Nanakusa

This is going to be a sketchy review of a very nice, Third Ward restaurant that happens to have a sketchy menu on its web site. I use online menus so I don't have to write down all the details of preparation and prices when I’d rather be savoring new tastes. Well.. Nanakusa’s online menu does not show all of its specials-of-the-day, nor is it detailed enough for me to even figure out which items I ate at the restaurant.

This could also have something to do with my inability to read or speak Japanese. It’s hard to believe that we actually hosted a Japanese exchange student for an entire year back in the late ‘80's. Yukie perfected her already-fluent English, while The Man and I learned konichiwa (good afternoon) and ohio gazimus (good morning). In a whole year. We are SO pathetic.

Before eating at Nanakusa with our friends, Fay and Terry, on Friday night, we attended a classy wine tasting at George Watt’s Tea Room. Put on by Riedel, the manufacturer of skinny-stemmed, expensive, easy-to-break wine glasses, this affair boasted lovely hor deuvers and a pour of four higher-end wines for each of us. Here’s what I learned: 1) that wines actually do not taste as good in what the Riedel guy politely called “Joker Glasses,” but I call Pier One glasses, 2) that it matters which shape glass you use for which wine, 3) that those “balloon” glasses really are the best for chardonnay, and 4) which glass is best for my current favorite varietal, red zinfandel.

Then we were off to the Third Ward. Fortunately, we were able to park right outside the door of Nanakusa on E. Chicago St, as winter (or at least nasty fall) weather has returned to Wisconsin. Nanakusa does not take reservations for parties of fewer than six, but we were seated within ten minutes after arriving at about 7:30 PM. Our table for four was along the windows and graciously separated from other diners.

As we’d consumed an adequate amount of wine before arriving at the restaurant, we delved right into our food selections. Fay, Terry and I decided to share a number of dishes, while the Man Who Could NEVER Choke Down Raw Fish, Even If Stranded On An Island With No Matches, ordered his own meal. The Man chose a vegetable tempura which came with a salad. (When I asked him today about that salad, he said it was especially good because “It had some grated good stuff on the top.” This I found on the online menu. It was ginger. Had he known that, I wonder if he would have even tried it.) The Wild Man also had an appetizer of Gyu Maki ($7.75), made of thin slices of beef wrapped around green onions, then grilled. “That was good,” he said. High praise for any food that is not meat loaf or ring bologna.

The other three of us shared four dishes. First came a dish which I recall might have been called Hotate Sashimi, a plate of thinly sliced raw scallops with the tastiest dollop of wasabi sauce on each slice. They were difficult to pick up with chopsticks, but there’s no way you’d want to eat any of these lovely dishes with a fork.

We wanted to have some tuna and had asked the hostess what dish she’d recommend. We took her suggestion and ordered the Hon Maguro Chu Toro ($11.50), three pieces of very soft, mild, almost bland tuna with two puddles of tasty dipping sauces. This is not like eating sushi from the deli, where you get some soy sauce for dipping. Here each sauce is unique perfection. Then came the salmon with sesame (I think this cost about $13), a generous portion of raw delicious salmon with yummy sesame sauce plated up with two piles of shredded items, one of crisp raw vegetables and the other deep fried oh-so-skinny potatoes. We agreed this was the best item we ordered, though all were very good. Next to arrive at our table was black cod marinated in a miso sauce. It was delicious, however $8 was a bit of a shock for this one-and-a-half-inch serving of fish. And finally we enjoyed several pieces of panko crusted and fried eggplant with a red miso sauce.

Each of the four of us spent a total of about $20 - mighty reasonable for this snazzy restaurant. Of course we’d had wine and appetizers before we came here.

So that’s all for now, friends. Or, as they say in Japan, sayonara. (Okay, so I know one more word. Still – it's pathetic.)

Stirring the Pot

The Joint is a Pain

I don’t think I've told you that the The Man built the fence that was on my gulag list. It looks terrific. Check that off the list. The shrubs have been transplanted from my sunny perennial bed to in front of the new fence section. But our house was built in 1958. Like everything from that era, it’s falling apart. Remaining on the gulag list are: caulk the roof windows that have decided it’s time to leak when it rains, finish spreading huge, heavy rolls of insulation in the attic before winter, saw down an ugly crabapple tree and cut back the ugly lilacs. The Man Who Insists On Having A Lawn Regardless Of The Fact That We Live In A Woods also has mountains of leaves to blow, rake, mow and mulch.

And then there’s the annual fall bulb-planting project. Every spring I make a list of where some daffodils would look cool. We usually plant upwards of a hundred bulbs each fall. They don’t live forever, in case you didn’t know. Last spring was a great year for spring flowers. Maybe it was the mountains of snow that blanketed them all winter. I don’t know. But they bloomed forever and were spectacular. So when I made my list of what to plant this fall, I must have pictured a really amazing show. I found my notes this week. They say things like, “twelve yellow daffs S. of bench, W. of amalancher, eight red tulips in front bed, E of fence, S of bleeding hearts,” etc. I added up the number of bulbs to plant, and YIKES! It came to 372! That is insane.

I bought 6 dozen. The Man Who Digs My Holes (and I who fill those holes) would be cripples for the winter if we planted 31 dozen. This list is going to take years to complete, even if we can prevent further bodily deterioration.

For the moment, my knee is healing. On Tuesday I made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. On Thursday I cancelled it. On Friday, trick or treat eve in Brookfield, I set up my usual treat station out in our driveway, where I hand out M&Ms and homemade cut-out pumpkin cookies to kiddies and wine, spiced cider and cheese to the adults who walk the streets to prevent the kidnapping of Spiderman and Princess Di. The Man and I spent a few hours hanging out with them. Fine for The Man. His knees more-or-less function. (That means: he can play singles tennis for an hour and a half, but he cannot walk around the block with me, because of his knees, he says. He must think I’m an idiot.) Anyway, between having cancelled the appointment with the ortho doc for Monday and having stood for hours in the driveway on Friday, the knee is not so swell this weekend, but I insist it is improving.

(How many people do you know who’ve had a knee replacement and had problem with or after the surgery? Of our friends, I know of four. All had very serious problems that lasted for years after the surgery or are still a problem. I am not rushing to have my lousy joint repaired.)

Then this morning, The Man gets up from his breakfast, leans for a minute on one foot, and then hobbles off to the bathroom. “Whoa,” I say. “What’s with the limp?”

“It’s my big toe,” he replies. “It hurts when I bend it. Maybe I did something to it when I was mowing the leaves yesterday.”

It’s sunny and 55 degrees today. The man and I are sitting at our computers, ignoring The List. The rolls of insulation can stand in the front hall for another week. The ugly crabapple tree and lilac bushes have been ugly for years. They can be ugly a while longer. The Man has been known to dig holes through the snow in which to plant daffodil bulbs. And the roof window won't leak if it doesn't rain.

Stirring the Pot