Beefy Fat

Do I have your attention yet?  Facebook has this strange bug in which the only screenshot I can add to a link is the first picture on the blog post.  So obviously I'm starting with the picture above.

And then moving backwards in time to cover what's happened since the beginning of the week.  Nothing happened.  I finished classes and ate some mildly interesting things.

#1: Early in the week, I felt like some taiyaki.  So I bought a custard and a choco taiyaki from the corner taiyaki store on my way back from class.

Chocolaty, really chocolaty.  The custard was much better, and I wish I had gotten a red bean. 

#2: A ramen joint across the street closed down to general unpopularity and lack of business.  In its stead a curry place took over the space.

So one day, I sauntered over and took one of their European Style Beef Curries to go.  I figured that for 290 Yen, I really couldn't go wrong.  What I ended up with is this:

I guess beef curry just means it's made from beef, because I got no meat.  I mean I can't complain too much for 290 Yen, but I do feel misled.  Feeling like I needed some protein, I microwaved some sausages and added them to my meal.

Pretty good.  Definitely a little dark tasting, but complex and a bit spicy as well.  Not sure if I like it more than Coco Ichiban down the street, but like I said...290 Yen.  Speaking of which, we are way under-budget.  We basically stayed in and did nothing for the last two months, so we have this fortunate problem of having a couple thousand dollars too many.  So much for getting out there and experiencing Japan, right?  Our remedy for this situation?  Eat everything.

#3: Our friend Kyoko posted a picture on facebook claiming that this one drink was おいしい~.  So, I stopped by one of the million vending machines in the area to try Morinaga Hot Cake Milkshake.

I think miruku se-ki probably means milkshake, but I could be wrong because it wasn't like a milkshake at all.  It tasted more like a maple milk tea than pancakes really.  What is this strange Japanese marketing ploy?!  Do the Japanese want their drinks to taste like breakfast foods?  My verdict: just ok.  The coffee and tea that come in vending machines is just too sweet for me.  I like my coffee black and my tea green...or black...or yeah.

Thursday was my last class and we made plans for a last second shopping trip on Friday before flying out.  As usual, family was asking us to buy a million thing before coming back to Taipei.  V and I had two things for ourselves on the agenda.  V had promised to buy me a pair of jeans for Christmas and I planned to buy her a camera in return. Also, we wanted to meet up with people before we left; fortunately or unfortunately, the only ones available we Diana and Gordon.  Thus Friday night turned into a double-date.

We went to Bic Camera to purchase the Sony Nex-3 that V had been eying for months.  We spent way too long there trying to figure out how to sign up for a credit card in order to get a huge discount, for which I was ultimately denied.  I don't think I've ever gotten declined for a credit card...  Here's V and her new camera in a picture from my suddenly obsolete one.

That thing does it all.  It's a compact DSLR, but it comes with two lens, takes 720P movies in 3D, and comes in pink.  Talk about unnecessary functions...I don't even know anyone with a 3D TV.  V doesn't have depth perception and can't watch 3D movies.  Hmmm...  Also, I am now deathly afraid of V and her HD pictures.  They say that nowadays, people on TV just pile on the makeup because HDTV is so unforgiving; that's how I feel right now. 

Case in point: here is V's camera's virginal photo of me and Diana.  Looks clean right?  Too clean...  The camera supposedly has a feature to reduce blemishes and essentially fix your face.  Need to turn that on, like now.

On my end, I finally took the plunge and got a pair of Studio D'artisan's.  Correction: V got them for me!  I love my wife.  Here's what they look like on wear zero.

I'll keep updating how they fade and change as I wear them out.  Excited about that.

On our way back, we found this donut stand in the Meiji-Jingumae metro station.  Neither of us had eaten much at all, so we decided to try what the advertisement told us was the #1 donut on Rakuten.

This matcha azuki donut tastes more like cake than a donut.  I suppose that's why the store claimed that women like it.  It definitely felt healthier than the typically fried kind we're used to.  We didn't feel bad at all eating two.

After finishing all of our business, we finally met up with Diana at 六歌仙 - Rokkasen.  We've known about Rokkasen for a while, since the first time we walked through Shinjuku to check out or apartment, our realtor pointed it out and told us that place has yummy yakiniku.  We didn't know how pricy it was at the time, but we sat down for our most expensive meal in Japan.

