Myogi-san, Again

hey all,

Seems like it has been a while, but for once my weekend was really fun. On Saturday, Michi and I made mabodofu, which is a spicy Chinese ground pork and tofu dish. Below is my version of it that I made earlier this week. It is literally just spice, ground pork and tofu, as that is what the recipe calls for. Next to it is my homemade version of ginger ale: Mitsuya cider and whiskey.

400g firm tofu
100g ground pork
2 cloves garlic
chunk of ginger to match the garlic
1 tsp sake
3 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tbs tobanjan
beef bullion
2 tsp corn starch
seseme oil
salt and pepper to taste

1. chop the tofu into 1cc cubes and boil for 1 minute. remove and drain.
2. finely chop the ginger and garlic, and saute them together with the tobanjan sauce in some seseme oil in a soup pan.
3. add the ground pork and 1.5 tbs of soy sauce.
4. when browned, add beef broth (beef bullion dissolved in 1 cup of water), rest of soy suace, sugar, sake, salt and pepper, tofu, and corn starch dissolved into cold water.
5. heat until it reaches the desired consistency.

Serve with rice. Quite tasty, and a lot spicier than the store bought sauces. If you're not careful while cooking it, the tobanjan sauce will start to smoke a little while cooking, and sear your nostrils and throat.

Michi's version is a lot less spicy, because she insisted on adding onion and chives to it, which really dilutes the power of the chili sauce. Still good, but I like mine better.

On Sunday, we got up around 6:30 and took several trains over to Matsuida station in Gunma prefecture in order to hike Myougi-san again. We went there several months ago, but we only saw about 1/3 of the sights, so we came back.

I decided I'd try my hand at meditating under a waterfall. There were subsequent reports of a hairless, pale ape creature seen wandering around Gunma.

What we didn't get to see last time was this: four large stone arches, called sekimon in Japanese (stone gate).

Showing off the muscles.

The second gate is particularly scary: you have to climb the chained paths to get through it, and by that time it had started raining a little.

Michi using her Force powers to hold up the stone arch.

It started raining a little during our lunch break at the 4th gate, and after we crossed the 2nd gate it really started to come down, with some of the loudest thunder that I've heard since coming to Japan. After getting through all 4 gates, we took shelter in a public rest area and called a taxi. I guess we could have tried to wait the rain out, but we had hiked from about 11AM to 4PM, and Michi was tired from the heat and the rain and just hiking for 5 hours in 36C temperatures. If we had waited, we could have hiked back to our starting point, but that would have taken another 2 hours or so, and we needed to get back to Tokyo.

Cheers,