out that there are outposts of the food empires of Wolfgang Puck, Todd English, Roy Yamaguchi, and Lawry's The Prime Rib here in Tokyo.

Adventures in Mobile Pastry

I dropped by Yodobashi Camera (the big electronics retailer with the really annoying jingle) in Shinjuku today to pick up some stuff, and passed through the South Exit of Shinjuku Station on the way home. At the top of the staircase down to the Yamanote Line platform I spotted a big advert for Doughnut Plant NYC, the Japanese branch of the New York City doughnut shop. It seemed oddly out of place and out of scale to me, covering the entire wall alongside the top of the staircase (with the eye-catching slogan "GO NATURAL WITH FRIEND"). 

It was when I passed the staircase that I figured out why: the sign was actually the back wall of a recently opened shop inside the station: a branch of The Doughnut Plant. Man, that business is expanding rapidly here in Japan -- and selling more than doughnuts. This store was selling cake doughnuts as well as the traditional kind, not to mention bagels, salads, and t-shirts.

Of course, it's really a franchise of the original store in New York, not a branch or extension, so it looks like they're doing things in their own way -- Japanese -- way: on offer at this store was the NEW YEAR "和" CAKE DOUGHNUT BOX - a pack of four different kinds of doughnuts: Triple Valhrona chocolate, green tea, yuzu, and kinako flavors (yuzu is a tart citrus fruit native to Asia and kinako is sweet toasted soybean flour often sprinkled on confections).

The biggest sign of this being a Japanese business were the display cases for the non-doughnut products: one refrigerator was labeled: 

PLANT SALAD & PLANT FOOD

After wondering, briefly, how there could be non-plant salads and anyways what was this place doing selling nursery supplies, the light dawned when I looked at the sign over the t-shirt rack, PLANT STORE. Ah, "Doughnut PLANT" --> "PLANT Salads", "PLANT Food", and "PLANT Store". Shows a less-than-certain grasp of idiomatic usage, clearly.

I bought a cinnamon bun and a frozen pizza-bagel, though I was somewhat tempted to buy one of the t-shirts, which has what looks like a Japanese-style slogan on it. I had to wonder if Doughnut Plant employees in New York City actually wear t-shirts reading:

NEVER SAY NO!
ALWAYS SAY YES!
BEST! BEST! BEST!

Honestly, I can easily envision a bunch of Japanese Doughnut Plant employees beginning the day with this chant. New York? Not so much.

UPDATE: And here's some pictures:

Vincent Schiavelli

ROME -- Vincent Schiavelli, the droopy-eyed character actor who appeared in scores of movies, including "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Ghost," died Monday at his home in Sicily. He was 57.

He died of lung cancer, said Salvatore Glorioso, mayor of Polizzi Generosa, the Sicilian village where Schiavelli resided.
        - Associate Press obituary by Marta Falconi, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Well, this is bad news. I've admired his work in countless movies (I remember Buckaroo Banzai in particular, and the "Humbug" episode of The X Files).  But it's also slightly weird, in that I was just discovering another side to the guy.

If you're reading this within a few days of my posting it, you should see to your left, in my list of books I'm reading, Vincent Schiavelli's book Many Beautiful Things: Stories and Recipes from Polizzi Generosa. I've put it aside for the moment -- actually, I left it by the bed and keep forgetting to put it in my bag when I leave for work each day -- but it's a lovely -- and hunger-inducing -- book about Schiavelli's encounter with his Sicilian roots in Polizzi Generosa, the town in Sicily where, according the obituary, he died. Which seems fitting, since his love for the town shines through in the book.

It's a pity, because Schiavelli's book made me want to visit Sicily and Polizzi Generosa, meet the people, maybe get a shave and a haircut (one of his cousins is a barber in town), visit one of the town's bakeries and try the pastries, and hey, maybe run into Vincent hanging around at the local cafe and have un caffè with him as we watch the world go by.

Sorry, Vincent.