V and I still hadn't tried Wagyu beef in Japan, and so we made a point to give it a go.  Originally, we had targeted Kobe beef, but Matsuzaka beef is actually held in higher regard and when we saw it on the menu, everyone decided to get that course.  The entire course included some side dishes, a salad, salted beef tongue, spine lobster, short ribs, and finished with the Matsuzaka ro-su (which I think is tenderloin).

Everything was righteously delicious.  The beef tongue was amazingly soft; I don't understand how it's possible to make tongue that marbleized.

Lobster.  Can't go wrong.  It took a little while to cook though, and the poor short rib waited on the side as we tried to get the shellfish to cook all the way through.  Eight courses in, we were doing pretty well, but we still had a couple to go.  Eight sounds like a lot, but they included stuff like lettuce as a course, so we only really ate maybe four or five different dishes.  Yeah, ok.  That still sounds like a lot.  Regardless, the star of the show finally arrived.

Supposedly Matsuzaka cattle is all female.  They're famous for being fed beer, but I found out that it's not to make them fat.  It's to make them eat more when they lose their appetite.  Additionally, they're rubbed down with shochu, given massages, and then gently walked in the afternoon.  A great deal of effort is put in to give you a cut of meat with that much marbleization in it.

When you eat it, you can clearly tell the difference (despite what Diana says).  I described it as "beefy fat" rather than fatty beef.  The sensation of it just melting away in the mouth is one that has no precedent in my culinary experience.  V has decided to go vegetarian for a while to give her arteries a break.

We actually had another course which was a rice course.  You got your pick of bibimbap, gukbap, or juk.  They were all pretty good, but I don't know if anyone finished theirs after the multitude of other courses we had just had.  We finished off with some strawberry and yuzu sorbet.  They were a nice touch, but Diana was disappointed that they didn't have the popsicles she had gotten the last time she came.  Posicles.

Rokkasen and Wagyu was an amazing experience.  I'm not sure if I need to eat it again anytime soon, but I am really glad that we finally tried Matsuzaka.  The only issue we had with dinner was that they kept rushing us to finish eating in two hours or so.  I guess they must have felt bad about it too since they gave us a discount.

Oh wait, that's only 4 Yen off.  Thanks for the 0.01% discount, guys.  We were contemplating just paying that extra 4 Yen to spite them, but quite frankly dinner was too enjoyable for us to be such assholes.

Tomorrow we fly out again for Taipei.  Feels like we've been there a lot lately, but Chinese New Year's is coming up and it's going to be my first time experiencing it for real.  V is excited too since it's been forever since she's been back for the Chinese holiday season.  It'll be my first time and the maiden voyage for V's new camera.  Look forward to it.

Dosukoi!

Wow nearly two weeks since my last post.  With all of my work piling up, I have been a bit too busy to write a post.  Did you know it takes me about two hours to pump one of these out? At about 70 posts, that means I have put in about 140 hours into this blog.  Wow.  Any chance I can get to 100 before I leave Japan?  Unlikely.

It's starting to kick in that we're not going to be here much longer, and we're trying to figure out our plans for February and March.  I'm still busy this week, so unfortunately we don't have anything significant planned.  Lately, we haven't even been eating anything special either.

On one of the days we didn't know what to eat, I decided to sample some cuisine specific to Japan: vending machine corn soup.

It can be described as a combination of "pretty good" and "exactly what I expected."  Drinking soup out of a can is quite pleasant actually, and I could see myself using it to warm myself up from time to time.  There's also a tomato basil that I suppose I could try as well.

I had a weird day on Tuesday when basically all of my classes save one was canceled; too bad no one bothered to tell me until I was already on campus.  My morning class only has three other people in it now, and the guy who was supposed to present today ended up sick.  So the professor and the rest of us decided to go for an early lunch at a local establishment, Asa no Ha.

Asa no Ha is a quaint little shop that probably seats fifteen at the most.  The menu is written on a blackboard outside and the chef is set up at a counter putting the meal together in front of you.  Everything was under 1000 Yen including my Asa no Ha Bento.

This was actually one of the top ten things I've had in Japan.  So much attention to detail and impeccably put together, right now I'm thinking about how many more times I might be able to eat this. 

