Rain. Pancakes. Music.

Rainy Season Morning Pancakes

Sorry I haven’t put up a post here in a couple of months. I have been putting a lot of time into the other areas of my photography (like cute things and women in corsets). Still, I have been experimenting in the kitchen and listening to good music.
Those who haven’t lived in Japan, might not know the pleasures of the fifth season: rainy. Your clothes smell like sweat or mold. You wish for a sunny day, not so you can go to the beach, but so that you can do your laundry. For a California girl, Japan’s summers are too rainy, even outside of “rainy season.” But rain has its nice points, other than being good for the crops and flora. For a person like me who plans about 5,000 things in day, rain often forces me to stay inside, write songs, jam, edit photos. I also often make one of my favorite things in the world: gluten-free pancakes!

Flour Substitutes
In Japan, I haven´t found gluten-free pancake mixes, so I´ve experimented a lot with different things I´ve found available here.
Rice flour (komeko).
Potato flour (katakuriko).
Sorghum flour. Natural House has both sorghum flour and sorghum pasta, and it´s not ridiculously expensive.
Buckwheat (soba) flour. In specialty markets I have found soba flour, but you have to double-check because soba is often mixed with wheat.
Corn flour or polenta. Yeah I was surprised how awesome this tastes.
Mill oats into oat flour. I know that some people don´t eat oats, and I haven´t really found any here that are certified gluten-free, but I personally take the risk with oats occasionally.

Recipe
1 egg.
1 cup of flour. I usually mix two of the above, depending on what I have around.
¾ cup of milk. I often add a little bit more since gluten-free flours can sometimes suck up the liquid more than regular flour). I also have used coconut milk, rice milk, or mixtures.
1 tablespoon of olive oil in the batter and enough to coat the pan, but not too much!
1 tablespoon of baking powder.

Optional Goodies
1 tablespoon of honey or sugar If you´re going to put something really sweet on top, it´s not necessary.

Dried fruit or fresh fruit. I´ve found that fresh fruit usually works best when you put a couple of slices on top of the still-raw side of the pancake before you flip it over. Dried fruit is OK to mix in and having it in the liquid few minutes makes it soften up. I really love raisins in pancakes.

Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, or allspice, or a combination! I almost use cinnamon because I´ve read that it helps our bodies better cope with insulin spikes, and all of these spices are good for digestion.

Nuts, either whole, broken into chunks, or pureed, depending on your taste.

Vanilla extract.

Preparation
• Mix all of the ingredients together (except for fresh fruit) until it´s not lumpy anymore.
• Heat up a skillet with a thin layer of olive oil about medium-high heat. Let the griddle heat up a little so that the heat becomes more even. In any case I´ve often found my first pancake is not as pretty as the rest.
• Fill up a spoon ladle about ¾ full with the batter and spoon it on the hot griddle. This makes it easier to control the mixture if you want tidier, round pancakes. If you want to put fresh fruit, you can put some on the top (raw) side. *You can also add spices to the raw side instead of mixing them in at the beginning. I often do this with cinnamon.
• When little bubbles are on the top side of the pancake, flip it over with a spatula. It´s difficult to say exactly how long to cook it, but the first pancake is always a bit of a trial for me. The key is to not let it get too burnt on the inside, but not still raw on the inside. You can poke it with a fork to check.
• Once you´ve cooked all the pancakes, put some syrup, honey, and/or fruit on top. You can serve them by themselves or with other sides. The bacon pictured above is apple-smoked bacon I found at Yamaya market in Shinjuku. Also, those are Hershey’s kisses on top, even though it kind of looks like unchi or eyes on a weird abstract table face. Just chocolate, I swear.

Music and Pancakes
So enjoy the pancakes, take your time to eat them. Grab a partner and put on some good music, or just leave the doors and windows open and listen to the rain. My playlist are some songs for relaxing on rainy day mornings. (Click on the photo above for a link to the list on Spotify.)

