Food in Japan

I typically write about some aspect of quilting and sewing in my weekly blog posts, but I hope you’ll find this topic interesting too, since we all like to eat! Enjoy!

I am a somewhat adventurous eater and I was looking forward to experiencing food in Japan. The one thing I was warned about ahead of time was that there wouldn’t be many green vegetables – and I found this to be surprisingly true. A few floral shoots of broccoli snuck into dinner one night, but that was not the norm.

Aside from the salad bars on the American portion of the breakfast buffets, the majority of meals revolved around seafood, rice, tofu, noodles and salt. Although Daikon radishes and cabbage were pretty easy to find.

We went to a sushi making class during the trip. It was more of a stage production than an actual cooking class, but it was fun. What we made was pretty, and much of it was tasty – even if most of the seafood was raw (the rice is hiding underneath each item):

Eating in restaurants was an interesting experience. There was plastic food outside all of them and it was made to look exactly like what was on their menu.

I found out later that it’s a multi-million dollar industry in Japan, and it did make choosing our dinner a little easier (even if we didn’t know what we were ordering because the descriptions were all in Japanese). If you’d like to learn more about the plastic food industry in Japan click here.

One night a few of us decided to have dinner at the Tempura restaurant on the top floor of our hotel. The view was beautiful and the meal very interesting. Everything is deep fried while you watch, at high heat and in a very light batter. The chef began by showing us a wooden box filled with all the foods he would be preparing, and the presentation was a lovely part of the meal.

The first item he prepared for us was prawns. He showed us the large, beautiful prawns: heads, tails and all; cut off the heads, and cooked the rest to perfection. He put two of them into my boat shaped dish and I lifted them off with my chopsticks, dipped them in salt (no cocktail sauce), and enjoyed. Then he did the same thing with the prawn heads!

I looked with wide eyes at Vicki, who was seated next to me. She said – “when in Japan” and popped one in her mouth!

So I did the same. It was crunchy, and I ate them both. We all enjoyed the meal very much.

Besides seafood and rice, there were many restaurants that served chicken and pork. It was often deep fried, served with noodles and quite yummy.

The night we stayed at the resort near Mt. Fugi we were served an amazing multi-course dinner. The presentation and unique dishes were a highlight:

An amazing meal and surprisingly filling!

While traveling from place to place I would get the munchies. Potato chips were not easy to find, and when we did the only choices were wasabi or shrimp flavor (I’m afraid they must be an acquired taste):

We purchased Bento Boxes for lunch on the bullet train. It was very compact. The two boxes stacked and were topped with the beautiful cardboard lid.

Many people in Japan commute long distances each day and these boxed lunches are extremely popular. Mine was delicious!

I’m going to end this post on a sweet note. We noticed many different flavors of KitKat candy bars all over the country. It turns out that KitKat is pronounced similarly to the Japanese phrase for “you will surely succeed”. So the Japanese people began gifting them to friends prior to athletic contests or academic tests. They became so popular that the Nestle company decided to fill the need and make a variety of them. The most unusual was Yuzu fruit/Matcha tea (not my favorite).

It was a fun souvenir to bring home to the kids.

I truly enjoyed the culinary experience, but I must admit I was ready for a hamburger with a big dish of asparagus when I returned.

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In a comment last week, Laurie asked about the project I Roketsu dyed. I chose a dragonfly design on a t-shirt.

I finished in a short amount of time and the teacher made a comment through Izumi that I should add one to the back shoulder. I love it!

I love it. Now if it will just warm up enough outside to wear it.