Memories of Japan

I had meant to start this blog with a report on eating in Japan, but as I never got round to writing that report, this'll just be a brief ode to the joys of eating in Japan and some padding for the photos of some of the dishes I ate on my trip in November 06. Looking back at those photos, here are my 8 key memories:

1. Okonomiyaki is my favourite dish in the world and Fugetsu is my favourite chain restaurant . The care they take over making okonomiyaki there is really something, coming back to your hot-plate 6-8 times during the cooking process to make sure that the finished dish is going to be just right. I guess that if you had told a fussy teenage me that my favourite dish in adulthood would be a combination of egg-fried cabbage, noodles, seaweed, kimchi, spring onions and cheese, covered with mayonnaise and brown sauce, I would have come out with whatever "whatever..." was back then.

2. Kushi-age rocks! Can you imagine anything much better than sitting at a bar with a big bowl of soy sauce and a guy handing you skewers of bread-crumbed, deep-fried peppers, onion, mushrooms, aubergine and quail's eggs, which you can then dip in the soy, and add chilli flakes if that's your thing. You even get a big bowl of raw cabbage to chew on, to whet your appetite and to clean your palate for the sinful ingestion of skewer after skewer of the real deal.

3. Domburi, domburi, domburi. If all the richness of okonomiyaki and kushi-age have got to you, what better than going zen with a domburi bowl of sticky rice with egg, covered in vegetables. The one we tried near Daitoku-ji in Kyoto was made with avocado and tomato in a pretty hippyish joint and I've since had the real deal with more sauce and shitake which was just the thing when you want a meal that tastes great and leaves you feeling saintly.

4. Did I say saintly? Who's to say that the holy wouldn't enjoy the breakfast of doughnuts I had most days in Japan. I'll save the long "doughnuts are the breakfast of kings" spiel for another post and just refer you to the picture of a Mr Donut breakfast tray (only two of the doughnuts in the photo were mine, honest).

5. The food-floors in big Japanese department stores are something else. You could spend hours in somewhere like Hanshin, particularly if, like me, you wander round adding things to your basket and then realise you have to retrace your steps and pay for things at each individual concession. Had some great yaki-soba there and also marvelled at the quality of the patisserie; well, marvelled and ate.

6. A Japanese-style breakfast of miso soup, rice, pickles and seaweed can be a pretty good thing, as I hope the photo from the breakfast buffet in the Tokyu hotel in Hakuba shows. Another great thing about such buffets is that you can load-up on fruit which is, as people say, bizarrely expensive. There's some kind of racket going on there, but I can't work out what it is. That said, the apples and apple juice from the Japan Alps region are awesome, and the breakfast buffets also have chips.

7. I like udon. My stepmother reliably informs me that in a league of classiness, udon and ramen fight it out at the bottom of the pile, with the aristocrat soba sitting pretty in the noodle rankings, but my uncultured palate can't get enough of udon: so thick, so delicious and so likely to be served in a place where you can get slightly cold, but delicious tempura, and cheap too.

8. I guess that if I lived in Japan, the novelty might wear off, but as a tourist the whole vending machine thing is endlessly fascinating. Fancy a beer on top of an isolated mountain top? Just scrabble around for the 300 Yen and look for the machine.