“Walkin’ on a Pretty Day” Kurt Vile
“Lips lips lips” Indians
“Harsh Realm” Widowspeak
“The Flower Lane” Ducktails
“Sunlight” Seapony
“You Won’t Be Missing That Part of Me” Melody’s Echo Chamber
“Knot Comes Loose” My Morning Jacket
“Into a Dream” Shannon and the Clams
“Sweepstakes Prize” Mirah
“Boyfriend” Best Coast
“The Summer” Coconut Records
“Take it Easy” Surfer Blood
“Caring is Creepy” The Shins
“Say Yes” Elliot Smith
“First Day of My Life” Bright Eyes
“Peace of Mind” Mikal Cronin
“Fineshrine” Purity Ring
“Fall Creek Boys Choir” James Blake, Bon Iver
“Casper (1995)” Speedy Ortiz
“Shelia” Atlas Sound
“Til the Morning” Bahamas
“Morning” Iron & Wine
“One Sunday Morning” Wilco
“Saturday Morning” Real Estate
“Sunday Morning” Velvet Underground
“Impregnable Question” Dirty Projectors
“She Don’t Use Jelly” Flaming Lips
“Friday Night, Saturday Morning” The Specials
“All the Sun That Shines” Peaking Lights
“Marilyn on a Train” The Cleaners from Venus
“Ghost Mouth” Girls
“I Set My Face the Hillside” Tortoise
“Sun in Your Eyes” Grizzly Bear
“Myth” Beach House
“House of Leaves” Salvia Plath
“Leaves Fall” Mansions on the Moon
“Acid Raindrops” People Under the Stairs
“Morning Fog” Dangermouse, Daniel Luppi
“Cloud Generator” Tycho
“Raincoat” Bibion
“Yuba Source Part II” Date Palms
“Backwards Berlin” Jagwar Ma
“Vur Hildegard Von Bengen” Devendra Banhart
“I Want the World to Stop” Belle & Sebastian
“Rad Pitt” Egyptian Hip Hop
“Penelope” Pinback
“Like a Stranger” Bodies of Water
“Motor City” Sand Circles
“Air Conditioning” Kisses
“Not So Blue” Quantic
“Golden Light” STRFKR
“Miasma Sky” Baths

Today´s Gluten-free Adventure—Pollo de Naranja and Spinach-Raisin-Carrot rice

Click on the photo above to link to my spotify playlist. Today´s music theme: Naranja, because I had an orange and half a carrot I wanted to use, because orange is a warm color, and the weather is warming up. Some notes on the music below, if you´re interested.

Pollo de Naranja

I had an orange, nira (a green Chinese onion), and some fresh cabbage. I decided to make some kind of orange marinade using what I had around the house.

Step #1—Make the marinade (I don´t like measuring, so these are guestimates, all blended in my tiny Barbie-esque Muji blender):

• 1 orange (I left the white stuff on because I´ve heard it´s good for you, had to add it a few sections at a time because my blender is so tiny.)
• A few little bunches of nira (another green onion would work just fine)
• 1 tbsp. of maple syrup
• A few pinches of dried red pepper
• 1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
• 1 tbsp. Mexican hot sauce (not habanera unless you really can handle the spice)
• 1 tbsp. non-gluten soy sauce (can be found at Natural House, or if you don´t have allergy to soy, you can often find tamari in natural food shops.)
• 2 laurel leaves
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 tsp. sesame oil
• 1 tsp. salt
• Garlic powder to taste
• Paprika to taste
• Salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Step #2—Cut 2 chicken breasts in to small strips and mix with the marinade in a Tupperware, letting it soak in the fridge. I like to stir it every so often and add a little spice or soy sauce or something, so feel free to experiment. That´s what I do with all the recipes I read.

Step #3—I shredded the fresh cabbage I had with a knife, but probably onion or bell pepper would be nice too, just to give it a little crunch and vitamins. I put everything in a non-stick pan, including the marinade, and let it cook on medium heat, stirring frequently. I think I probably cooked it for 15-20 minutes, but you could cook it for shorter if you want it more liquidy or add more liquid (even a little bit of water) and keep cooking.

Step # 4—I served it on a little bed of raw shredded cabbage. The meat and cabbage turned out really soft and almost tasted like a curry, mysteriously. It wasn´t what I expected, but it was a hit with both my boyfriend and I.