Cat on a taxi.

Two days in a row, the same cat was sitting on the same taxi...leering at me.

One of the must-do's on my list was to attend a sumo tournament.  With the January tournament ending this week, we painfully figured out how to buy tickets for Friday.  Actually, the website we were trying to buy tickets on wouldn't take any of our credit cards, and we eventually had to ask Diana to help us buy them.  Thanks Diana!

Every year there are six sumo tournaments and half of them take place at Tokyo's Ryōgoku Kokukigan (両国国技館).  Tournaments are 15 days long and wrestlers have one match a day.  With twenty or so matches, they all kind of blend together when you don't know anyone's name.  Actually we spent most of the time trying to figure out who was who.

There's a lot of pomp and circumstance surrounding sumo.  The matches last a couple seconds, but in between each match, someone comes out to sing.  Wrestlers drink from a ladle passed to them by the participants of the next match, and then throw some salt into the ring.

They move over to the center of the ring and get into ready position...and then back out.  Then they walk over to the corner and slap themselves a couple of times and throw more salt.  The match doesn't begin until both wrestlers are totally ready and they both touch they fists to the ground.  Once those fists touch though, they explode at each other until someone either ends up on the ground or outside the ring.  

The longest match we saw lasted about a minute, and ended when the two wrestlers were locked in the center of the ring; then one just picked up the other and carried him out of the ring, limbs flailing wildly.  It was pretty incredible.  I have to say, my respect for sumo wrestlers as athletes has grown tremendously. Anytime I see a retired sumo wrestler on TV, he is totally trimmed down.  Sumo wrestlers expend an enormous amount of calories training and eat nonsensically just to keep on the weight.

The best wrestlers aren't even the biggest.  Currently there is one Yokozuna, Hakuho, and he's swiftly becoming one of the greatest of all time.  He's the one on the bottom of this picture:

It's hard to tell, but the other wrestler outsizes him dramatically.  Hakuho has only lost 2 matches in his last six tournaments, both of them to the same opponent.  His streak includes 63 wins in a row (tied for 2nd all-time).  I think the Yokozuna is always the last to go, and the last match has a million advertisements.

It has to disrupt his concentration a little right?  Hakuho took out his opponent but with a bit of difficulty.  After the last match they do the bow ceremony; this supposedly portrays the gratitude of the victors.

All in all, it was an interesting experience.  It's tough to get too involved in the sport with the large breaks in between matches and no knowing who anyone is.  I would like to go one more time and not sit in the nosebleeds, but I doubt I'll have the chance.

As we were leaving, a million people were getting these gift bags that just looked like they were filled with random food.  I was soo tempted to buy one but was afraid of being stuck with a bag of crap again.  Someone needs to tell me what that's all about.

新年会 - Shinnenkai(s)

I forgot to mention; the okonomiyaki place used these crazy mutant eggs that had two yolks!  Every single egg popped out twins...amazing.

My favorite word of the new year is "katzenjammer."  Go google it. I wondered why everyone wanted to meet up on Sunday instead of Saturday.  Turns out Monday is a national holiday, 成人の日, Seijin no Hi.  Coming of Age Day is basically the day when all the new twenty-year-olds celebrate their passage into adulthood.  I missed most of the day being a little hungover; that's what happens when you start drinking at 4 PM.  

Shinnenkai's are just parties celebrating the new year, and my first was at the residence of a guest lecturer for a class I wasn't in, Mori-san.  Steve and Dominique, who are both in said class, accompanied me to Mori-san's four story residence in Aoyama-Itchome.  

Pretty amazing house; it's located next to the Canadian Embassy and sure enough I met the Canadian ambassador that day...  We talked about Obama.  I met Mori-san's son and a lot of other people I don't totally remember.  About half of the people there were students and the other half were acquaintances of the host.  One of those acquaintances was Japan's representative to Miss Universe 2006.

She made yakisoba with this guy on the right...forgot his name.  Oh come on, it's not like I remember Miss Japan's name either.  Yeah I met a whole lot of random people and practically drank an entire bottle of wine.  Dominique busted out the mad skills of the 5th ranked Yoyo-er in Europe:

6:30 rolled around and I had to bail to catch dinner in Shin-Okubo.  Of course by then I had already eaten my fill.  I didn't end up eating much at that dinner, but I have to say the kanton we went to this time was pretty disappointing.  They didn't even give us any lettuce!  I did ask for them to make us some fried rice.

