After two engineering degrees and several years of highly technical work experience, I figured the logical next step for my career was to spend a year teaching English in rural Japan. A month ago, wife Angie and I embarked on just such a plan. Just four weeks have seen us settle into our new home here in Yamagata City, way up north in a valley between two mountain ranges. “Yamagata” roughly translates to English as “So Far From Tokyo that Godzilla Wouldn’t Even Think of Stomping It.” It’s admittedly a bit off the beaten path, but its 200,000 residents and its non-stop cultural activities make it a fun place to call home.

Slight trouble in paradise, though: Angie and I don’t speak such great Japanese. Oh, sure, we can ask all sorts of questions and wax eloquent about “I go to store!” and “I like karaoke!” but when it comes time to comprehend a spoken reply, we’re often left silently scratching our heads.

And so, since it’s difficult to read restaurant menus and even harder to identify ingredients at the grocery store, I find myself eating a lot of rice at home. As you probably have guessed, the rice is not imported from afar, it’s grown down the street and shoveled into a plastic bag. The picture on the bag is especially disturbing, it’s some sort of well-dressed circus ringleader popping out of a rice grain.

You may have heard of Japan’s amazing technological gadgets; I own one such modern wonder, an automated rice cooker. Put in rice, add water, push a button. Ten minutes or so later, voila! Hot, sticky rice to your stomach’s content. Except that apparently I am capable of messing up even this simple a process. I have managed to produce crunchy undercooked rice, riotously scorched rice (not to mention the damage done to the rice cooker), and curry-seasoned rice so foul and inedible that Angie and I have dubbed it an assortment of names that should not be repeated.

I am branching out, however. Just today I managed to concoct a batch of restaurant-grade miso soup. If, of course, that restaurant is me serving miso soup on my back porch to the neighbors. To say that it was not good soup would be, well, accurate. But I’ve also been working on my fish teriyaki (tasted like a shoe dipped in soy sauce), my cold soba noodles (like a shoe without soy sauce), and my hearty pot of seasoned udon noodles (tastes good, but smells like shoes ‘n’ soy). Maybe I should stick to rice.