Food-and-Drink on Nanikore

Bike Tour: Lakes, Tea and Senbei

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 06:46:17 +0000

It’d been quite a few weeks since I’d been out on the motorbike for a day trip, so when my old friend CS offered up the middle day of a 3 day weekend for a trip out in November, I was up for it, and so spent some time staring at my Touring Mapple book and Google Maps to see where we could put in a few hundred kilometres.

The Classy Meet Up

As I’m all about style and culture, I had decided we should meet up on the infamous 246 road before moving up into the mountains of central and western Kanagawa Prefecture. The meeting place: The Eastern Gods Truck Station. Well technically it’s the Toushin Truck Station, but the literal translation of the kanji sounds a lot better in my opinion. Yes, it’s a truck stop - a fair sized one too - with a restaurant, showers, some rooms, and of course ample parking for large trucks, and a smaller area for vans. We parked up in the latter car and van park, CS’s Triumph Tiger 1200 dwarfing some of the vans, whilst everything dwarfed my CB400.

A cup of tea and a catch-up later we were on the 246 for a little while before heading north on the 412 and then moving onto the 413 and pushing west. The 413 is a decent road - well surfaced, the odd narrow portion, with plenty of twisties to play on. For the most part you’re going along valleys, but at elevation, so expect some dampness and mist, especially on an overcast day like we were on. It was at this point I discovered the mist loved settling on my visor and stubbornly refused to roll off, so I need to sort that out.

Doushi Road

About half way along, we came across a rest area near the town of Doshi, and sailing past all those people in cars who like to queue for parking spaces, we parked up in the bike area which was packed with bikes and bikers - men, women and children of all ages, with all manner of bikes, trikes and quads. It was a good place to take a break, with people queuing for various hot snacks or grilled chicken, pork, vegetables , some tasty looking grilled fish, as well as a shop selling powdered radish roots, fresh veg and other things there was no way I could fit on my bike. In the end I had a bottle of hot lemon juice from the the vending machine. A missed opportunity in retrospect - I should have queued for the grilled fish.

Back on the road, more twisties, but then a slower section in traffic around lake Yamanaka. I always like the lakes around Mt. Fuji, especially for the novelty ferries. I didn’t take a picture, but Yamanaka had the giant swan ferry on the water as we rode past.

Another missed food opportunity here: we went past several nice local places and pulled away from the commercialized lake area,and only when we were stopping for some fuel did we decide we were hungry, by which point our only real option was the nearby Royal Host. It’s perfectly acceptable as a place to eat, but as a franchise, we’d usually avoid it.

As CS has a GPS system, he oddly likes to make use of it, and due to this, it likes to run him a merry jaunt on occasion. This time, instead of taking us to a small tea house on a mountain road I had spied on Google Maps, it decided we really wanted to sit in more traffic around the outskirts of the larger Kawaguchi lake in a market stalls area where it continued to confidently claim the tea shop was always 3 minutes away,.

After fifteen minutes, we called it out, told it we weren’t happy, did U-turns and followed my direction following my paper map. That was better. Or at least it was better for a while, since on the 137, we were to look for road 708, a svelte mountain road where this legendary tea shop would be waiting for us. Unfortunately CS was a couple of cars in front of me, and he missed the turn. This left me bombing up the road thinking I was way behind, arriving at the beautiful tea-shop and realising it was just me. Long story short, CS did finally locate the place, and it was worth it.

Tea Time

It’s called Tenkachaya (天下茶屋), as in, ‘whole world under heaven’ tea shop. They also make and sell senbei rice crackers. There’s no parking as such, and the collection of cars and bikes basically hug the sides of the road. Inside it’s all wood, modestly lit, and very relaxing. The staff were really friendly, and explained what was available in the shop and on the menu. That’s when we noticed we’d misunderstood something. They do sell tea - indeed they give you a complimentary cup when you sit down - but their speciality is a blend coffee. I had to have one, and yes, it was very good. Also, the senbei were sweet, sort of lemon flavoured, and the staff advised us to break them in their plastic wrappers before eating because they could probably stop a bullet. They do taste rather good though, so we bought some as omiyage to take away too. It’s by itself really on that 708 road, which the tunnel making it far quicker to get to and from the lake, but it is worth the ride/drive up for a rest stop and to take in the view.

