Tsukuba University is renowned for its science and the size of its campus. Apparently it is number one in Japan for science and number 2 for campus size.

What I found out yesterday was that it is up there in the culinary rankings as well for pork ramen. A couple of slabs of pork, some bamboo shoots a stack of noodles and some nori turnedan otherwisedifficult day into a pleasure for at least 5 minutes. It is a shame that it is not possible to eat continually. If it were, I probably would have stuckwith this dish for the rest of the day. As it was, I was forced to return to reality and deal with the world again with only the memory of a quick, delicious and cheap meal to keep me happy.

What is your favourite food on a bad day? Is there something that is guaranteed to make a bad day turn good for you? Share your secret. You may well be providing a valuable community service.

Check this out for easy.

Stir fry minced beef with some grated ginger and a splash of sake. Drop in cubed firm tofu, mushrooms, green vegetables and whatever else you have and serve it up on rice. A five minute dinner that tastes like it took all day.

Everything that glitters is not gold. I love pudding, parfait and ice cream. What could be better than a pudding-grand parfait-ice cream? Almost anything as far as I am concerned. Next time I willlook instead for achocolate-beef-ice cream or the Kimchi-prawn- ice cream. Maybe they would taste better.

Tonight my wife cooked for us (always a welcome occurrence). She cooked brown rice and served green veges, mushrooms and sesame chicken with a sesame dipping sauce. Why do I never think of good ideas like that?

Today is the last day of Golden Week here in Japan. It is made up of a string of public holidays (this week broken up by some work days for some malicious reason). Yesterday was Boys day so Ithought I would share one last bit of boy’s dayfor this year. This morning we opened some other Kashiwamochi that were given to us by some friends and found out that they were of 2 different species. The first are red bean filled the second are “white” red bean filled. Can anyone tell us what makes the difference?