It was inevitable: my husband doesn't consider a visit home complete without at least one wagyu (Japanese beef) feast, so we took a bread from all the seafood and pigged out on teppanyaki (food cooked on a table-top griddle).
The star of the meal was a big pile of very well marbled and thinly sliced beef, but there was also tofu, nama-fu (wheat gluten cakes), cabbage, shiitake, shimeji mushrooms, eringi mushrooms, and hampen (fish paste cakes).
Once cooked it was dipped into a mixture of daikon oroshi (grated daikon) and ponzu (citrus soy sauce) and you better believe it tasted fantastic. The beef will almost certainly be the best we'll have all year, so it's kind of a bummer to know that it's all downhill from January 3rd. We definitely weren't complaining at the time though.
On the fourth day of the year I'd recovered enough to go out for a bit, so we all drove out to Kiyoshikoujin Seichouji, a temple near the Takarazuka theatre in Hyogo Prefecture, for hatsumoude (the first visit of the year to a shrine or temple). After offering our prayers for the new year we bought omikuji (fortunes), and I got stuck with kyou (bad luck). Good thing I don't believe in silly stuff like that, or I might be in for a bad year.
Or maybe it was true after all: shortly afterwards we stopped by a soba shop for lunch. My in-laws had been there before and said it was good, but after waiting over half an hour out in the cold we were treated to a mediocre meal. It seems the shop follows the despicable practice of subsituting inferior ingredients on busy days: although usually the shop only sells teuchi (handmade in-house) soba noodles, on this day the the regular menu items all came with noodles purchased elsewhere. Only the more expensive lunch special came with teuchi noodles, but there were no signs or notices on the wall warning customers of this. We only found out because one of us happened to order the special and it was completely different from everyone else's, which prompted us to ask the waitress. Who cheerfully explained the sneaky substitution.
That night's dinner more than made up for the crappy lunch, and was of a kind I really love: many little dishes of various treats served with endless bowls of rice. Delicious, sweet, fluffy rice, the kind I never seem capable of making at home. This was an especially fancy version of the many little dishes type of meal, with ikura (salmon roe) and mentaiko (spicy cod roe) included in the already impressive spread.
And the next day we flew back to Tokyo, and on the bus home from the airport enjoyed some pretty nice views-- it was already dark and Tokyo looks so much nicer at night. Sadly all my attempts at pictures came out fuzzy, but I kind of like the way the lights on the building above look all spiky.
Num num num! It all looks fantastic. Looks like that bad luck really works for you. :-D
Posted by: Melissa Maples | 2008.01.13 at 06:45 PM
I can't tell you how much I enjoy your blog! Your lovely pictures of all those delicious Japanese dishes...YUM!
Btw, I gave you an award :-)
Posted by: Janet | 2008.01.14 at 11:27 AM
That last photo is fuzzy but it looks beautiful that way. Very dreamy, and with striking colors!
Posted by: elarael | 2008.01.15 at 04:44 PM
Whoa...that's a lot of food!!:D
And lots of meat....no seafood?:p (Yeah, you mentioned a break from seafood:)
Posted by: Christy | 2008.01.15 at 05:26 PM
Wow...lots of food...and MEAT!!!:P
Posted by: Christy | 2008.01.15 at 05:30 PM
i can see why you love the dinner... nice
Posted by: teckiee | 2008.01.15 at 08:46 PM
Thank you for the lovely comments.
Posted by: Amy | 2008.01.25 at 11:41 AM