I ate a lot of food in Japan, and took a lot of photos. Not all the photos I took were pretty enough to merit their own post, but I think they’re interesting. So I thought that maybe all together they’d be worth sharing.
Behold: an experiment in photo quantity over photo quality.
1: Japanese pasta salad, 2: Hand rolls (and I helped!), 3: Korean cold noodles with kimchi
4: Katsu-don at a “family restaurant”, 5: Actual cronuts from the local kombini, 6: Fried chicken
7: A little Japanese cheeseburger, 8: A bowl of noodles with pork belly and powdered cheese, 9: Oranges
10: When you drop your gyoza in your ramen, 11: Kimchi and pork stir fry, 12: Pork-stuffed lotus root
13: Chicken nanban (fried with a mayo-egg sauce on top), 14: Tonkotsu ramen, 15: Burdock root
16: Biscotti from Coci’s Oven in Nakatane, 17: A ramen whose name I refuse to repeat, 18: Mo’s burger
19: Salad and cat plates, 20: Chicken tail yakitori, 21: Chicken hearts, livers, intestines, skin, OH and meat
22: My favorite veggie stir fry, 23: Gyoza, 24: Japanese breakfast with burdock root, fish, and rice with yolk
25: Cooking chicken at our table, 26: Anchovy sashimi (I think), 27: Shiso and mushroom tempura
28: Some kind of gelatinous sweet thing with crushed peanuts, 29: Tonkatsu, 30: Herb tea with roasted wheat
31: Pork and veggie stir fry, 32: Boiled peanuts (not the only ones I had) 33: HUGE avocado tuna roll
34: A really good salad, 35: Spring rolls at the Sun Pearl, 36: Sashimi at the Sun Pearl
37: A BLT with a hard-fried egg, 38: A fancy meal at a set-meal place, 39: My favorite pastry
40: Salt-broiled fish with miso soup, 41: “Western” style breakfast, 42: Lunch special at Hana Outa
43: Men’s almond Kit Kat (of course) 44: Thai style yakisoba (pad thai), 45: My favorite vending machine drink
46: Nabe stew with kimchi broth, 47: Tiny tanegashima fishies, to eat whole. 48: Tempura sweet potato
49: Tongue and other off-cuts at Korean BBQ, 50: Intestines on the grill, 51: Japanese pomelo
52: Broiled amberjack collar with shredded diakon, 53: Chicken tartare with egg yolk, 54: Sashimi
55: Soba noodles with seaweed and fish cakes, 56: Egg don, 57: New year soba with tempura
58: Tanegashima red rice, 59: Notorious chicken sashimi, 60: Fried fish and avocado burger
61: Chicken curry, 62: Random fried snack from the kombini in Hakone, 63: Sweet potatoes, cooked and dried
64: Japanese bento from the kombini, 65: Consomme served on JAL, 66: My favorite garlic fried rice
So much food, right? Looking at them all lined up makes me hungry. Some of my favorite meals are undocumented too, because of bad lighting or just overwhelming enthusiasm for my meal, which makes it hard to remember to whip out the camera.
i really am so confused about the chicken sashimi. is that approved by the FDA? so, would you say that this experience opened your palate a little? did you end up liking some things you didn't in the beginning? loved these pix! thanks for sharing. some interesting stuff there.
miranda — April 23, 2014It's really weird, but Japanese chickens aren't kept the way we do here, so you aren't likely to get sick from eating them raw. Salmonella happens when chickens have to stand around in their own poop all day, which they don't do in Japan. Texture and flavor-wise I'm not a fan of raw chicken, just because I know if I was in America I'd be in the hospital the next day. My head says it's wrong! As far as things I developed a taste for - I'd have to say miso and seaweed (to an extent) and sashimi. I went in not loving any of them, but now I like miso and sashimi and I can totally deal with seaweed.
courtney — April 24, 2014