After that good rest we started winding our way towards the Chuo expressway, joining at it’s southern starting point, and following it east. There was plenty of traffic - perhaps people returning Sunday night to avoid the read traffic insanity of the Monday return, so we ended up filtering for a couple of kilometres before stopping before the Hachioji junction where we parted ways. My route would take me onto the newer Ken-O extension south. I like the road as it’s not so busy, there’s plenty of distance between junctions, and even though there aren’t yet service areas, it’s a relaxing ride though I should note, there’s no street lights along some sections, so with just me on my bike, even with the headlight on, it felt oddly isolated.

The only notable thing on that final stretch was that all the auto-payment arches (ETC) were broken on my exit ramp, so I had to stop and get off my bike, get my bike seat off to give the chap on the gate my ETC card so he could manually check it through, then put it all back together. I’ve never had to do that before. Odd really.

All in all a good day out.

(An aside here: the lake is called Kawaguchiko. That ‘ko’ denotes lake [湖], and though most signs in English say Lake Kawaguchiko, it’s technically Lake Kawaguchi I think).

Calligraphy and Food

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 20:25:48 +0000

We were out in the agricultural hills of central Kanagawa prefecture a couple of weeks ago, and stopped off at the 90 year old home of the Hekkoro / Gonbachi restaurant. It’s an old style wooden Japanese farm house, old wooden floors, a casual table layout, and the back is adorned with calligraphy and artwork from local art classes, mainly from children. Why not mix calligraphy and food?

Aside from serving some very decent food using local vegetables and making dishes from noodles to curry, it also allows you to read some of the books they have, and even do some shodou(書道 /calligraphy), which a couple of junior high school kids did actually do whilst we were there. On the day we went it was raining, and as you can see, the condensation on the doors to the garden was a relaxing backdrop to the calligraphy table.

It’s yet another interesting local place, a little bit out there, but worth a look if you’re anywhere near the vicinity. It has it’s own small gravel carpark, which isn’t too difficult to find from the road, and since it was raining quite heavily on the day we were there, it meant a short run from the car to the restaurant itself.

I had the black bean curry, and yes, it was very good. It’s also good to know that you’re eating local produce, and that it’s really fresh, which adds to the taste and the whole atmosphere of the place.

Interestingly, and this likely due to the local produce, they also have a page dedicated to local radiation readings, since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. That’s a thoughtful touch, even almost ten years on.

Recipe: Gazpacho Soup

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:58:08 +0000

As it’s probably been noted - it gets pretty hot in most of Japan in the summer, so what could be better than a nice bowl of chilled soup? Over the years I’ve come to quite like gazpacho soup, made famous to my generation in the UK from the comedy ‘Red Dwarf’, where the character Rimmer ruins his career by asking the chef to ‘heat it up’ whilst at the captain’s table. So then here is a recipe for gazpacho soup. The soup itself is Spanish in origin, so you can expect a lot of juicy ripe fruit in there.

Anyway, I’ve digressed already, this soup is prepared chilled from fresh ingredients, and should be chilled in a fridge before serving - it tastes very good after being chilled overnight. To make it, you really just need that fridge, some ingredients, and a blender. One thing I like about Gazpacho soup is that it’s difficult to say it’s wrong since there are so many permutations of it based on local recipes (a bit like Miso Shiru!).

