One of the things I always tell people back in the USA is that the food in Japan is second to none. From the price, to the quality to the variety, eating here is a culinary dream.
I'll be doing a this series documenting the various foods I eat here in Japan. That includes home cooking, restaurants, snacks, everything and anything.
Tamagoyaki
This is a dish that is commonly eaten with sushi, both as a desert or add in some graded daikon and it becomes a side dish like below.
Tamagoyaki is basically a rolled up omelet sweetened by sugar. There are several variations of this dish by adding in various sauces, but essentially it's a sweet omelet and it's delicious.
Food Trucks
Food trucks have always been around in Japan. Since the food truck boom in the US it seems like there is a boom here now too.
This truck was at a service area, rest stop, on the freeway. These trucks are often overpriced, exotic food like this pork stick with cheese. It actually wasn't that bad, but the experience was worth the $4.50 price tag.
One food truck you can hardly go wrong with is the Yakitori trucks. Often times they use their own home made sauces that can be generations old. This is the yakitori truck that comes by my house Tuesdays and Fridays.
I grabbed a few skewers last night to supplement my wife's already delicious dinner, but I forgot to take pictures! You can't go wrong with the yakitori trucks.
Izakaya
Izakaya are the main staple of Japanese dining. They are restaurants that serve small dishes of a plethora of food. Sometimes they are fantastic, sometimes they are horrible, microwaved garbage and other times very exotic, like this place the Niigata HIVE guys took me to.
This was duck with seared, essentially raw, chicken and chrysanthemums with ikura(fish roe). Now, no matter how drunk I get I still wouldn't eat the semi-raw chicken, but the duck was delicious and the chrysanthemums were interesting. The latter had a normal plant taste kind of along the lines of a red cabbage. I was told these chrysanthemums are grown in Niigata and apparently are the only kind that are edible.
Another dish we had at the same izakaya were these pork ribs, Japanese style.
Served on a bed of onions with an unknown minced topping, the pork was excellent. It fell apart and melted in your mouth with each bite.
Home Cooking
I always look forward to my wife's cooking. Honestly sometimes I'd rather eat her food at home than go out.
One dish my kids love is okonomiyaki.
It's a Japanese style pancake filled with cabbage and pork and then topped with various things like cheese, mayonnaise & okonomiyaki sauce( a thinner, sweeter cats sauce), fish flakes and nori powder. You can add various ingredients to the pancake when cooking like seafood or what ever you can think of on top of it.
Of course a lot of foods need sauces and one of the best sauces in the world is Tabasco Chipotle sauce. Recently Japan started carrying this godsend so we always have it on our shelf and use it liberally on meat dishes.
Fresh Food
Now, when even 7-11 is selling fresh fruits & vegetables you know you're in the right place.
This is a very common sight here. Not necessarily 7-11, but open markets selling fresh foods outside. Often times I will be walking through neighborhoods and farmers will sell their products on a small, unoccupied stall right on their property.
I'll be back next week with a trip to an izakeya in Niigata we stumbled upon while searching for a place to eat. Here's a peek
