All about the food!

For my final post about Japan, it would be unfortunate if I didn't do a separate post about food. Now that I think about it, I am regretting not doing a separate one about Beijing, Vietnam and Thailand from our last trip, but oh well. It's not like I don't mention food in every single one of my posts. Let's face it. I am a fat person in a skinny person's body.

So that being said, here is a lovely gallery of some food highlights from the trip!

Dinner one night...tempura!

Oh 7/11 breakfasts, how I miss you! This was a variety of ground meat, egg and something else (fish maybe?) on rice with other stuff. Like a meatball. And a hardboiled egg. and probably some other fish thing. All of that magic for about $3!

Fiddleheads, some kind of cooked pork, and plum wine. Always plum wine. Sweet, sweet, delicious plum wine.

 

Conveyor belt sushi? Heck yes! We ate something like 19 plates of sushi for about a dollar of plate. It was silly not to pig out!

Yosha's breakfast of choice: Starbucks (which she swore was better than back home) and more 7/11 mystery magic.

Curry was everywhere. It was generally garam masala-tasting and included some kind of salad to keep our scurvy away for another day.

OKONOMIYAKI!!! These are generally pancakes made with lots of lovely stuff. Generally egg, cut up cabbage, some noodles, and a kind of sweet/bbqish sauce.

We (ok Yosha, but I was a very close second) were very much into mochi. A lot. The obsession continued when we found mochi that you could buy from a vending machine. It didn't ooze freshness like the stuff we had freshly made at the cherry blossom festival but goodness it was deelish!

nevermind writing stuff in the sand on the beach. We wrote it on okonomiyaki that we made ourselves one night after touring around looking for geishas in Kyoto.

Another convenience store delight

This was my dessert at the ninja restaurant. He was so cute, I almost didn't want to eat him! Almost. Except for the fact that he was a perfectly-sized piece of cheesecake.

Typical Japanese fare. I can't even remember where this was taken. Some kind of mixed little plates of goodness.

Takoyaki, or deep fried octopus balls!

REAL sushi! When we think Japanese food, we typically say sushi, but really I think most people mean sushi rolls. Avocado rolls, California rolls, spider rolls, etc...those aren't Japanese. It doesn't mean it's bad. It's just not authentic. This was a home-cooked sushi dinner made by Nonaco's parents. It was such a wonderful treat to have shared such a delicious dinner in a genuine Japanese home.

Some black bean and tofu spicy dish. Yum!

Another set meal...deep fried chicken cutlets with some other dishes. And beer. Oh yes.

My mouth is watering right now thinking of this steak. This is real steak, from Kobe. See the marbling perfection? This is what steak should look like. Worth every one of the $140 I spent on that meal.

I would be lying if I didn't say this trip included a lot of desserts. Because it did. We somehow had no trouble justifying any piece of dessert that we wanted. In typical Japanese style this beautiful little pastry even included its own ice pack. I wish I had enough vocabulary to tell the lovely woman behind the counter 'Don't waste your time. This little gem won't make it past the next block'.

Sushi fresh from the Tsukiji fish market. If I were an elderly person without teeth, I could have just used my gums on this dish and on the Kobe steak, that's how mouthwateringly amazing and tender these dishes were.