Okonomiyaki

There is a couple of routine things that I do when I go back to Japan. One of them is to visit my advisor in undergrad. He moved from Osaka to Tokyo a few years ago so I missed a change to meet him for a while (my home town is Osaka.).

Before I met him, I had about half hour to kill at the station where his campus is located. I walked around a bit and found a Okonomiyaki restaurant. Okonomiyaki is one of my favorite foods even after I lives in U.S. If you go to a Okonomiyaki place in Osaka, you would have good taste Okonomiyaki at any restaurant because people in Osaka love Okonomiyaki. I wanted to try in Tokyo if it is true. In Tokyo, there is a similar food called Monjayaki. It is much softer and the shape is not like a pancake. So people use a small steel tool to scoop and bring to the mouth. I am not sure nowadays, but people in Tokyo used to prefer Monjayaki to Okonomiyaki in old days.

The Okonomiyaki I had in the picture was acturally quite good. The mixture of flour, water, potate and eggs was very soft and the souce was a little sweet but spicy.

The one bad thing was that I had to eat in rush because I was almost late to appointment to meeting my advisor...

Beef bowl (special)

Like fast food hamberger chain stores for Americans, there are beef bowl chain stores for the Japanese. The major three chains are Yoshinoya (probably the largest in Japan), Matsuya, and Nakau. I forgot where I had this in the picture, but I am sure at the one of their places in Yokohama.

The standard menu is a just beef bowl from the size of medium (Nami), large (Ohmori) or extra large (Toku-mori). The miso soup, pickels and raw egg are the sides. So having a beef bowl with sides is a kind of "Special". The shredded red things on the beef is ginger. The slightly spicy tastes of the ginger match the thin sliced marinated beef. The raw egg with a few drop of soy souce is alos poured onto the beef and mixed well. This is like Sukiyaki, which thin sliced beef dipped into raw eggs.

Well, if you like salty soy souce taste, you don't want to miss this.

Cheese Cake

This is a cheesecake that I had at a cafe in Tokyo. There was nothing special about this cake. The taste of the cake is ,I would say, just good. It is as good as NewYork cheesecake, but much lighter so that you can eat it easily after you have dinner. What's nice in Japan if you love sweets is that wherever you go, you can find this type of delicious cheesecakes at cafes, cakeshops, restaurants.

Kamo Seiro (Soba)

It's a Soba again...
This Soba in the picture is called Kamo Seiro.
There is no word of Soba in the name of the dish, but we can expect it is Soba or Udon.
It looks like a bamboo Sushi rolling mat on the right, but this is Seiro. I think Seiro is a cooking tool used for steaming. Here it is just used to be under Soba. Soba is not steamed.

Kamo is a sort of duck meat. You can see some fat floating in the dipping sorce. It had roasted Kamo meat, shiitake mushroom, and mitsuba (herb leaf).

The combination of plain taste of Soba and salty soup was really good!!
Like I wrote some days ago, I prefer Udon to Soba, but this was one of the best foods when I traveled in Tokyo area.

Kakiage Soba (Noodle)

Soba (Noodle) is one of the most loved noodles, other than Ramen and Udon. Generally, people from western part of Japan including me like Udon better and those from eastern prefer Soba to Udon.
One reason is the soup.
Soup for Soba is darker and more salty because of soy souce. I think this dark soup match Soba so well.

Anyway, the picture is a set of Soba and rice when I traveled to Tokyo. As I expected, the soup was dark and salty. On the top of Soba, the fried stuff is a fry of mixture called Kakiage so that this set is called Kakiage Soba.
Kakiage is a mixture of samll shrimps, chopped scallops and cubed vegetables. It is fried, but not mixed tempura.

You can try many types of Soba or Udon conbo with rice or just a noodle.

Ton Katsu (Pork cutlet)

This is something I had in Japan last December.

You can find pork cutlets at any Japanese restaurants in all over the world if the owners do not want to put it in the menu.
It's one of the most popular Japanese foods for sure.

I think that the popularity of pork cutlets for Japanese comes from the teste and also the name, "Ton katsu".
"Ton" can be written in a chinease character and means pork.
"Katsu" is a part of the word "Katsu retsu", which used to indicate all kinds of deep fried foods, according to a web.
So "Ton Katsu" means simply deep fried pork.

Another meaning of the japanese word "Katsu" is to win. This case, it is a verb. From this meaning, people like to have foods with "Ton Katsu" before an event that you cannot absolutly lose.
Some people have before college entrance exam, or others have before a big horse racing. The foods with Katsu can be "Ton Katsu", "curry with pork cutlets (Katsu curry)", or "rice bowl with pork cutlets (Katsu Don)".

It may be known that Japanese people do not have strong religious beliefs in general, but almost all people like beliefs that you can bring a luck by eating foods with "Katsu".

small hamburger

I went back to Japan last Thanksgiving and stayed just before Christmas.
It was almost one month vacation.
There were couples of things that I wanted to do for the long break such as renewing my student visa and attending a friend's wedding.

During the stay, I often went to Mos Burger, which is one of the biggest hamburger chain in Japan.
The picture is a combo meal, I remember, this is chicken something...
A combo meal is very similar at any fast food stores, but Mos burger now serves a combination of a hamburger, coffee and french fries and onion rings. You can choose an old style comb, just french fries.

Since I got used to an American hamburger, this hamburger at a Mos Burger looks really small to me!! It is almost cute like a toy. But price is real. This "value" meal costs about $5. It is a bit expensive for this small portion of meal. At other fast food stores like MacDonald, a combo meal is a bit lower price and a hamburger is slightly bigger.

It could be one of the smallest hamburger at any fast food restaurants...

Happy new year

It's been quite long time since I updated ths blog.
I am still maintaining the status of a student.

As one of my new year resolutions, I will re-start this blog.

If somehow you fine this blog, I would apprciate your comments or messages for this blog.


Hiroshi