But can I eat it?
Some people have suggested to me that Hamster Salad seems a tad, well, arbitrary for a blog title. I don't see that myself, but I don't mind giving you an exegesis of the name if it helps us reach clarity.

My husband and I used to live in Japan; we were there for a long time. Experts in cross-cultural issues will tell you that adaptation to a new culture follows a fairly predictable path of highs and lows. You are totally head-over-heels, I-can't-believe-I'm-so-lucky, isn't-that-an-adorably-odd-way-of-doing-things in love with the experience for the first three to six months before tail spinning into a grumpy disbelief that one's new love could possibly behave like such a moron.

That's when a lot of people pack up and leave. It's the right choice for many of them, but if you stick with it, you come to realize that you were projecting your own angst at losing some measure of control onto your innocent adopted homeland.

We stayed. And stayed and stayed. The cycles of high and low eventually flattened somewhat to a gentle wave--nothing more serious than we would have experienced had we never left Canada. I missed the variety of, well, everything, but especially the grocery stores in Canada. The incompetency of the banking system would get me just as riled in either country. And Japan had the edge on public transit, that's for darn sure.

Adjusting to the (new!) English language
Being in Japan as a career language teacher (i.e. not one of the ones just dropping in from backpacking around southeast Asia and in need of a six-month infusion of yen) and a self-professed Grammar Grump, I found that the cavalier treatment of my home and native language by the Japanese tongue accentuated my down periods. I'll go into this in more detail in an upcoming Grump, but for now let's just say that I taught myself to appreciate the poetry in the syntactical and semantic errors I was hearing and reading.

"Ten minutes by fast foot." How can you not smile at that? "I left you a massage." Oh, goody--so much better than a boring old message! "The stuff in the office are very nice." It's wonderful when the staff don't tell you to stuff it.

One of my husband's writing students presented him with a delightful description of her best friend. He had asked her to practice certain writing techniques in a descriptive paragraph, among them imagery, and similes in particular. She reported back that her friend "ate like a hamster." This gave us pause as we imagined said friend perched on her haunches with a carrot stuffed (staffed?) into one cheek pouch as she shoveled in whatever else she could get her little paws on.

The writer was, of course, trying to present an image of her friend eating rapidly and with intensity. We have since adopted the expression to describe any event that is performed with a noticeable level of focus or drive. "She studies like a hamster." "Our cats are sleeping like hamsters." "It's raining like a hamster."

But what about the salad?!
If you've googled "hamster salad" (what? am I the only one who's done that?) you've seen that it comes in two main types: that made of vegetable matter designed for hamsters, and that made primarily of animal product designed of hamsters. The title of my blog comes from neither of these, and I just want to say here and now that I was shocked, shocked, to discover that hamsters are, in fact, raised for food in some places. (Maybe I should live in one of those places for longer than six months so that I get over it.)

Where my Hamster Salad comes from is the name of a dish that I created out of my own head (um, imagination) and which we ate frequently (and with vigour!) while in Japan. Hamster salad starts life as a regular green salad (leaf lettuce, not head lettuce), which then gets super-charged by the addition of: roasted pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes (the ones in oil), avocado, chickpeas, red, yellow, and/or orange pepper, red onion, more avocado if you've got it, fresh basil (cilantro would be great, but just try to find it in Japan), sometimes raisins or finely chopped apple, grated carrots, and a generous amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar as dressing.

It salads like a hamster. And this blogs like a hamster.

So now it all makes sense, right?
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 5:13 PM