It's time again - after spending a few days in a hospital eating what must be the worst food I've ever had in Japan. Even the rice was inedible without adding a smuggled-in packet of instant chazuke and some hot tea.

I was only there for a few days, so I could handle it, but my heart goes out to some people who had been - or would be - there for weeks or longer. I don't know what was scarier: that the people who prepared the food actually went to school and had some kind of training, or that some people (even hospital staff) actually ate it as if there was nothing wrong...

Nurses and other inmates would see me returning full trays of food and inevitably make remarks about how "foreigners can't eat Japanese food." When I couldn't eat the rice, it was because "foreigners can only eat bread."

It's time again to definitively answer the age-old question that plagues every foreigner in Japan: What do gaijin eat?

A Random Lunch on a Typical Foreigner's Table: White Rice Rice in our house is easily a couple of blog-post chapters on its own, so for this particular meal: we enjoyed our own home-grown rice. We still have about a half-year's worth of last year's harvest sitting in rodent-proof lockers in our basement.

We store it as momi (rice-in-the-husk) to preserve freshness. As great as it tastes at a year old, we can't wait to try the fresh rice from this year's harvest - hopefully within the week.

Hijiki Kiriboshi Daikon Itameni Dried hijiki seaweed, kiriboshi daikon (cut and sun-dried daikon radish), carrot, sesame, and soy sauce.

Hijiki gomokuni is a very traditional dish in Japan, but we haven't seen it on our table much recently - at least compared to the past few years when Tomoe was pregnant and nursing and needed a lot more of the calcium and iron found in hijiki.

Though it's getting harder to find due to cheap imports from China and Korea, Tomoe uses and recommends domestic hijiki purchased online. If cost is a barrier, consider that a normal health-conscious family might pay only 3,000-4,000 yen ($30-$40) more per year.

Yes, there's the issue of carbon emissions, food miles, local economies, and Japan's dietary self-sufficiency, but another reason to buy local: Japanese hijiki is less likely to come with a piece of used toilet paper surprise.

Apparently, there were stories about Korean growers using unprocessed humanure to fertilize crops. Remember, hijiki is a seaweed, so fertilizer is applied by simply pouring poop into the ocean. People reported seeing toilet paper and other things floating in the farms. Japan is also much stricter in terms of regulating the plankton-icides and algaecides that China and Korea apparently use freely.

In this variation, kiriboshi daikon is used. Traditionally, daikon are cut into thin strips and dried in May (the best drying month of the year) to preserve radishes that survived the winter in the cellar but are looking... less than market-fresh.

Sun-dried daikon are also mineral and fiber rich, with lots of vitamin D3 to help absorb calcium from the hijiki. Likewise, the oils from ground sesame help absorb iron.

Finally, the carrots. I'd love to say we used our own yuki-no-shita (grown-beneath-the-snow) carrots, but we didn't grow enough this year. These are from a local farm market.

Roasted Natto Krispies Homemade natto using black, brown, and yellow organic soybeans from our garden. This batch wasn't fermented in rice straw, but with leftover bacteria from a store-bought pack. Still worth making at home.

For this dish, Tomoe sprinkled chickpea flour over the natto and stir-fried it with a dash of oil and salt. Tomoe says it's a "good meat substitute" - but since it has neither the texture nor flavor of meat, I assume she means nutritionally. It is high in protein.

The dish could be made with boiled beans too, but only 60-70% of nutrients from boiled beans are absorbed by the body. Fermented beans like natto raise that to 99%.

Okanori (Curled Mallow) The brilliant green veggie is called okanori - "seaweed on a hill" - apparently because it has a tender, slimy seaweed-like texture but grows on land.

Tomoe simply boiled it and garnished it with sesame oil, garlic, and salt. Delicious just like that. It's in the same family as okra and other mallows, often used as a cool-weather okra substitute or as a thickener in soups.

Extremely high in calcium, it beats spinach for salad greens. But it's hard to come by - it only looks fresh for a few hours after picking. Strangely, even in the countryside, we're the only ones growing it on our block - maybe in the whole village.

Next year, we plan to plant lots more. It's a low-/no-maintenance green that grows nearly year-round. It's the first green to appear when snow melts, self-propagates like a weed, has few pests, and provides fast-growing ground cover. We hope it'll outgrow the weeds. Its soft stems and leaves compost quickly and are rich in calcium.

Rayu The bottle on the table is Tomoe's homemade spicy rayu sauce. Unlike supermarket versions, hers uses our homegrown chili peppers (fiery), plus imported Chinese huajan, a spice related to sansho, for a tingling piri-piri heat.

The recipe is simple - soy sauce, huajan, chili peppers, sesame oil, and vinegar - and takes less than ten minutes to prepare. A bottle that would sell for ¥2,000 in a supermarket.

It's a staple in our spice rack. I use it way more than plain soy sauce.

Kaki (Persimmon) Can't forget our first kaki of the year! Bought at a farmers market for cheap - one of the underripe fruits growers pick early to thin the tree.

A few weeks ago, it tasted like cardboard. But left in a closed plastic bag with other ripening fruits for a while… now it's a gem. Mona-approved.