There's nothing like bacon fat fried rice that you don't totally remember eating.  It was my first time meeting a previous Tokyo visiter, Zach, and his buddies from Temple.  Diana and Gordon had just come back from Hakone and busted out their gift initiating the omiyage duel.  

It's manjyuus from Nanohara!  Don't tell them I took half that box.  I ended up having the most eclectic collection of alcohol that night.  During the first party, some Japanese guy asked me what people in America drink to start the night, beer or wine.  I told him people just usually end up drinking one thing, but then I totally ended up doing the opposite of that.  Wine, makkoli, soju, beer, tequila (three of us took a random shot in a store just to use the restroom...terrible idea), and then nihonshu.  Tasted the rainbow.  

I didn't feel completely miserable the next day, but I didn't feel great either.  We ended up doing nothing other than drinking this Pepsi.  

Well I drank the Pepsi.  Pepsi Mont Blanc tastes like Pepsi with a shot of coffee.  I enjoyed it immensely, a remarkably pleasant surprise.  V disagreed.  We did go out for dinner, but we didn't get to see anybody in kimonos.  Instead everyone had already changed into casual wear to go out drinking.  My understanding of Seijin no Hi is that you wake up god awfully early, put on your suit or kimono, go to the temple, hang out with your family, and then drink at night with your friends.  That last part is very familiar.


The 11th rolled around and it was time for us to break our Kagami-mochi, an event called Kagami-biraki.  Unfortunately, I think we did the whole Kagami-mochi thing a little wrong and never took it out of its plastic container.  I did some research and found out that the mochi should dry out completely and become brittle so that you can shatter it; however, ours was still moist and hard as a rock.  We decided to wait it out, and after a couple of hours it turned into this:

From all the pictures on the internet, no one else had a mochi that turned out like this...  At this point, I started to tear it apart.  You can't cut it with a knife, since it represents your family and doing so would be cutting ties.  So I tore it apart with my bear hands until my fingernails bled.

I'm totally serious about the fingernails.  They hurt so much right now.  I opened up a mikan and the stress on my fingernails reignited the pain.  To top it off, some of the juice got under my fingernails, and the acid started to burn me from the inside out.  Melodramatic?  Absolutely not, it friggin hurts.  But I sacrifice my body for the sake of my family.


V had some of her homemade zenzai left over and our mochi then turned into this:

Now, we have all this mochi left over.  Someone please tell us if we need to eat all of it as part of Kagami-biraki.  Can we just eat some of it and throw the rest away?  We need to know.

Our Triumphant Return

Don't really have too much to say about our trip back.  I watched The Town on the flight.  It's that Ben Affleck movie about bank robbers.  It wasn't a bad movie at all; just extremely predictable and a little too dramatic.  I basically fast-forwarded all the talking and watched all the bank robbing and the ending.  V watched Hanamizuki in a third language.

We landed in Haneda and decided to explore some of the sections we hadn't been to before.  I'm not sure how we never knew, but Haneda has multiple floors of food courts and novelty shops.  They don't have many options as far as duty-free goes, but they do have a Hello Kitty store.

Have you seen a sadder sight in your life?  Kimono clad Kitty-chan taunting my wife.  How dare she.  There were even billboards claiming the store is open 24 hours.  It's criminal I tell you.  Haneda also has this deck where you can watch planes take off. 

Only in Japan will people want to sit around and watch planes.  It looks nice and all, but Japanese people are complete suckers for stuff like this.  Actually, they just like to look at things in general.

The food court looks like a movie set.  Pretty novel and inviting.  Haneda looks like a decent place to kill time if you're waiting for a plane.  Maybe next time we fly out, we'll get to the airport earlier so we can give it a better look.

I've just been getting some work done since we got back, and things have been quiet overall.  The last few days we tried some new places for dinner.  ぶち旨屋 - Buchiumaya is an okonomiyaki place down one of the side-streets around us.  I found it by basically google-mapping our neighborhood and picking the highest rated place.

