A keiseki nabe dinner in Tokyo, and more

Nabe (or nabemoto) is the Japanese name for any of the hot pot dishes where all the ingredients are cooked in one vessel and shared at the table. I want to share a nabe dinner that I recently had in tokyo on Friday with my hosts from the Tokyo Science University. After dinner my friend Hayashi san took me to a "working man's" soba shop where we had a few interesting dishes and a drink.

This was a nice evening of food starting with some appetizers, as usual. On this plate is some octopus, a piece of tempura, walnuts, some kind of pate like fish cake and some chicken. It was served with some pickled vegetables as well.

Next came the sashimi. This fish was extraordinarly fresh and tasty!

They also served another piece of cooked fish as a course.

This was kind of a pudding or custard and I'm not sure what it was made of. It was tasty.

Here is the nabe pot! You can see lots of vegetables, some seafood and quail eggs. On the bottom are noodles.

My hosts - Prof. Hayashi on the right and Prof. Soai to the left of me.

After dinner Hayashi san and I walked around for a little bit. As if I didn't get enough food for dinner, he took me into a local soba shop where working men gather after work on Fridays to drink and eat. We had a few bites of special food. Here is some fried squid. Very good.

We also had some cooked pig stomach. I know it sounds bad, but it was really good! Not tough at all. It was tender and really tasty. Topped with some red chili pepper it was even better.

This is an interesting soba shop. We drank shoju which is a kind of a distilled rice liqour. The way you prepare it is most interesting. At the table is a kettle of water used to cook the soba in the shop, so it has many of the buckwheat nutrients and starches. You pour this hot water into the glass with the shoju. We also crushed some salty pickled plum into the drink. Unusual and delicious.


Me and Hayashi san.

And our server! :)

Kaiseki dinner in Tokyo

Kaiseki dinners in Japan are more formal set menus. On Saturday night my hosts from Gakushuin university took me out for a particularly delicious, light and healthy kaiseki dinner.

The dinner started with appetizers. On the plate are some fried shrimp, a snail (which was particularly difficult to remove from the shell) and a pickled plum.

Next came the sashimi course. You just can't go wrong with raw fish in my opinion!

Interestingly they served mushroom and broth in these individual tea pots. You poured it out and drank it like tea then you ate the mushrooms from inside. It was delicious!

The main meal was a piece of cooked fish. Elegant and simple in a truly Japanese style. It was delightful.

We also had a vegetable tempura course.

And finally to end the meal, some soup, rice and a few pickled vegetables. Along with some beer and sake, it was a nice meal.

After dinner with my hosts, Profs. Nakamura and Akiyama.

Living on the edge with Fugu

After a day spent at the Tokyo Institute of Technology my hosts took me out for dinner at a local favorite of theirs. This being the start of winter , Fugu is the specialty of the season. Last night's meal was all about this dangerous fish. If you don't know, Fugu is the Japanese name for the pufferfish. This fish contains a very deadly toxin in its organs and sometimes in its skin called tetrodotoxin. This is a neurotoxin that can paralyze your muscles. If your diaphram becomes paralyzed you will suffocate - all while being fully conscious. Fugu is highly prized in Japan due to its inherint danger. Chefs must have special training to cut the fish to avoid contaminating the edible parts.

It seems every meal in Japan starts with beer but quickly moves to sake. This 1.8 liter bottle was barely enough for us! Now I do like sake and I am always surprised at how many different sakes there are all with their unique flavors.

Japanese meals often start with a sashimi course. Last night I was treated to my favorite - raw crab! If you've never tried it, you must. It is absolutely the sweetest sashimi I have ever tasted.

Next we each had a tray full of various appetizers I don't know what everything was but it was all very tasty. I know we had some snails, some mushrooms, the thing on the bottom right was a most delicious oyster, and on the bottom left - lotus root.

Now comes the Fugu! First up was a fugu tempura - lightly battered and crisp on the outside, delicious and soft on the inside. It tasted like fish, of course, so I don't know if the taste is really anything special.

The main meal was a hot pot cooked at the table. Here it is before everything was cooked. Inside there are pieces of fugu, vegetables, tofu, mushrooms and cellophane noodles. The pieces of the fugu are carefully cut so as to enjoy the most tender cartilage near the bones. I have to say the fish cooked this was was absolutely delectable.

Even the fins of the fish are used in a special sake drink called Fugu Hire-zake. They slightly char the fin and place it on top of the sake in the cup. When it is served at the table the ignite the cup with a flame briefly to impart a very interesting smell and taste to the sake. This sake was served warm and tasted very interesting with the charred fin flavor infusing the sake.


Japanese meals usually end with a rice course and a soup. The rice tonight was served in the form of a crab maki roll. I'm not quite sure but I think the curled round pieces in the soup was the skin of the fugu. This night we ended with pineapple and sort of a coconut jello pudding.



So, I enjoyed the fugu very much and I lived to tell the tale! Next time I must try fugu sashimi.

Tokyo eats on the cheap

Yes, even cheap sushi. This was had for about $10 at a department store market. More on that later. On Tuesday I arrived in Tokyo and I visited Chuo University on Wednesday. This is not a great picture but I did manage to snap a skyline view of Tokyo from one of the tall buildings at Chuo. It certainly does not capture the immenseness of Tokyo.