For mine I get the following ingredients and roughly chop them into a bowl - this should make 6+ servings:

500g chopped Italian tomatoes
300g of bell peppers
200g of cucumber
juice of 1 lemon
50g of celery
5 cloves of garlic
100g of red onion
30g parsley
pinch of oregano

That goes into (and essentially fills) my blender! Give it a whirl around a bit until it’s broken down a bit, then add:

100g virgin olive oil

after a bit more time you can add some of the following to taste:

salt
pepper
balsamic vinegar
pepper sauce

You can really blend it as far as you like - I’ve tried leaving some more chunks in there, and I’ve tried taking it all the way down to a thick liquid, and it tastes good most ways, so you can’t really over blend it. You can also add some ingredients at the end just diced if you prefer.

Variations

There’s lots of ways you can do Gazpacho, adding a few things - I quite like adding a few olives, or sometimes a piman (a smaller Japanese non-spicy pepper) from my mini-garden. I’ve done some with several drops of Tabasco and it’s actually ended up really quite good for accompanying a BBQ, with that added spice and a drink. If you want it less spicy, you could add some cold boiled potato which would also thicken it up.

Also, if you don’t think you’ve got enough liquid in there after a minute or so of blending, you can add some tomato puree or juice.

Please post good variations in the comments!

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Kirsty Girl — 2011-07-27

This looks really good. Methinks I will be making this for lunch tomorrow.

gurahamu — 2011-07-28

It’s fairly quick n easy to make (just that principle chopping time) and if you have a small garden, you can make use of veg from there, which can be nice.

Recipe - Chicken Kiev

Sun, 15 May 2011 12:52:13 +0000

I’ve always liked chicken Kiev, though usually it’s been in a restaurant, or from a pre-made one back when I lived in the UK. I like the idea (garlic butter in a bread crumbed chicken breast) so I thought I’d have a go at a recipe for Chicken Kiev myself, from (almost) first principles.

I looked around and found quite a few recipes, but in the end they morphed something of my own. Some suggested deeper frying in corn oil which didn’t appeal to me, so I went for a more oven based approach with olive oil.

This was for two adults and a child. So then, the most important part:

485g of chicken (2 breasts)
1 egg
2 tblspn of flour
chicken filling: 1 tblspn of lemon juice
2 large cloves of garlic, chopped
~100g of butter salt and pepper
‘herbs’ - I used some parsley from the garden but tarragon seems popular
breadcrumbs - 100g from 3 slices of rye bread - dried a bit then blended (with no crusts in there!)

Oven: pre-heat to 200C

Prepare the chicken by cutting along the thickest part of the chicken breast to form a pocket as large as possible - you may even want to remove some of the chicken for this (I didn’t though).

Get all your filling together in a large bowl, and mix with a fork until it’s well mixed together, then leave it to sit.

Get three plates or bowls, and put a couple of tablespoons of flour in one, and in the other beat the egg. In the third bowl we want fresh breadcrumbs - get two or three slices of bread, minus the crusts, blend them for a couple of minutes and then put them in the bowl and let then dry a little.

Now stuff the butter/garlic mixture into the pocket - really pack it in there - then drag it in the flour, then the beaten egg, then roll in the breadcrumbs. I then closed the pocket with a couple of wooden skewers to keep as much butter in the chicken as possible.

Heat up a very thin layer of olive oil in a frying pan, and place the chicken in it, turning when it looks browned. Now put all of this (including the olive oil) into the 200C pre heated oven for 18-20mins. We have a handle-less frying pan which we simply placed in the oven, but an oven tray would be fine too.

Then, when the time is up, serve and eat! We had ours with boiled new potatoes and some pickles since it was a hot day - you can use the butter/olive oil in the oven tray as some sauce for the potatoes.

I really enjoyed it, though I’d like to make my own bread for the breadcrumbs too if I had time. The only thing I’d say is that it might be better going for smaller chicken breasts.

If you’re in the mood for something else along similar lines, try ‘ double stuffed pork chicken breasts’, which are delicious too, if something of a meat overload.

Three Local Beers

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:36:33 +0000

Just a short post. Over the last few years, perhaps due to family and tastes, I just seem to have gotten out of drinking beer very often, or at least the lager derived beer which constitutes such a large percentage of the market here. I should say though that whilst wine now represents the small amount of alcohol beverages I do drink, I have been trying some local micro-brewery beers to see what the local brewers are offering.

