I love how an intellectual approach to ticking off items from the bucket list really helped me to hone in on what really interests me, as well as what has been preventing me from ticking the items off earlier in my life.

Case in point, I wanted to tackle a so called easy one: cook oden.

My first attempt at this saw me head down to Donki to get a pre-packaged set of oden ingredients (mainly variants of fish cake), daikon and then head home to prepare it.

I quickly realised some issues with this bucket list item.

For one, it was wa-aay too underachieving in a sense – I didn’t get any sense of joy in getting closer to achieving this simply because the process was too banal and simple.

I had in my mind imagined a process of research, experimentation and a final vision of creating this izakaya old school, Japanese style broth with delicious ingredients (thanks to having watched too much Izakaya shows on Netflix). Merely getting convenience store-esque, pre-packaged stuff didn’t jive with that vision.

Furthermore, the outcome was certainly underwhelming. Oden in such a state isn’t macro rich and just isn’t that amazing – it violated my own rules for food choices: food must ideally be both macro rich or taste amazing.

And so.. I decided to tweak this bucket list item to that of making simmered daikon. In my mind, that was something that was authentic, moderately macro rich (it’s just veg) and had potential to taste good.

Stay tuned for part 2…