Habitual Food

Please write a post about how your family uses grocery stores and the variety of vegetables, fruits, roots, grains, and nuts that you eat in a typical week.

From the class list I came up with 30 items including fruits, vegetables, and grains that my family consumes in a typical week:

Fruits: apple, pear, apple/pear [Japanese pear (I forgot its real name)], avocado, papaya, cucumber, banana, dates, figs, pepper, tomato (11 fruits)

Vegetables: spinach, celery, potato, carrot, cabbage, lettuce, garlic, asparagus, bean sprouts, edamame [boiled soy beans, in pod]. (10 vegetables)

Beans/Grains/Roots: fresh ginger root, walnut, peanuts, rice, potato, kidney beans, onions, lima beans, lentils, chickpeas. (10 Beans/Grains/Roots)

With all of these foods my family usually cooks a homemade meal and also includes meat or fish in a main dish. For example we eat white rice from Nishiki Rice (Japanese white rice) almost everyday. We have a rice cooker so there is always fresh rice to eat. Sometimes we wrap seaweed around the rice and eat it in little bites. Besides dried seaweed we also eat Hijiki. Hijiki is a brown sea vegetable growing wild on rocky coastlines around Japan, Korea, and China. It is a traditional food and has been freely sold and used as part of a balanced diet in Japan for centuries. Hijiki is known to be rich in dietary fibre and essential minerals such as calcium(1400 mg/100g),iron(55.0 mg/100g) and magnesium(620 mg/100g). (wikipedia definition)

Just for clarification my mother usually cooks dinner unless, I am home by myself, then I make my own dinner. Not a fish stew or anything but I have hummus on sun-dried tomato and basil wraps (although I don't really care for the taste of the wraps alone, the hummus over powers the wrap, so I don't notice it) with slices of fresh tomato on top.

When we go grocery shopping, we usually go to the Met Food in our neighborhood. They have pretty much everything we like to eat, including all 30 food items I listed above. My family goes food shopping because most of the time we prefer to make our own meals instead of going out to eat. My mom loves fish so when she has the chance she makes a very spicy fish stew, usually with salmon or a white fish like tilapia. The base is a chicken broth with tons of cabbage, carrots, beans, and plenty of hot peppers. She lets it simmer all day long and it is excellent on rice as well as eating it as a soup.

From my list of fruits eaten in a typical week: my family and I eat the fruits as they are, we do not mix them or make anything with them. Just eat them. From the list of vegetables I eat, they are eaten as they are but most of them are cooked in a certain way before eaten. For example: fresh ginger root is put into a stir fry for extra flavor or a fish dish. Walnuts, peanuts, and other nuts are eaten as they are as snacks. Rice eaten as a base in most meals, sometimes I put rice in a bowl, then put fish or meat on top. Rice is like my pasta. Potatoes are either boiled then made into mashed potatoes or boiled cut up and put into a curry (which also has meat and carrots). Chickpeas are eaten in a salad or in the form of hummus. Other beans are put into soups or made in a chicken dish.

Favorite Meal: Sakedon (Salmon-don) which is salmon, sliced sashimi style, on a bed of seasoned rice. I could eat that meal any day. It is delicious! As for homemade food, my mom's fish soup is my favorite.