One of my favourite things about Japan is the food and drink there. They have an amazing culture where they take pride in their local foods, are interested in different and unusual dishes and are constantly spending money going out to eat. It’s a big business – much bigger than in the UK, where people tend to eat out only on special occasions. Eating out in Japan can often also be much cheaper than buying food from the supermarket and making it yourself.
So, I’d like to dedicate a post to the wonderful things I ate in my week in Japan. I have *SO* many other food photos from the 3 years I lived there, I may have to do these more often.
Speaking of unusual food (… drink), here is some bottled tea that contains the goodness of green vegetables. You can see the things in it on the bottle – broccoli, cabbage, spinach… and there on the top right, goya. I HATE goya. It’s a vegetable from Okinawa in the south, that tastes really bitter. I was interested in this tea, then saw that and refused to even try it. Such is my loathing of goya.
This here is soy milk icecream. My town also does some pretty good tofu icecream, which you really must try if you come across it. You can find some really crazy icecream flavours in Japan.. even wasabi!
Fried stuff. People think that Japanese food is healthy. That if you eat enough sushi, you’ll live forever and be really skinny.
WRONG.
First of all, Japanese people have 3 ways of preparing food – eating it raw (fish, beef, chicken -yes, chicken… that’s a story for another day), pickling it to death or deep frying it. There is SO much deep fried food in Japan. When I had to eat Japanese school dinners (oh, that would make a good post too… hmm, I’m on a roll…) I got SO fat just from all the fried stuff they gave me all the time. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved fried crap as much as the next girl, but it was a real overkill. Before Japan, I didn’t have any opinions on fried stuff. Now, I don’t eat it if I don’t have to. Well, maybe a burger monthly.
Ah, now this is the good stuff. I love these kinds of dishes. Fish done in soy sauce, probably crap loads of sugar with ginger, mirin and all that stuff. The pickled plums are there to keep the “fishy” smell away, apparently.
Sushi AND deep fried stuff!
Again, creative snacks – this is chewing gum with 7 flavours that you can taste in one stick, one after another. Ok, so I could only taste 2 or 3 vaguely fruity flavours. But, they are still trying and that’s what counts.
My karaoke staples. A packet of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, whatever limited edition milk tea flavour is on, and some non-milk drink to wash the milk down with before singing (milk is very bad for singers…)
Fried stuff on sticks at chinatown in Kobe.
Mmm steamy goodness of niku-man. Steamed buns with meat inside.
While to us croquettes are cylindrical potato goodies, to Japanese people they are similar to hash browns, I guess, but with meat or prawns in them too. I really like them (though are in the deep fried stuff category…) The one above is “niku jyaga” flavour.
This one was just a Kobe beef croquette, but I had seen people queuing for hours for them, and went past at a time when the wait was only 5 minutes. So, I had a go. Japanese people were walking by, saying “woah, even foreigners want them!” and I had to stand on the pavement eating it which is taboo in Japan, but it was really good so worth it.
I think that concludes my round up of the food I ate. I have so many photos from when I used to have a Tumblr, so I might do more of these themed photo dumps. It was quite fun to write.