The interesting thing about Japan is that many of the private railway companies are owned and operated by huge department stores. These are unlike anything in America. Many major train stations in Tokyo (and all over Japan) are a maze of department stores, shops and train entrances. Once you figure that out getting around is not too difficult. Every major department store has a floor for each type of goods they are selling. Generally the bottom one or two floors are dedicated to food, both prepared and fresh produce. There are cases filled with delectable sweet treats and gyoza stands. It is like a huge market with super attentive staff at every station. The sushi you see above was my dinner on Tuesday. Yes, $10 from the Tobu department store at the Ikebukuro station.

Here is one case filled with fried meats of all kinds. Oh, I wish I had better pictures. I will try to get some better ones when I get to Osaka.

Here are a couple of pictures just outside the Shinjuku train station.
And in Ikebukuro I was tempted by the Colonel.

Instead, for lunch, I treated myself to another local cheap favorite. This is a small fast food shop that has a variety of rice bowls topped with grilled meats. It is an interesting process. You must first buy a meal ticket from the vending machine near the entrance. You can choose a variety of things from their limited menu and you choose by pressing the button for anything within the price range of what you've put into the machine. You sit at a counter, there is only one thin counter at this place, and hand your meal ticket to the server in front of you. Within a minute or two a hot steaming bowl of meat covered rice and a small bowl of miso soup appears. You eat quickly and leave. For less than $4 you can be satisfied. Quick, easy and you don't even need to hassle with trying to order off a menu written in Japanes. Many of these places have a picture of the food next to the buttons on the vending machines.

Here is a photo of the street that I am staying on near the Mejiro station.

Sendai Beef, and I do mean beef

On Monday I had the good fortune to be treated to a very nice Sendai meal. Even in a small country like Japan regional cuisines abound. In Sendai the local favorite is Sendai beef. Of course they try to rival Kobe beef and I have to say my meal I had recently with my hosts in Sendai was incredible. They brought me to a restaurant that specialized in Sendai beef cooked Korean style on a table gas flame grill. They eat many parts of the cow here and one of the most prized parts here in Sendai is the tongue. Here you can see beef tongue being grilled. I found the taste to be quite good but the texture was a little tough.

After the tongue was all gone, they brought out a plate of nicely marbled meat. This was more to my liking and it was tender and delicious.

Now the thing that makes beef tender and tasty is how well marbled it is with fat. Take a look at the fine grain marbling of this shoulder cut of beef. It was melt in your mouth tender!

Next came the ribs. These were also quite good.

After all that meat I thought we were done until they brought out yet another plate. I said they eat all parts of the animal. This is marinated liver and intestines. They also tasted pretty good but I'm not much of a liver eater. I found the intestines to be very chewy. I guess it's good exercise for your jaws.

Sendai Eats

On Sunday I traveled from Narita to the Tokyo station and then took a shinkansen fast train to Sendai. Here is the local Narita station on a beautiful sunny morning

Here is the Tokyo station shinkansen platform. See everyone queuing up for their cars? You have to know the Japanese system in order to understand it. Instead of questioning it you jut have to go with the flow and everying is ok.


On the way to Sendai it is apparent that every inch of space is utilized in Japan.

Near Sendai you an see mountains in the distance.

They are crazy for this game here.

This is a food blog, after all. So I guess I should talk about some food. Below the Sendai train station there are many restaurants. I found one in particular that did not have a picture menu. I had to drag my server outside to point at the food I wanted in order to place my order. As you can see I found some pretty good shrimp tempura and noodle soup for a very reasonable 880 yen. That's less than $10 US. Pretty good deal.

Onigiri

I've just arrived in Japan for a two week trip. I am looking forward to many wonderful Japanese meals while I'm here. But after being up for 24 hours and finally getting to my hotel jetlagged and stuffed full of awful airline food, I was not in the mood for a fancy restaurant meal. Fortunately the Japanese have convenience stores on just about every corner. I grabbed a quick snack before I passed out from jetlag. A Sapporo and a couple of onigiri hit the spot. Onigiri is a rice ball, usually stuffed with something, wrapped in a crispy sheet of seaweed. The packaging is ingenious as it has layers of plastic to separate the nori from the rice so that it does not get wet and soggy. You peel the package open from top to bottom then pull the two corners and the plastic pops off. You end up with a perfectly wrapped onigiri. I had one with shrimp and one with tuna inside. Wash that down with some good Japanese beer and you can't ask for much more.

Szechuan Green Beans with Pork

I think stir fried green beans are my all time favorite dishes and they are so easy to make. This Szechuan inspired dish is not too hard to make. I started by quickly steaming some green beans in a hot pan with a splash of water and a cover just until they turned bright green. That takes only a minute. You don't want to overcook them. Once flash steamed the beans are quickly cooled in cold water and drained. I like to precook the beans a bit as it makes it easier to stir fry without burning them. Next I took some chopped pork and seasoned it with salt, pepper and Szechuan peppercorn. I added some chopped garlic and ginger to the meat. I heated my wok until it was almost smoking, added some oil and threw in a half teaspoon of red chili in oil. This was the kind of chili that is like red pepper flakes that have been cooked in oil and placed in a jar. The meat was added to the wok and it was fried with constant stirring just until cooked.

The meat was removed from the pan and set aside.

The wok was heated again and the beans were tossed in. The beans were seasoned with just a dash of salt and pepper. They were stir fried for 3-4 minutes until they started to get browned on the sides. I like to add my ginger and garlic near the end so it doesn't burn. So, once the beans were almost ready I tossed in more garlic and ginger. This was stirred for just a few moments and the meat was added back into the pan. A teaspoon of garlic chili paste and a splash of soy sauce. That's it! Serve hot over rice.