The three I tried this month were from two breweries - “Shonan Bitter” from the Kumazawa Brewery and “Kamakura Prime” and " Enoshima Beer" from the Kamakura Beer Company.

Overall they were all palatable ales. I’m not sure I’d want to drink too many of any of them on a given night, but if you’re having a bit of a house party they’d go down pretty well. They’re a little bit pricey - even in supermarkets - going for 400-500yen a bottle, compared to the 200-300yen for a can of lager. That said, you’ll enjoy one of these more than two cans of Asahi Super Dry.

Despite the names, by European standards, they’re perhaps not deep, rich tasting beers but again, very decent, and fit the region they come from - Shonan is famed for it’s beaches and layed back attitude - to being almost horizontal at times, and drinking these I don’t think of oak beamed pubs but of open fronted cafes selling yakitori with surf boards propped up.

Looking around, the area seems well served with local brews apparently grown from local hops too, so as I try a few more I’ll perhaps post on them, and actually make some more notes on the taste comparison front. I wouldn’t mind getting on the bike and visiting a hop farm too.

Recipe: Tsukune

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 01:48:49 +0000

Just like the recipe I put up before for misoshiru, I’m playing safe with another Japanese dish in that there are lots of different versions, so no-one can say I’m definitively wrong so this is a recipe for tsukune.

Tsukune is essentially a chicken ‘meatball’, often cooked over a flame or hot coals in restaurants - especially in yakitoriya. I quite like tsukun e so I thought I’d cook my own a bit more over the summer since they’re great over BBQ, and they’re really simple.

Ingredients:

400g of fresh chicken breast (no skin!)

~5g of fresh garlic (1 clove)

75g of diced fresh onion

1 tablespoon of olive oil

a little Tabasco sauce

a little soy sauce (usukuchi)

salt and black pepper

some tare sauce

some small wooden skewer/kebab sticks

a blender

The Making Bit

First, chop up all the chicken into chunks into a bowl, then add the olive oil, Tabasco, soy sauce , salt and pepper and stir it up to get it all well mixed in and whilst it’s sitting, dice up the onion and garlic quite finely, and add that to the chicken, stirring it in well.You can let it sit a bit now, and put your skewers into water, which should reduce the amount they burn later on.

Next, get your blender / food processor ready. In all honesty, you can just keep chopping the chicken and other ingredients up to get the consistency you want, but the blender is going to save you time - however, we’re aiming for a meatball type consistency, not a paste! Put everything in and work it through - chicken is quite fibrous, so you need to make sure you’ve got all the large chunks cut down. The onion should still be visible.

Once you’re happy it all looks right and consistent, ball it up, with a size of about an inch (~2.5cm) across. The mixture can be sticky, so don’t be afraid to use some flour to keep them from sticking to the plate and everything else, and keep your fingers wet when picking the mixture up.

Then simply place a few on each skewer and we’re ready to cook. When we aren’t having a BBQ, I tend to use our ridged Le Creuset skillet, but you can also grill them. Once they’re cooked through you can server them with a tare sauce.

As an option, you can put some fresh parsley or other herbs into the mixture, and cook with a little olive oil. you can also serve with some sliced lemon between each ball.

If anyone has any suggestions - please put them in the comments.

Recipe: Miso Shiru

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:22:51 +0000

I just thought I’d post on a little bit of simple cooking for a change, and something fairly synonymous with Japan - miso shiru. This is one of the recipes I’ve kind of worked along with of late - a carrot and daikon vegetable one.

I’m a big fan of soups generally, growing up with Scotch broth and chunky vegetable soups in the UK, so I tend to go a little heavier in this recipe than others.

Ingredients:
1 litre of water
150g of daikon
80g of carrots
100g of miso/dashi paste
135g of kinu tofu
Some Worcester sauce
Some wakame (type of seaweed)

Cooking time: 20-30mins. (to whatever). Makes 4-5 bowls worth.

