I've recently started to do some meditation. "Ooo...", you say? It's nothing to do with 'Healthier and Happier' sort of 'me' that I'm looking for. Well...maybe it is, but the words 'happy' or 'healthy' are overused, and they sound, to me, like 'Don't worry' or 'Eat more healthy food and do more exercise'. They don't mean much, do they?
I started to meditate just as an experiment to see what happens. At least five of the people I know (and I don't know that many people) mediate and we talked about it. I started it because I wondered if I can keep my thoughts under control and to stay unaffected and unattached to certain thoughts and emotions. I'm not talking about this in terms of relationships, i.e. staying 'cool' and 'distant'. I'm talking about my own inner discipline like the one in Buddhism.
I might be a bit of a simpleton, but honestly the result it brings is quite something. Not only I feel I'm achieving what I wanted to achieve but also things that happen to people around me seem to work quite nicely. It's still early days so we'll see if it's just a coincidence or meditation is actually effective. Mind you, as I talked about it here, there is no such thing as coincidence.
Now food. This dish is one of our favourites. It's so simple (as long as you have a rice cooker), filling, nutritious, deeply savoury, and utterly delicious. Everyone who tried this recipe came back to me to say how good it was. The only thing is you have to have some Japanese rice, a rice cooker (hopefully Japanese), and some smoked mackerel fillets... But then, if you don't have a rice cooker you can use these ingredients and stir-fry the rice. I've never tried it myself, but it might work.
Ingredients (for 2 people):
2 people's portion of uncooked (Japanese) rice
about 150g of smoked mackerel fillets
2 dessertspoon of Shoyu (soy sauce)
1 dessertspoon of Saké (Japanese rice wine) or dry vermouth
2-3 spring onions, finely sliced
(optional)
some Nori (Japanese dried seaweed)
Shichimi (Japanese seven spice chilli)
Wash the rice in the bowl until the water becomes clear. Put it in the bowl of a rice cooker. Add Shoyu and Saké and top it up to whatever measurement of water you need according to the instruction of a rice cooker. Flake the fish fillets and put them on top of the rice. Switch on the cooker and cook the whole thing.
When the rice cooker peeps to let you know that it's ready open the lid and add the spring onion. Shut the lid down again and leave it like that for about 5 minutes for the onions to soften a bit and lose its oniony taste.
Sprinkle some shredded Nori and Shichimi before you eat, if you like.