Spinach-Raisin-Carrot rice

What you need:
• Already-cooked rice
• Carrot
• Spinach
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 cup of raisins (or more or less depending on your sweet tooth. )
• Cinnamon to taste ( I love cinnamon, so I put a lot. Also, in addition to lots of health properties, cinnamon is said to help to stabilize blood sugar, which is probably a good thing when you´re eating sweet raisins and white rice. Anything that might help boost our metabolism, while it´s lowering cholesterol and fighting bad cells, deserves a role in my meal sometimes.)
• *nuts would be a great addition to this, especially if you´re vegetarian and this is a main plate.

I had some day-old rice, probably about one and a half cups, so I decided to make something with that.

Step #1—I rinsed the spinach and tore off, and chopped the leaves, along with the carrot and garlic.

Step #2— I sautéed the carrot and garlic first with a little olive oil, then sprinkled some garlic powder, salt, and cinnamon. Once it was a little softened, maybe about 4-5 minutes, I added the spinach and raisins and sprinkled more garlic powder, salt, and cinnamon.
Step # 3—After I felt it was the consistency I liked, I turned off the heat, and put the day-old rice plus the contents of the pan into a big pot and stirred it around, until the rice was heated up all the way through.

I actually would not have thought these two dishes would go well together, but the sweetness of the rice and spice of the chicken went really well together!

A little note about the music: Lately I have also been listening to all the Primavera Sound and Fuji Rock artists this year, known and unknown, because festivals like this give me a good chance to reacquaint myself with old favorites and discover artists I might not know about yet. We saw Wilco in Tokyo Friday night and were Coachella webcast junkies all weekend, so we ended the weekend really musically energized; making gluten-free gyoza and having a toy music jam session. Anyway with my mind being stimulated by so many genres, I thought it would be fun to do a theme playlist, with the theme of orange–titles, group names, etc. Orange is one of my favorite colors and fruit, and it was fun to think thematically. My music taste is kind of chaotic, so I tried to pull from a lot of different genres. One of the songs made it on here just because the album title killed me, ¨La parte chunga.¨ How could I not add it? Lots of other artists I like, love, or feel lukewarm about. Enjoy the orange mix tape.

Going to start blogging for reals now.

I am starting a blog about my life living gluten-free in Tokyo. I am gluten-free because I discovered a couple of years ago that I am highly allergic. Luckily, I love cooking, so I make a lot of my own food at home with the basic gluten-free ingredients I can procure.

When I moved back to Japan last September, the first time living here gluten-free, I realized how little information was out there about being gluten-free in Japan. Since then I have learned a lot about how to make living gluten-free possible, and I continue to learn things. With this blog, I´d like to help people find places to shop and eat out, and also to get ideas for what to cook. I also will throw whatever other little tidbits I might find about being gluten-free or living healthy in Tokyo. A lot of this information will still be useful to gluten-free people in other parts of the world, or to people living in Japan and wanting to learn more about cooking international cuisine here (e.g. Mexican, Costa Rican, Italian, and all kinds of fusion in-between.) Lots of people won´t miss the gluten in these recipes, or they might just be gluten-free naturally. Basically this website is for everyone, anyone who loves food, cooking, and music.

This blog will also include comments about music because my boyfriend and I are music addicts. We are both musicians—my instruments of choice happen to be toy instruments. Music is an important ingredient in our cooking, why the food always tastes so good.

A Mexican abuelita told me her secret was to add love into everything she cooks. Music helps me live in and love the moment. Since I see it as such an important part, and the glue of some of my deepest friendships, I will also include playlists or albums I´m listening to.

I would love to hear your questions, comments, ideas, experiences, music suggestions, anything! Please keep in mind this blog is just a labor of love, so it will not be comprehensive, and it might generally suck. But I think it´s worth it to put out the information I can, when I can. Maybe it might help another person and in the process I can learn and experience more. Happy gluten-free adventures!

Besos,
Holly Lanasolyluna

Fuji-san and Gluten-free Pancakes…Ohayo!!!

Snowy Sei-ji-no hi

Gosho

Kamogawa en Otoño

La Luz de Otoño: Asakusa

Nikko

Kamakura