First off, get the water boiling in a decent sized pan. Add the carrots and daikon to this. I tend to leave the vegetables chunky - about 1cm+ on a side - and since carrots and daikon are fairly hard, you want to soften them up a little before adding the rest of the ingredients.

This is when I usually add a few drops of Worcester sauce, which some people don’t go for, but I find it a bit more subtle than soy or bare salt, but still adding something to the background flavour.

Once the vegetables have softened up a little I take it off the boil, then slowly stir in the miso-dashi paste. I’m lazy - I don’t make my own dashi, and since I’ve seen nice old ladies buying the same stuff I use, it must be legitimate, right? I just don’t have time for boiling up various fish and such. Either way, it tastes pretty good.

Now is a good time to add wakame if that’s your thing, and after a few more minutes, add the tofu, once you’ve sliced that to the size you like. I find it prudent not to cut it too small, especially with kinu tofu, so it’s still easy to retrieve from the bowl when you’re eating, and so that it doesn’t fall to pieces if it’s sat cooking for any period of time.

Keep it going for a few more minutes, by which time the daikon should be cooked and the tofu will be mixed through and then serve in a small bowl.

For those not too familiar, you can usually get two main types of tofu in the supermarkets here - kinu （絹）and momen (木綿) - named after how they’re made, being from silk and cotton sieves respectively. The kinu tofus are a bit smoother, but some prefer the more solid momen variety.

A couple of friends have commented that I use more miso-dashi than they would, and from having had a lot of miso shiru in various restaurants, that’s probably true, so you might want to reduce the amount of miso. The truth is, I like miso. I like miso ramen. I like miso onigiri.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this simple recipe out there but it’s so simple it seems just too obvious. Any tips or family recipes always appreciated.

miso dashi

Shabu Shabu Split Bowl

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:24:40 +0000

An odd title to a post, but tonight we went out to have a bit of shabu shabu for the first time in a while.

For those who don’t know, shabu shabu is a meal where you have a big bowl of boiling water, and you sweep (or drop in and leave) very thin slices of beef or pork through it until it’s cooked and then eat it with different sauces like sesame (for example). The same goes for vegetables too - just put some carrots in there or such, pull them out when they’re ready and eat away.

We went to a branch of the Mo Mo Paradise chain in Ginza, and the twist here is that you don’t just get a choice of water to cook your sliced meat in, but of three soups: cow’s tongue, kimuchi and a salt based, potentially pork based one. We went for the first two. At this point in my order, I thought I’d got it wrong as the waitress said we’d need two nabe (pots/pans), one for each soup.

Ah. I was trying to see how we were going to fit two pots on the heating element in the middle of the table, and still be able to heat them both, when the waitress returned with split bowl shown below, in an almost yin-yang configuration. for reference, that’s the kimuchi on the right. I just thought I’d post it because I’d never seen one like this before, and it looked pretty good.

Miso Shiru Musings

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:35:49 +0000

So basically, when I woke up last Sunday morning, I was thinking about making some miso shiru. This is not a normal way to wake up. A normal way to wake up is either a) thinking about an enormous fried breakfast which somehow makes itself and then does the washing up, or b) going back to bed because it’s still technically ‘AM’.

Or both.

However, there I was wandering around the apartment thinking about miso shiru. Of course, like anything, my plan just got grander and grander.

“I’m going to grind fresh miso, make my own dashi from dead fish, recycled Gundam robots etc., make my own tofu and find clams and such on Tsukiji market to flavour. It will truly be an epic soup!! [Insert evil laugh here]”

Me

One thing I do know about my local supermarket on a Sunday AM is that it’s packed with customers over the age of 120. Hundreds of them. All buying the same things. So I decided to spend a bit more time in the planning phase.

After a cup of tea and a good sit down at the dining table, the whole thing seemed like a lot of hard work. Maybe I’d buy the dashi paste or powder and to be honest I don’t actually like clams, so what’s the point in that?