Not really sure what the name means.  I tried to translate it and it still doesn't make sense to me.  Also, we didn't figure out until we got there that it's Hiroshima-syle okonomiyaki.  I still don't know what the difference is.  The place looked like the real deal though.  A surly head chef, seating at the teppan, and waiting stools outside.  The menu even had names of TV stations next to each dish for when it was on TV.  We went with the second most popular dish: もちチーズ肉玉そば - mochi cheese nikutama soba.  My friend Sarah first introduced me to the idea of mochi and cheese in Osaka, and this preparation definitely didn't disappoint.

We'll be back for sure.  We ordered two okonomiyaki (one with cheese, one without - cheese is better), and it was wayyy too much food.  We still have leftovers in the fridge...  By the way, taking home leftovers in Japan is not a very propagated activity.  The fact that we can do it at Buchiumaya is a big deal.  Big.

That same day, we went to 7-11 to pay our bills.  I'm not sure if I've explained the whole paying bills at the convenience store thing, but while we were there we saw a Fuku Bukuro.  Fuku Bukuro is a tradition in Japan where they stuff these mystery bags with random items and sell them at a fixed price.  The draw is that whatever you get will definitely be worth more than what you pay.  Usually, it happens at department stores on January 1st, but that didn't stop 7-11 from cashing in on the trend as well.

That 1000 Yen bag was full of approximately 1700 Yen worth of snacks.  Completely terrible for you crap that I ate within two days.  Yeah the bag was definitely worth what we paid, but there's no way I would have eaten that much junk food if I hadn't gotten caught up in the hype.  Still worth it, I think.  I got a sweet bag that says Fuku Bukuro - Good Luck Bag on it. See that blue five pack of gum?  Each of those cost 99 Yen, and we valued the pack at 400 Yen in our estimate.  Unfortunately, that makes up a big chunk of the 1700 and I may never chew all that gum.  Anyone want some?

The next day, we checked out this new joint that opened up around us called Cafe ガスト.  I think "gasuto" is supposed to be "gusto," but I'm not really sure.  We walked in and figured out pretty quickly that the place was more of a family restaurant than a cafe. V ordered a hamburger plate and I got myself a mushroom bacon pasta.

Nothing wrong with a meat patty covered with gravy.  Plus it was really cheap.  My pasta was also less than 500 Yen.

Nothing to write home about...like I'm doing right now.  Still, dinner cost us less than 1000 Yen together and wasn't bad at all.  That's difficult to accomplish in Tokyo, so no doubt we'll be back to take advantage of Cafe Gasuto again sometime.

Well, dinner was cheap until we added dessert.  Not less than 500 Yen was the chiffon cake.

V had a good time if you couldn't tell.  It might have been the most expensive part of our meal, but it was also the biggest in terms of volume.  That damn chiffon cake was huge.  We were trying to figure out how big 12 cm during our meal.  We clearly underestimated either 12 cm or the chiffon cake lied.

Yep, this is becoming a food blog...

再見台北 - January Version

Our last few days in Taipei have been fairly low key.  Amazingly we arrived in the city to beautiful weather, but it has been raining since the new year began.  With the rain, V and I mostly stayed in to get some work done before heading back to Tokyo.  That didn't keep us from some last minute eating/shopping of course.

We decided to celebrate Ba's birthday on January 2nd.  His real birthday is after we leave, so we did a birthday dinner a little early.  We headed out to a place V insists I've been before but have no recollection of, The Mall.  This upscale shopping complex houses a food court in the basement and residences on the upper levels.  More importantly a branch of the popular Shanghai Shanghai lives there.

I've had Shanghainese food on many an occasion and multiple times at Shanghai Shanghai as well.  It's pretty much a can't miss joint with impeccable preparations of various dishes.  This time around though we ordered some things I haven't tried before.

I think we ordered nine or so dishes, but my favorite of the night might have been the fried bamboo shoots. Doesn't sound too complex, but something about these were amazing.  I seriously think I could have eaten a bowl of these by myself.  I'm too disciplined for that though; I've learned from my time here that you really need to pace yourself.  The dishes will keep coming and if you're not careful, you're just going to run out of room before the last few dishes.  At that point, if you want to continue eating, you better be prepared for some pain.  One interesting thing I've noticed about eating in Taiwan and Japan is that the food never comes out at that the same time.  Unless it's a super busy restaurant that's held back by the number of servers (like 270 Yen places), they always just bring you each dish when it's ready.  This either means you start eating right away, or you wait for everyone else to get their food.  I'm not sure even sure if it's ok to just start eating though.  Not a problem for communal eating of course.

