April Showers bring May...

If April showers bring May flowers than what does May snow bring? 
It was just this past week that the flowers were starting to bloom and our grass was starting to grow and then..BAM...snow storm. We were lucky, there are other places that got much more snow than us. Jack Frost just can't seem to leave the Midwest alone and spring hasn't had a chance.

So, as I was coming to grips with the "winter storm warning" in May I began reflecting back on my mission in Japan and what it was like to ride my bike and knock on doors in crazy weather. My next thought was about food...no surprise...and the things you can't get here in America. I started to wonder if there were any recipes out there for one of my favorite things and to my surprise I found one. 

I never met anyone in Japan that baked. I'm sure there are some home bakers in that country somewhere, but for the most part, when a Japanese person wants something that you bake in an oven, they go to a bakery or a convenient store. (The only "oven" I had in Japan was a toaster oven. There isn't a lot of room for appliances like ovens and dishwashers.)

You might not be able to get gas along with your candy bar, but they do have copy machines and you can do some banking (I used to get money out of the atm in the post office).

I used to have a silver bike with wire baskets in the front and the back. Both baskets came in handy while grocery shopping, but made an already heavy bike even heavier.

And you thought all they ate in Japan was rice and sushi. Check out that bread selection!! They couldn't even fit all the bread into one photo. 

 

A lot of the grocery stores had bakeries and there were also stand alone bakeries here and there. They sold both savory and sweet breads...many of them meant to be either a breakfast or lunch meal. You would pick up a tray and tongs and make your selections. It's a good thing I was busy and on a budget on my mission or I would have easily gained a hundred pounds.

These are examples of the lunch options.

Now about that recipe. One of my favorite treats in Japan was a bread called Melon Pan (the melon part comes from the shape and texture, and the word "pan" means bread). There are a few variations of melon pan, some come with chocolate chips, others are filled with cream or custard, and I even tried a maple flavored one once, but most of the time they're just a plain sweet bread (sweet is a relative term as most desserts in Japan are a lot less sweet than the ones in America). I had always wondered how they made this magical bread, and it was so cool to find out. You have to make two doughs, a bread dough and a cookie dough. The cookie dough is pressed very thin and is placed over a proofed bread dough and cross hatch marks are made to make it look like the outside of a melon. Here is the result of my first attempts at making it.

My cross hatch marks didn't turn out as well as I hoped. I think I made the cookie dough a little to thin. You can see on the bottom where the cookie dough is wrapped around the bread. The taste was great though and just like the melon pan I had in Japan.

 

 

Tonkatsu is one of hubby's favorite Japanese dishes. I hadn't made it forever and thought it would go well with the melon pan.