So yesterday I decided to drop into a grocery store I’ve been meaning to go to in a while called “Satou.” It’s a very small local grocery store here that sits next to a giant big new Maeda (The Safeway of Shimokita). I’m not sure how Satou’s does business but just outside it is an outdoor type vegetable store.

Now I was tipped off before hand that this little veggie market might be carrying beans or “mame.” A side note here is that here they really, really, don’t have “Mexican food”. I mean even the Korean restaurant here runs a little side market to sell specialty Korean food. I guess the whole international food isle thing hasn’t hit quite yet. (neither has canned food, but that’s another thing).

Ok, so I walk into the market and sure enough is a bag of pinto beans. I was kinda excited too to see them. There were three size bags: small, med, and big. I bought the small bag because I wanted to see first if I could make– Refried beans.

There’s a few ways to do it…

One is cook it over a stove top for 2 1/2 hours, and the other way is just to soak them overnight. I’m doing the overnight one.

Once soft I got some garlic, onion, tomatoes, and seasoning mix. My plan is to sauté the garlic and onion in vegetable oil, then mash the beans and add them in. Mix it all up then cook up some ground beef, rice, and chop up lettuce. And do a kind of taco salad thing with whatever chips I can find.

IF.. and only IF I can successfully make one bowl of FRIJOLES REFRITOS will I buy a bigger bag of beans.

Deeper then beans is just whether I could live “live” in Japan or not. Now I got lucky and got a pack of tortillas, but I’m down to 2.. so the “NO SH*T Goal” here is to make a straight up: All fresh hand made bitch’n burrito with refried beans, ground beef or thick sliced beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, green & chili peppers, onion, guacamole, sour cream (or something close enough like sour yogurt), and sea salt/pepper all on top of a big flour tortilla– just using stuff I can find here in Japan.

baby steps… baby steps… but I think I can do it.

~J

Read More