At 2 am my cell phone alarm went off. I woke up in a hot little room, fully dressed and sprawled out on a floor of woven bamboo mats. A breeze rattled the paper window screens. I lay still with one eye cracked open. Outside the door there was some shuffling, followed by the sound of feet plodding down a flight of stairs and the scrape of a sliding wooden door. I sat up and groped in the air until I found the light cord. After scraping the crust out of my eyes and a quick change of clothes, I slid open the bedroom door and crept down the stairs.
(more…)

I’ve been itching to write lately but haven’t had a lot of good adventures, so I’ve decided to put some words in a slightly different direction. Here’s my brand new cooking blog, unascetic.com. Check out the about page for more details.

I’m still going to update andrewwelsh.net whenever I have a good story to tell. So please keep an eye on both blogs. As always, feedback is welcome!

The first step to making nukazuke was to get my hands on some nuka (rice bran). As rice bran is the brown husk of rice grain, removed during the milling process to produce an aesthetic, polished white grain, a hunch just short of supernatural pointed me toward the nearest rice shop. In Japan, particularly in city outskirts, you can hardly swing a stick without banging into the storefront of a rice shop. And as such, there stood a small grain-dealing corner store not 20 paces from my apartment building.
(more…)

One of my clearest memories from college revolves around a gallon jar of dill pickles bought from Kroger for a couple of dollars. It was the summer of 2005, and I was living in a third floor one-bedroom apartment just off the busy intersection of Martin Luther King Blvd and Hopple St in Cincinnati. I was taking a couple summer courses and had no regular work to speak of. Consequently I had no regular income to speak of either. Of course, I had a good deal of savings and generous parents so that I never had any true hurt for money, but there was in me a fixation for living as much by my own means as possible. This meant that I lived on a strict, self-inflicted stipend, which often amounted to about two dollars per day, a calculation I made often and with much glee. I found that I could get by on a hardy oatmeal breakfast, turkey sandwiches for lunch (on bread I baked myself), and a chicken and vegetable stir-fry for dinner. The cracks and spaces between meals were bridged by the crunch of a pickle fished deep from inside the tall gallon jar.
(more…)

One drizzling, chilly Sunday afternoon my Japanese teacher picked me up at my apartment and drove me the seven or eight minutes over to the nerimono shop. We parked, hazard lights flashing, on the side of the road. (As parking is scarce in a country as crowded and mountainous as Japan, it’s common practice for cars to veer up onto sidewalks or halt abruptly halfway off the road when the driver needs to run into a shop or meet a friend. Nobody seems to mind.) She took me into the shop and introduced me to the manager, a woman in her late sixties with a blue scarf bundled around a nest of peppery gray hair. “This is my student,” she said. “He loves fish cake and things like that, and he’d like to see how you make it here.” The woman looked me over and I tried to seem as sane and normal as possible. She laughed.
(more…)