Everyday Food Porn -- Part I

This is the first thing I ate when I got back to Japan. It's a bento (弁当) I bought at Tokyo Station (東京駅).

Each city's main train station sells special bento -- ekiben (駅弁). Since Tokyo Station is the terminal for multpile lines of bullet trains, you can imagine it's ekiben heaven. Everybody grabs one on the way to the platform.

I had my eye on one of those daily special ekiben but it was way too big to carry. My hands were full with cat and cat paraphernalia so I settled on the smaller, old school makunouchi bento (幕の内). It's got grilled salted salmon, some simmered veggies and pickles. The rice in bento often has a red pickled plum right in the middle; it's supposed to remind you of the Japanese flag. When I dug in, I thought to myself, you're gonna eat really well for the forseeable future!


A bowl of udon in light broth. A bowl of rice with
tempura and sauce. Some pickles. (天丼セット) Simple. Cheap. And amazingly good, especially in winter.

What kind of tempura can you see? I see eggplant (なす), pumpkin (かぼちゃ), shrimp (えび), and Japanese whiting (きす). What? It's a finger-sized white fish perfect for frying.











The afternoon selection
at a bakery
called Pure Dough!
That exclamation point
is not mine;
it belongs to
the name of the shop.





I love going to the fish markets here.
This one thinks he is Steve McQueen.
Make a break for it, guys!





I'm on housework duty for the time being, which means my biggest responsibility is dinner. So far, no disasters. Actually, Yuki made most of the first night's dinner. I took care of last night's.


Miso soup. (Y)

Stir-fried pork belly and cabbage. (Y)

Stir-fried Manila clams with spring onions (me)


























This kind of fish is called shiroguchi (しろぐち) or ishimochi (いしもち) in Japanese. It took a bit of googling to find its English name because the poor thing doesn't have a wikipedia page in either English or Japanese...yet.

Anyway, in English you can call it...drumroll...silver jewfish.

Yeah, it needs a better tag. Someone should recommend a rapper name for it.

How do you eat it?




You grill it. And then eat it with some Thai sweet chilli sauce.




Don't forget a veggie dish: bean sprouts with two kinds of mushrooms, enoki (えのき) and shimeji (しめじ).


All this stuff came from the food court at this monster shopping mall in Kameda, Niigata. The place is not yet two years old so everything was super clean.













Ramen (ラーメン) in a soup made from chicken stock. And pot stickers (餃子).　The pot stickers are kinda big. I like my Japanese pot stickers small and my Chinese pot stickers oversized.

Picky? Hell yeah!














Curry rice. Bowl of udon with seaweed (わかめうどん). Squid tentacle tenpura (イカゲソ).
Yes, that is a lot of food, expecially for just $7.















I don't go to Micky Dee's in the US on moral grounds but in Japan, I don't mind because the ground has changed.

Yet, I still have standards. I eat just the teriyaki burger.