After another cup of tea and a quick game of Katamari Damashi, the ‘grinding your own miso’ thing seemed positively twentieth century - you can get very reasonable miso in a tube I’m told.

It takes a lot of time to make tofu. I remember seeing a programme on TV about it. Also, I don’t have the huge bath they had, so I’m better off just buying some.

OK. I have my plan. Just one more cup of tea, and off to the shop.

So after another quick Katamari session, I got to the supermarket, and had decided to do an all vegetable miso shiru based on the truth that I had a lot of veggies in the fridge which needed using. Potatoes, carrots and mushrooms to be exact. Also, I spied a tub of miso/dashi paste. Pre-mixed! I saw an elderly lady buy one, so I figured it must be pretty good, because I can’t quite see her allowing herself to be ridiculed by friends and family for not knowing how to make good miso shiru.

Buying the tofu proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Actually, it shouldn’t have been. There’s basically two types in our local supermarket - kinu and momen. They’re actually made differently, taste different, and have slightly different consistencies. I wanted momen, which should have been easy as I can read the ‘kinu’ kanji pretty easily, so I just needed to avoid it.

Actually, it was only after I bought the kinu tofu, and carried it home, that I had this epiphany. Ah well, no problem, I’ll just figure it out later.

Bottom line was I mixed the dashi/miso mix (very twenty first century I might add) with hot water for a few minutes, added my slightly pre-boiled potatoes and carrots, then a bit later the mushrooms, and then finally, a couple of minutes before serving, the slightly soft tofu. Outcome: complete success. See, I knew that was a quick, pain free idea.

No, there was no wakame. I just wasn’t in a seaweedy mood that day. Maybe next Sunday.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Paul Brown — 2006-02-13

I hate to spoil it for you after all that effort, but those nice fellas at Heinz do tomato soup in a can which involves the following preparation:

Open can (essential)
Pour contents of can into bowl or big mug
Place bowl or mug into microwave and nuke the bejeezus out of it
Drink soup
Burn skin off tongue and roof of mouth

Now THAT’S 21st century.

graham — 2006-02-13

In the old days I would agree with you. Get that Mulllllahhhgittawny soup, Nuke it in the microwave for about ten minutes or until the plastic bowl starts to go a bit wobbly, then chuck it in your mouth.

nowadays, we need healthier food like tofu and bean paste….to stick in the microwave for ten minutes until the bowl starts to wobble etc.

Times they are indeed ‘a changin’.

Honestly Bad Coffee

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 05:18:27 +0000

Every now and then it’s good to try something you don’t often try. To be honest to yourself. However, a bad time for this is before a meeting at work, and a bad thing to try is a different variety of something you aren’t keen on anyway.

For me, this was a different type of canned cold coffee from the works fridge. Generally, I don’t drink these, but when one is called " Honesty" you have to at least give it a try right?

Wrong.

This was awful, vile, disgusting. If this coffee was a relative, you’d send it really nasty socks at Xmas. If you see this in the konbini, give it a miss. Honestly.

No 2 soups can be the same

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 00:13:45 +0000

This is a weak post. I know it’s a weak post. But I’m going to do it anyway.

Today was hot. Hot and humid, and I walked all the way from Maru building near Tokyo Station, to Ginza.

Did I mention it was hot and humid?

Anyway, by the time I got back to Maru, I’d got a little hungry and decided to head over to Tokyo Soup Stock for some lunch. I was feeling pretty hungry and noticed that Chili Con Carne was on the menu this month, and it’s usually really good. I ordered then the ‘Soup Stock Set’, which is 2 regular cartons of soup and some rice or bread. The counter person asked me what I wanted - ‘Soup stock set with bread’. ‘Which soup?’ ‘Chili Con Carne for both please.’ ‘I’m sorry, we can’t do that.’ ‘Do what? Chili Con Carne is on the menu isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, but with this set, you must have 2 different soups’. ‘Why?’ ‘…’

So I ended up with chili and a pork stroganof.

