4 meals today

Went shopping today with my host mother. I had told her that I liked food and wanted to learn about Japanese cuisine. All she told me was "tabemeno, ikimashou" (Food, lets go). I guess she understands the way I think because in no time we were heading to their supermall, an 8 floor behemoth with 2 grocery stores, a drug store, electronics store, homegoods store, and Starbucks. Yeah, they made it over here.

First grocery store:
Dry goods and bottled drinks. Japanese love dry goods. They had everything pre-packaged, dehydrated, canned, and ready to go. Toast spreads, chocolate, fish crackers, tofu bites, you name it they have it. Of course, everything was in Japanese so I could only decipher a few. Like everything else in this place, the supermarket is spotless, the workers will bend over backwards for you, and is disgustingly efficient. As a side note, for all the rubber stamps, red tape, certifications and departments in the government and education system, it all works. You don't wait on line for everything and everyone you deal with knows what they are doing, which is good since if they didn't the entire city would stop. There are police on every street corner in their little boxes waiting to help you. Wherever there may be extra traffic (enterence to parking deck) they station 2 traffic cops to make sure everything goes smoothly. Back to food. You walk through the grocery store and every aisle has samples. I got some corn on the cob, shabu-shabu, tea candy a gyoza, and spaghetti. The gyoza was the best I ever tasted, the shabu-shabu was spectacular, the corn was corn, the spaghetti sauce almost made me puke. Good thing I'm here to show this country how to do sauce. One of hte many things I like about Japan are the beverages. Everyone has bottled iced green tea and iced coffee, unsweetened. No snapple or frappucino garbage in bottles. O yes! The tea! Holy crap is it good. Hot, cold, green, roasted. I love this stuff and can't get enough of it. The green tea is green and so clean tasting. Even better is the roasted green that tastes a little like coffee.

I hadn't written about food in a while so there was alot to get through. Back on track.
Store 2:
Meat, fruit, dairy, etc. The meat in Japan, the wagyu beef, is ridiculously fatty and marbled. I am not talking about Kobe per say, just ordinary supermarket meat. It looks nothing like the beef in America. It makes American beef look like a celery stick as far as fat content goes. The first night when we ate at the steakhouse I could definitely taste the difference. Very fatty, sometimes not desirably fatty. All the fruit was enormous, figs, apples, and oranges especially. Best thing though were the mushrooms. Japan has mushrooms like you wouldn't believe. There was half an aisle of fresh mushrooms at cheap prices.

My extra meal came from the coveyor belt sushi restaurant set up in this enormous mall. I saw it and couldn't resist plopping myself down and eating myself silly on all the sushi I wanted. Prices ranged from 110 yen to 350 yen for two pieces. AMAZING. Some of the highlights were giant clam (geoduck), salmon, broiled salmon belly, and octopus. The sushi was very generous. Huge hunks and slices of fish. Everything was on the conveyor belt. Sushi on top, wasabi, gari, soy sauce on the bottom along with the tea cups and soy sauce dishes. Tea was in a powdered form on the table and you had your own hot water spigot. So cool.



Dinner was at an okonomiyaki restaurant. It means "cook what you like" and gets its name from the egg-based omelet, but the meal had a lot more. Japanese like many courses at dinner. Started with a seaweed salad that I'm addicted to and soup with some strange substance called "konyaku." Best way to describe it is a firm, gelatin substance with flecks, tasteless. Really don't want to go near it again. From then on, everything was grilled at our own little grill in the table.Then there were potatoes, some strange pouch of stuff. There was "monjayaki," a vegetable mixture in a milk or yogurt base with some pork, flavored with fish roe. It was salty but delicious, especially the burnt bottom. Little burnt pieces are good eats in any cuisine. It was served with a tamarind sauce, similar to Worcestershire. The okonomiyaki had shrimp, squid, eggs, pork, beef, garlic, and peppers in it. After cooking, we put dried, smoked fish flakes, a sweet soy sauce, and nori flakes. Mayo was offered but I refused.

Japanese food tastes different, but whats most apparent is the different textures. Textures range from the sticky natto and konbe (seaweed pickles), to a soft and mushy mochi ball (rice), to that strange, compacted gelatin texture of "konyaku" and "anko" bars. Anko is a sweetened red bean paste. Japanese can take a lot of textures that Westerners would balk at. I have to admit I think some of the textures are pretty nasty and I like everything.