Japanese Food

Prior to coming to Japan we never really thought about Japanese food. We made the effort to try what we thought was sushi in London a couple of months before we came, but apart from that we didn't give it much thought. We naively thought you'd be able to buy most things like you can in Europe.

That naivety made our first trip to the supermarket quite memorable! We walked around in a bit of a daze firstly shocked by the price of fruit and vegetables, then by the amount of fish they stocked and the fact that had no tinned food and only one small freezer. Oh and then the biggest problem was that everything was in Japanese! For the first couple of months food consisted of chicken,vegetables and microwave rice.

The fruit and vegetables are really expensive as they are really big and all locally produced. You can buy one apple for a pound whilst a peach, like the one in the picture, will cost you about 1.50.

After that initial shock we actually enjoyed visiting the supermarket to look at all of the crazy stuff. We would walk around prodding anything we thought looked strange! The best thing we found was live sea creatures moving around in their plastic bag of a home. We would squeal at each other and act like two 5 year olds, the locals couldn't help but laugh at us! It was on these expeditions we also found tinned tomatoes and tinned fruit!

We also found some delightful stuff the Japanese call natto. They eat this with miso soup and rice for breakfast. My students love the stuff so I decided we should try it. I was given the instructions to stir it 100 times to make it taste good! I could have stirred it a hundred thousand times and it would have still taste bloody awful! But then I guess fermented soy bean was never meant to taste good. Do you fancy some?

We have found some good food and I now love sushi and sashumi (Andy is slowly getting there) and miso soup (I make a great vegetable miso soup). Andy loves the meat dishes.

This is sashumi. Sashumi is raw fish with no rice whilst sushi is raw fish with rice.

This is us taking it to the next level and having sushi for breakfast

We have also come to like the food below:

This is miso soup, but if you prefer you can wakami soup which comes with seaweed. Yum Yum

This delight is actually a desert but we try not to eat it often.

These green and purple balls are mochi. Mochi is a rice ball filled with mashed up aduki beans. They take a bit of getting used to but now we (me more than Andy) like eating them when they are hot.

Bentos are one of the best things about Japan. They cost about 3 pounds and come in various different varieties. They fill you up so much and are great when you are too tired to cook!

This delightful meal is an example of the school lunch I eat everyday.We don't get to pick what we want, rather we are given it and told to eat it all, and pretend that it tastes fantastic! We have three days of Japanese style which means our meal comes with rice. The other two days come with bread.