I did say it was a weak post, but no weaker than that rule. I think I’ll try again next week and see whether I just got a rigid employee on a bad day. The exchange went on a little longer than I put here, but I think you get the point.

They never tell me I can’t have two butadons in Yoshinoya.

Original Comments

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Luke — 2004-07-09

Maybe we should band together and keep asking them everyday. If they don’t offer it just go away :)

Spoon fed

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:34:43 +0000

My long suffering partner and I decided to go out for a meal to the ‘Hiro’ restaurant on the 35th floor of Maru Building in front of Tokyo station. It’s a beautiful looking place, with an amazing view over Tokyo, which looked fabulous as the sun set. The food, as you would expect, comes in many small courses, each well made and presented, but the course that really impressed us was the caviar and rice entree, which, as it was only really a mouthful’s worth, came all ready on a spoon.

When the waiter presented it, he exclaimed “You may be surprised…it looks like sushi but it’s not!”. We were thinking it looked like a few bits of rice and caviar on a spoon. I’ve had small courses before, but not one where it came pre-attached to the cutlery.

We kind of looked at each other for a second, and at some of the other diners…was this a sample? Like a waiter presenting a taster glass of wine before pouring for all? Nope, that was it, though I should say that it was absolutely delicious.

All said, ‘Hiro’ is a great place for a date or a special occassion. Prices for dinner start at 9,000yen for a set meal, so I’ll be living off pot noodles and Yoshinoya for a while.

Gososamadeshita!

Food revisited

Sat, 13 Mar 2004 02:41:26 +0000

Many may know that a few weeks ago Yoshinoya and pretty much every purveyor of gyudon (sliced beef and onion on rice) stopped selling the delicious dish (or bowl) due to pretty much every cow (and many politicians) developing BSE.

However, following a tip-off from a friend (thanks Ueda-san), I took advantage of an introductory pricing offer (oomori for 350yen) and tried Yoshinoya’s new thing - butadon. Basically gyudon, but with pork instead of beef (and a few other herbs in my opinion). I have to say that I was impressed. Get to your nearest Yoshinoya now, and give it a go. Want something extra? Get a hanjuku tamago (soft boiled egg) to go with it.

((Apologies for all the brackets above.))

What can I eat?

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 17:28:57 +0000

I noticed on my way home the other day that McDonalds is now selling a fish version of McNuggets. Why is this? Well, I suspect it may because it seems to be about the only safe thing now. Except vegetables. For now.

The last couple of days has seen not only a huge increase in bird flu, but also BSE cases anew.

Sadly, the owners of a chicken-farm which tried to cover up the death-rate from the bird-flu hanged themselves. This isn’t a massive surprise to the Japanese - cover ups of even massive health issues aren’t unknown – recent years have seen falsified nuclear safety reports and a few real screw ups ( and here too).

The Agriculture ministry also announced today the 11th official case of BSE in Japan. All of a sudden, that mass slaughter in the UK a few years ago doesn’t seem so over-done.

This all bothers me, and I think to be honest in a few months I’ll end up being a vegetarian whether I like it or not.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

kevin — 2004-03-10

Beans aren’t scary! Eat beans. Beans, beans, beans!

Let’s all eat beans.

Seriously though. The big beef scare has been a big boost for the environment. Chickens don’t have near as bad of an effect, but beans are the best. :)

kevin — 2004-03-10

BTW, There is a good show on NPR’s The Connection about food scares.

If you have an hour, you may want to listen to it.

http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/03/20040309_b_main.asp

“It’s getting hard these days to find good news about food. Most recently, it started with the beef. Stampeding mad cows sent consumers running to the fish counter, only to learn that their beloved farm-raised salmon was tainted with toxins. Then the chickens got the flu, and there’s that buzz about coffee increasing the risk of miscarriages. The list doesn’t stop there.

Daily headlines herald new fears and spark new phobias: mercury-poisoned swordfish, killer cheese, and so-called spring water that’s really from the tap.

The flood of information has many of us scratching our heads in the produce department, wondering what is safe to eat.”