All quiet

Sorry for the lack of updates; I’ve just moved house.  For the next few months rod making will be somewhat out of the question, but I am still fishing occasionally and have started making charcuterie again.

Mouldy

My Catalan fermented sausages are growing Santa Claus-like beards of mould; it is all good mould, though, and I assure you they are supposed to be like this.  Unlike the natives of Lleida, Barcelona and so forth who merely have to hang their sausages up to be blessed with a spontaneous growth of the right variety of mould, here in east Tokyo we are not so lucky.  I buy my mould in the form of a pure culture, rouse the creatures from their frozen slumber and then I am obliged to inoculate the sausages by hand.

Anyway, I’m finally off work now till the New Year – Christmas is a regular working day here in Japan – so in addition to putting my feet up, I hope to get some fishing in over the next few days.  Wherever you are and however you celebrate, I hope you enjoy the holidays and thank you for reading my blog.

Just a quick post

I was in Morioka station when the earthquake struck, but thankfully I am safe and very lucky to be on my way back, rather circuitously, to Tokyo.  I will post more when I get home.

Into the third year

of Compleat Tsuribito; thank you for your reading and posting comments!

One very pleasant surprise awaited me last night when I went to see my rod making teacher to pick up some of my rods I left in his care.  Earlier this year I misplaced my favourite and long-serving fishing knife, much to my disappointment.  Well it turns out my sensei went fishing last week and the skipper produced a knife and asked him if he knew the owner…well, the prodigal is returned!

A very, very big thank you to Captain Takahashi of the Kaitomaru, Fuku-ura Harbour.

No internets

at home for me, as I kicked over my YahooBB modem whilst cleaning over the weekend and just like the story of the collision between the fat man and the boy with the werry large head as told by Samuel Weller, its inner workings have never been the same since. Might take a few days to sort out so it may be some time before I can update again from home.

Exactly one year has passed

since I started this blog; how time flies. Thank you to all the people who have visited and posted comments, especially repeat visitors. I really did not expect so many people to visit – if you Google ‘Punjabi food’ Compleat Tsuribito comes out second of all teh internets, and two of the first three pictures in Google Image search are mine (somewhat embarrassingly, poorly cooked lachar parathas and a rather unauthentic karhai chicken dish). Even though my blog covers quite a wide range of topics, some of the search terms people have used to find my blog are quite unexpected. The more esoteric include “fishing and beer”, “sunrise”, “tasty fish” although the most cryptic must surely be “dew texture”. In Japanese, my favourite recorded search request must be “伊豆温泉　彼女　夜” which translates, quite literally, as “Izu hot spring, girlfriend, night-time”. The things people think of.

Thanks again,

Adam Guy

New Category: Indian Cooking

As in, cooking Indian food, not people.  Other than fishing one of my passions is cooking, as should be obvious from the general theme of this blog, and my ever-expanding waistline.  Apart from the Japanese cookery that uses all the fish I catch, I also make traditional English, Thai, Italian and Chinese dishes, but the food I probably enjoy the most – both preparing and eating – is Indian. 

Of course, when I say “Indian” I guess I should really say ‘Indian Subcontinent’ as I also like to prepare the splendid food of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.  Whenever I go back to London, eating bhel poori and a paneer dosa at Diwana’s, or charcoal-grilled kebabs and straight-out-the-oven hot naan – with the crumbled almonds and pistachio literally falling off the bread – at Raavi’s Halal Tandoori Restaurant, or a feast at the Bengal Lancer are just as important fixtures in my itinerary as a trip to Paxton & Whitfields, Milroys, Fortnums or the Davidoff shop. 

As much as I sound like a boorish wag, the best Indian food I’ve ever had was, rather unsurprisingly, in India.  No matter how I try, I can never get the same taste, of the mutton biryani – served in a little handi with roti wrapped in greaseproof paper folded on top to keep warm - at the hotel in Mumbai, or the tikka and boti kebabs served in the street in the city’s most famous kebab stall whose name escapes me (advancing age is a terrible thing), or the sumptuously rich makhani paneer at the ‘Durbar’ restaurant, or anything from the tandoor at ‘Khyber’, so good I ate there two nights running.  However, I do my best to recreate something similar and look forward to my next trip to that part of the world.

My first post in this category is today’s tiffin: qeema matar and tarka dahl, with basmati rice made interesting with a little chana dahl.

Language Options

Rather than make a new separate blog and run two concurrent blogs, in English and the other in Japanese, I’ve re-tagged all my previous entries as English or Japanese (with bilingual entries tagged with both, so that they will be brought up either way) language, so that if you wish to only see posts in English, just click the tag ‘English’ in the Categories sidebar to the right.

日本語のダイアリーのみ表示したい時、右の「Categories」にある「日本語」をクリックして下さい。英語のみにしたい時は「English」を。

ちなみに河豚釣りでお世話になった大原の長福丸さんのリンクを追加しました。

日本語テスト

Adam Guyの個人ブログ「Fishing Japan」まもなく開始

よろしくお願いします

Coming Soon

Adam Guy’s “Fishing Japan” blog.