日本Fall 2013--Part II: Eating Out

From the very beginning, our mutual love of food has played an important role in Keizo's and my relationship.  The night we met, he bought me donuts and coffee before I caught my train home and on our first real date, Keizo admitted he was still hungry before we had even finished the dessert that came with our meal.  All this is to say that we eat very well when we are together, and this trip was no exception.

The food pictured above is a sample of some of the things we purchased:

• dog-shaped bread with chocolate cream filling.  Why is everything in Japan so darn cute?  These days when I visit, I can't resist animal shaped bread; over the years I've also eaten pigs, pandas and turtles.

• a Japanese take on Italian pasta with shrimp, avocado and wasabi cream sauce.  This restaurant is in a relatively new complex near Keizo's local train station that also houses two bakeries, an import food shop and a stone fired pizza restaurant.  I like to refer to it as "Little Italy."

On this day our lunches came with a bread buffet and drink bar.  On the drink bar were two pitchers of fruit flavored vinegars.  I mixed mine with olive oil to dip the bread into, but other people were drinking them straight!  I suppose they tasted more like juice, but I was still pretty put off by the idea of downing a glass of something called "vinegar."

• minced chicken between slices of fried renkon (lotus root).  This dish is from our dinner of small plates at a yakiniku place in Tenjin.  We enjoyed a lot of delicious things, but the presentation of this one caught my eye: the ceramic plate with woven basket and tiny twigs, plus the large dollop of mayonnaise and salt for dipping are all so lovely.

• I am ashamed to admit I don't know the real name of the little ice cream place near Keizo's training ground.  I just call it the "Cow Shop" since it has several dozen miniature bovines decorating the interior.  They have a rotating selection of some of the most unusual ice cream flavors I have ever seen including tomato and carrot. 

Ordering is always a chore for me; what flavor do I want to try?  And with a double costing only 50 yen more than a single, which two flavors will go well together?  This time I settled on chai tea and Sweet Potato, which were both quite good.  The chai flavor was pretty strong, but the Sweet Potato was a bit creamier and had small, yummy sweet potato pieces in it.

While we ate out quite a bit (especially compared to my normal routine) we also cooked together a few times.  More to come in Part III...