Japanese food

Green tea ice cream

So, the thing about Japanese food is that sometimes you know exactly what you're eating.

But often you don't. I never did figure out what those purple things were, but they were pretty.

Japanese breakfast: top left, cold fried tofu, then  mountain yam, salmon & pickle,  tart red sauce, green seaweed veggie, egg, plum and always miso soup.

Prettiness matters with Japanese food, in a way that it doesn't here in the US.

Tuna sashimi on the left (raw tuna), teeny-tiny white things with black eyes in the middle, and ??? on the right.

Dried bonita-tuna flakes are sprinkled on lots of things. This also contains those tiny white fish. See? They do have little black eyes.

Japanese friends treated us to a wonderful dinner at their favorite restaurant, and this was the sushi that they ordered. Very fancy. The fish was probably swimming in the ocean 24 hours ago.

They ordered this too: it's smelt. We used to have this in Wisconsin. I was surprised to see it there, fried up just the same as I had it decades ago, and you eat the heads and all just like back home. John, not raised in a fish-eating family, never really took to it in Wisconsin, so he wasn't terribly enthusiastic to see it in Japan.

Our friends had their 8-year-old with them, and this is what she ordered. Fries!

This appears to be some kind of bean-based sweet, wrapped in an oak leaf, and for sale in the market in Kyoto.

These are marzipan knock-offs. Don't be fooled. They're made out of beans too.

I took this photo in the market because I thought it showed a lot of cool, mysterious salad-y things which (except for the beans...wait...are those beans?) I didn't recognize.

So much of the food is from the ocean; I have a zillion photos of the seafood markets in Kyoto and Tokyo, but maybe I can show those another day. 

For lunch on a hot humid day: cold soba noodles for me.

But John preferred his hot. They're messy, so bibs were provided.

And now it's time to talk about the haute cuisine of Japan, and the meals-of-the-trip that I most eagerly anticipated. We spent two nights in a Kyoto ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn, bathing in the hot communal bath each night, then-in our robes-being served an amazing dinner by a beautiful kimono-clad woman. We had kaisecki the first night, and shabu-shabu the second.

The kaisecki dinner had 14 courses, small servings on unique plates chosen to highlight the food, not to match the other plates.

To prepare for this dinner I read Untangling My Chopsticks by V.A. Riccardi. The author went to Japan in the 80's to learn the art of kaisecki cuisine. In this book I read that the curled shrimp represents the wish to live to old age, long enough to have a curved back like so many of the elderly in Japan who suffer from osteoporosis. Well gee, I'm not so sure I want that, but this was a beautiful shrimp, every leg and tentacle intact.

Kaisecki must include something fried: tempura shrimp and peppers.

This salt-encrusted little fish was so gorgeous, somehow broiled into the position of swimming, and accompanied by a slender stalk of ginger. ooooooooooooh.

I loved the way these kaisecki veggies looked in their black dish. What a dinner.

And now: shabu-shabu, hot-pot, introduced to Japan in the 19th century from China.

The hot pot, boiling water, is on the right. These two lovely ladies set up everything,

including the pickles, sauces, sashimi, and rice.

Then they presented us with this plate of veggies,

and this plate of thinly-sliced marbled beef.  With chopsticks we poached things one at a time, dipped them in sauce and ate them. It was fabulous.

We ate Japanese food every day until nearly the last day. And then at last, exhausted by the walking,  the heat and humidity, the long day at the National Museum in Tokyo, the grind of public transportation, we came upon one of the ubiquitous Starbucks. An iced coffee and a blueberry scone. It was all over.