Sunday was all over the place.

For starters there was a B-Relaxed Vitamin water on the train ride down to Jersey. Then when I finally got there I had a padinha with some butter and a handful of these coconut and cocoa cookies that my girlfriend's mother had made. They were a little overwhelmingly sweet but otherwise really good. Japan has just pushed my chocolate preferences way towards the bitter end of the spectrum. Eating milk chocolate for me is how I imagine an 18th century farm hand might feel if you gave him a glass of skim milk. Ah, imagining...

Breakfast was just a quick snack, really. We had bigger plans for the day. There is a park near my girlfriend's house that has cherry trees along a winding river bank so we set out for a nice hanami picnic.

"Hanami" litterally means "seeing flowers" in Japanese and is a very popular excuse for early barbecues and getting drunk in large groups of your co-workers in public spaces. As the cherry blossom trees start to bloom, everyone starts talking incessantly about hanami plans and the plane fares skyrocket. It is an amazing time of year, though, and visiting Himeji Castle during "sakura" (cherry blossom) season is still one of my most vivid memories of Japan.

This year, the girlfriend and I set out to pay tribute to the Japanese style of celbrating western holidays while observing this Japanese tradition in New Jersey. We bought a box of thighs and biscuits with some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side from Popeye's and had ourselves a fried chicken picnic under the cherry blossoms.

In Japan, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, thanks to some kink in the cultural appropriation system, there is a huge spike in the consumption of fried chicken. KFC's take orders weeks before hand and some locations may not be open for anything but picking up pre-orders. Convenience stores open tables in front of their stores selling fried chicken to lines of customers so that bewildered foreigners can still find their way back to the beer cooler and instant ramen aisle without being walled in by the throngs of people eager to buy fried chicken.

I believe this is due in part to turkey being very expensive and not very popular in Japan. Most Japanese people I discussed the issue with had never had turkey before. I imagine this is due to a confluence of the difficulties of importing meat and the relative lack of iconic hype that turkey has in comparison to fried chicken. Fried chicken has an infamy in the Japanese image of American cuisine rivaled only by the mighty cheeseburger.

So, in the absence of a bento box and affordable sake worth drinking, we remisappropriated (Ed. sorry, I try but...) fried chicken as the official food of celebrating Japanese holidays in America. It was great, and made all the more awesome by my girlfriend's habit of peeling the thick layer of skin off the chicken thighs. I took these discarded sheets of awesome, loaded them with mashed potatoes and made these sort of comfort food cannolis. For those of you worried about my cardiovascular health, I also put in over 60 miles on my bike this weekend, so a little gorging on gratuitous amounts of fried chicken skin isn't going to be too detrimental to the big picture, I hope.

After all that awesome, I really wasn't in a mood to cook much of a dinner when I got home, but I did really want to try the dim sum items I'd gotten in Chinatown this week, so I busted out the wicker dim sum steamer cage and steamed a pork bun, a leek bun and some pork and black mushroom gyoza. The pork bun was the Chinese split-top variety stuffed with the sweet barbecue pork. These are a favorite of mine and for frozen pork buns that come in a six-pack for $1.50 they were surprisingly passable.

The leek buns were much better, though. There was a much broader complexity to the flavors at work and they were actually a lot juicier and more succulent than the pork buns. My roommate and I both ate them with liberal amounts of this Chinese chili oil I found that has peanuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews and walnuts soaking in the oil along with the dried chili flakes. It's not very spicy but has a lot of flavors going on that lend complexity to the oil itself while also providing for lots of different pockets of flavor as different chunks of nut pass over your pallet. If you don't find "chunks of nut" to be an appealing description of food stuffs, this is not an appropriate condiment for you.

Later in the evening I had a slice of left-over pizza which I reheated in the oven as I preheated the oven for banana bread. I followed the following recipe using 4 bananas: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001465banana_bread.php The banana bread came out very soft, almost too soft as I couldn't really cut it into slices. It could have used a little more salt, to my tastes, as well, but would have worked wonderfully as muffins instead of bread, since the texture lent so well to tearing and not slicing. I had a nice thick slice of the banana bread while it was still warm slathered in margarine as a bed time snack.

And not to back track after that nice Norman Rockwell moment, but I thought I should take a minute to illustrate how my food preparation compulsion plays out with the fairly inoccuous act of eating leftover pizza. Most people, I am led to believe, will simply take the cold pizza and begin eating it while it still holds the chill of the fridge, if they bothered to refridgerate it at all. Many people even claim to enjoy that cold, coagulated cheese and grease texture as a nice breakfast treat. I am not one of these people. While I understand expedience and can eat pizza cold when forced, I don't see how you could honestly prefer it to it's reheated form.

I took the pizza and threw it on a sheet of foil, then sprinkled dried oregano, red pepper, dill and Adobo seasoning on it before allowing it to reheat in the oven as it pre-heated to 350F. My banana bread didn't taste like pizza and my pizza didn't taste like cold butt. Everybody wins. No, it's not just the temperature, it's really more texture. If I had to microwave it, I would have just eaten something else.

And yeah, if it's a plain cheese pie, it's definitely going to get doctored up. At least I'm past my "corriander and tumeric on everything" phase and my "truffle oil and allspice on everything" phase. You should also consider yourself lucky if I never made you food during my "thai fish sauce and/or amaretto extract on everything" phase. I have no idea what I was thinking. Sometimes that stuff pans out, though, like vanilla and sage or honey and cilantro. So parents, when your son mixes every spice in the cabinet with vinegar and water, then freezes it for a week, then tries to convince you to eat it and give him feedback, be supportive. He's not autistic, just ambitious.