Japanese dining experiences

Update time! I have been flat out busy at school this week because Semester 2 of school starts this Friday and I have been trying to figure out possible lesson plans and what my predecessor has already taught (I've found journals kept by the JETs from 2002 right up to beginning of this year, but no luck finding anything for the current school year :P). Although it's currently school holidays at the moment, the students still come to school for club activities (club activities are valued with equal importance as studies). Anyway, I joined in on the Cooking Club yesterday as a break from work - they were baking biscuits for the upcoming gakosai (school festival). I was then invited to join them for lunch (cold somen noodles) and was given a packet of biscuits as a thank you for helping out.. Hehe.. I really am looking forward to the school festival as there will be lots of food!

I find that I am cooking a lot more now that I'm in Japan. The reason being that breakfast cereals are expensive and of the unhealthy kinds (think sugar-laden crispy cereals) and bread are quite expensive and only the unhealthy sweet white ones are available to buy. It works out to be a bit cheaper to eat rice and noodles (mainly soba and udon), so I have been cooking twice a day and having the previous night's leftovers for lunch. Tomorrow we'll have a breadmaker in our grasp (bought 2nd hand from an ex-JET), and we'll be ordering wholemeal bread flour from FBC (foreign buyers club) so hopefully we'll get healthy bread soon! We also miss eating brown rice (genmai) which is not available to us up in the Noto (although you would have thought otherwise since we are surrounded by rice paddy fields everywhere!) so we'll be ordering that from FBC too. Twice more expensive than white rice (which in turn is three times more expensive than rice in Perth) but it is healthier. We've been putting mugi (assortment of wheat, barley and rye) in with the white rice as was suggested to us by the Aussie guy who owns that bakery (more about him and his wife in a later post).

Anyhow, I thought that since I'd uploaded more photos I ought to blog about them... so here goes!


Tokyo dining

We wanted to try good dining places recommended by others. We only had the Tokyo Lonely Planet guide to help us so the two places we went to were recommendations given in the Lonely Planet guide.

Keika Kumamoto Ramen

Apparently this place is nationally famous, and since it was in Shinjuku (sorta near the Keio Plaza Hotel) we thought we'd give it a try. This place specialises in Kyushu-style pork noodles so naturally Rob went for the chashu-men noodles (I already had lunch provided at the hotel as part of the orientation) and it was okay. Ramen is of Chinese origin so it's not unlike the noodles that we've had before. The soup was quite rich and also pretty salty. The ramen was pretty pricey, at around 900yen for that bowl (about AU$11). I think that if this is the best that ramen can be (given that this place is a well-known ramen diner), then I probably will stick to having sushi for lunch..



Kanda Yabu Soba

Described as "Soba mecca for the buckwheat noodle aficianados of Tokyo" by the Tokyo Lonely Planet. It is in Kanda, near Akihabara (aka Electric Town). The restaurant itself was quite nice - traditional-looking, with a Japanese garden at the front. This soba-ya serves both hot and cold soba noodles, and we had a taste of both types.



Rob ordered the soba in hot broth with anago (conger eel, which we found out that day is not the same as unagi):


and I went for the one with duck breast meat:


They were both pretty good, and the broth had similar taste. We ordered plain cold soba (zarusoba) just to try it out:


Very simple, served with tsuyu (cold dipping sauce) with some grated daikon and wasabi on the side. The soba dishes came with the water in which the soba noodles were cooked in, and you're meant to mix this noodle water with the broth or tsuyu and drink it after eating the noodles. Supposedly very healthy. (I make it easy for myself when cooking soba noodles at home with hot broth - I cook the noodles with the broth :P).

To finish up, we had this mochi-like dessert made with buckwheat flour and had anko (sweet adzuki bean paste) filling. Quite yummy.


This experience was pretty expensive. I think it costed us around 4500 yen (equivalent to about AU$55?). Pretty pricey just for noodles methinks..


Anyway, that's all I have time to write now. I'll write more with more photos perhaps on the weekend if I have more time... I'm off now to memorise my speech in Japanese for my schools' opening ceremonies....