Back to actual food.

A staple of Shanghai (or so I think), I love shrimp lettuce wraps.  Delicious and crunchy, they don't even feel like they're bad for you when it's wrapped in lettuce.  Just a beautifully refreshing contrast to the rich shrimpy interior.

Here's something I've never really had before: vegetable rice.  It's not really fried rice, just seared rice with some juicy bits of salty meat on top.  Another one of those dishes I could have just eaten forever.  I'm a big fan of seared rice, like dolsot bibimbap (everybody's favorite).  Oh man, I want some all of a sudden...curses.

Guess who came to dinner?  Our favorite niece, Anne!

She arrived sleeping and was knocked out for most of dinner, but once she woke up and the dishes stopped coming, she became the star of the show of course. 

This is her inching towards solid food.  She can eat it pretty soon I think but probably can't have frog legs for a while yet.  Speaking of frog legs...

Frog legs is one of those foods I don't understand what all the fuss is about.  Yes, it tastes a bit like chicken.  I just feel like there's nothing remotely dangerous or even exotic about eating them.  They're like tender chicken legs with very little meat.  Delicious, but somehow unsatisfying by the pure lack of sustenance they provide. That's how I feel anyway.

The meal was pretty much over and V went over to hold her niece.

Baby likes her aunt since apparently the fact that she's not crying is sort of astonishing.  Notably, V told me later that Anne smelled really nice.  I thought babies were supposed to smell bad...not like flowers.  Kudos to the parents.

The cake was brought out and although it was Ba's birthday, I'm cutting the cake in the picture.  This is the only picture we got of the whole fam, and I'm cutting the cake since after the first cut, the person who's birthday is next is supposed to finish the cut.  Kind of amazing considering my birthday isn't for another six months.  Nothing like a good family dinner; our first with the entire immediate family!  Maybe next time Anne has some teeth to chew with.

The next few days were extraordinarily unspectacular.  V went out for a hair treatment while I stayed in and played some video games and got a surprising amount of work done.  We met up to see V's grandma, and I sat nice as arm candy as V chatted with her grandma and her uncle.  I usually try to pseudo pay attention to the conversation or at least look alert.  Unfortunately, this time there was this fascinating special on National Geographic about king cobras.  I was totally mesmerized...it was weird.

On our way back, we picked up some snacks for Popo at the pet store.  This pet store had two dogs just chilling out on their couch and this cat perched on top of some boxes.

Pet store pets tend to be friendly, and one of the dogs came over to play for a bit.  This cat though was just sitting up on the high ground like a queen and staring us down.  It's like it willed me over to come and pet it.  V came over and showed me how its done as it succumbed to her will and her pro head-petting.  Once we left though, it just continued the same act, that nonchalant stare.

We did some last minute shopping just because we felt obligated to go do something.  There's this one store in Sogo that we always pass by called Liz Lisa.  V has only been in there once when she spotted something Hello Kitty.  I don't think I've set foot in the place.  I'm pretty sure it's Japanese since it looks like something straight out of Harajuku.

I've never actually seen someone dressed so obscenely girly in Taipei.  It's like someone puked flowers onto lace and ruffles.  Just thought I'd share.

V bought a Hello Kitty fortune giving charm thing, and then we got some Yamazaki before heading home.  In Taiwan, Yamazaki runs its own bakery, but I have never seen anything like that in Japan.  Yamazaki is just a bread company, and after browsing their website, I think that the Yamazaki bakery chain in Japan is Vie de France.  I'm also having a very difficult time finding out anything about Flavorfield in Japan.  Does it even exist there?  Google "flavorfield tokyo" and the first result is an entry from this blog...

They called the things on the left Okinawan Donuts, but we know that it's really sata andagi!  Matcha flavored one on the left was pretty good.  Not as good as the nothing flavored ones we're used to.  I was extremely disappointed in the brown sugar one on the right.  I feel like I need some real sata andagi to make up for it; which is a brilliant idea of course.

See you all in Tokyo where the end of the term and a lot of work awaits me.  PEACE!