Japanese cuisine!

As always, food featured highly on our Japanese Sojourn. We make it a habit to taste the local area's specialty and sample the local brew. Our fabulous Ryokan in  Hakone offered traditional evening meals served in your room by our Nakai. So we donned our kimonos and sat at our low table to be served. There was a variety of dishes to tantalise the taste buds. Delicately sliced pork sizzled on a ceramic pot over a tea light candle, sushi, tofu, pickled vegetables, kaki-age tempura, udon noodles and a couple of dishes that we couldn't quiet recognise but were delicious none the less.

In a little cafe across the road from our Ryokan, two lovely ladies served us their specialty dish of Smelt fly fish. Agreed the name is by no means appetising but these little locally caught and fried fish were very tasty indeed.

We visited the Edo era inspired Amazake-chay tea house on the Tokkaido Highway. Here we sat on cushions at a low table and enjoyed hot tea to warm us up. We ordered their signature dishes of hot gooey mochi (pounded rice) cakes which are grilled over the hot coals and then dusted with soy powder or coated with sesame seeds and translucent, jelly like balls;  warabi mochi which is cooked in the same manner but made from bracken fern starch. While the gooey was sweet and quite tasty, the warabi was really horrid. We physically could not finish them and had to do a Mr Bean act and stuff them in our bags.

Back in the big city of Tokyo we enjoyed gyoza. These little Japanese dumplings filled with mince, cabbage, ginger and garlic were a firm favourite. We also visited a traditional Okonomiyaki restaurant. Okonomiyaki means " as you like it" Hence you choose your ingredients from a variety of combinations; pork, beef, seafood add your choice of vegetable, egg & cheese then cook your own savoury pancakes on a hot griddle. We have tried to recreate this dish in Australia but like a lot of creations from around the world they are only worth eating in the country of origin.

Pepper steak; the new  fast steak franchise in Japan is extremely popular in Tokyo. We just had to check it out and so glad we did. This idea was created in 1994 by Kunio Ichinose, who wanted to serve quality fast food without hiring a chef. He invented a method using hot metal plates that are heated by an electromagnetic cooker. The raw meat of choice with vegetables and rice are then served to the customer to cook to their preference. A special, secret recipe sauce is used to coat your meat. This sauce certainly gives Colonial Sanders a run for his money.

Kampai!