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Gifting Myself

Well, Christmas Eve's Operation Brine Turkey Leg worked out pretty well: I roasted the leg/flank/whatever, made up a pot of mashed potatoes, and used the turkey drippings and a dash of white wine and Wondra Gravy and Sauce Flour to whip up some gravy. A few bumps, but that's to be expected: a bit too much salt in the brine, the roasting pan was too small and lightweight to handle well on the stove, and the mashed potatoes came out a bit lumpy, since I had to mash them with the only potato-mashing tool I had, a steel pasta ladle.

For Christmas itself, I decided to spend it in the traditional American way: shopping for gifts. Mostly for myself, as a way to treat myself. So I spent some time wandering the garishly lit shopping areas of Shinjuku (lots of Christmas lights strung up everywhere), and wound up buying a new Apple computer mouse (thinking buying an entire computer to go with it next year), a new Apple keyboard (the old one is acting up), a polarizing filter for my video camera, four foreign magazines at Kinokuniya Books, and, from Tokyu Hands, because they have everything, a potato masher.

Timing is everything

Yesterday after work, I dropped by the Hanamasa store between my office and the train station to pick up some groceries. Hanamasa is a meat wholesaler that operates retail stores -- kind of like a small-scale Costco, doing walk-in business for tiny restaurants and such -- that sells large packages of inexpensively priced food, especially meat. They usually have an odd assortment of imported food (potato chips, sauces, biscuits) and for awhile were importing stuff from Trader Joe's -- no longer, alas. They even have turkey -- Jenny-O brand (imported from the states) either frozen or pre-roasted, as well as cut-up turkey. On a whim just after Thanksgiving, I bought one of the pre-roasted ones, since my little convection oven probably wouldn't fit a even medium-sized turkey without the use of a crowbar -- not bad, but WAY oversmoked -- giving me the old-fashioned US Thanksgiving experience, complete with far too much leftovers.

In any case, last night I pondered whether to buy MORE turkey and cook it myself this time -- the turkey parts looked manageable, certainly -- dithered a bit, but decided no.

When I got to the train station, I realized that I had left my iPod on my desk, and not wanting to go the long weekend without it (today's a holiday), I trudged back, retrieved it, put it on, and started walking back to the station while listening to the podcast of "NPR's Most E-mailed Stories", specifically the interview with Ted Allen of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on tips for Christmas turkey dinners. I'm a fan of the show -- well, of the episodes I've been able to get my hands on -- and even have QESG desk calendar at the office, so I paid particular attention.

Allen's first advice was to cut up the turkey and roast/cook the different pieces separately. Hmm, good, I could do that, even with my small oven. And literally as I was passing the Hanamasa meat market again, he mentioned brining. This stopped me dead in my tracks. Allen raved about brining, brings flavor, juiciness, etc as I stood outside the store and listened.

Brining, in a nutshell, is soaking meat in salty water, which, through osmotic action, infuses the meat with water, salt, and whatever flavoring (spices, etc) you've put in the brine. Alton Brown of the TV show Good Eats raves about the technique in his book I'm Just Here for the Food, (which I have a copy of, of course). I've never tried it, but Allen's mention of (and effusive praise for) the technique suddenly brought it back to mind. So I turned right, walked back into the store, and bought a package of three turkey legs/flanks (inadvertantly following another bit of Allen advice ("Buy three legs and tell your kids it was an unusual turkey"). I brought them home, concocted a brine, more-or-less following a recipe from the Alton Brown book -- salt, orange juice, brown sugar, bay leaves, peppercorns -- and God willing and the creeks don't rise, I'll be having a roast turkey with real mashed potatoes (I also bought potatoes at Hanamasa) and gravy for Christmas Eve dinner tomorrow.

If it weren't for the fortuitous timing of hearing that podcast I'd probably be getting my Christmas turkey either from Leftover Turkey Stew or a sandwich at Subway's (yes, they have them here).