To start with, Nat and I ate fugu (blowfish). Just the skin, but it was still fugu. We never really expected to. We never really had the desire to. I mean, with the potential for it being fatally poisonous one wonders why people have bothered preparing it in the first place. But we were at a restaurant with the English conversation group and fugu skins were one of the day's specials. It was actually pretty good. I still don't think I'd choose to order it in the future, but it's something we can say we've done.
On
the note of eating fish, one day I had noticed little, glazed fish skeletons for sale at the grocery store. I thought I'd try some. They come in different flavors, so I chose one that I thought looked good. I didn't like it. To me, it tasted like a piece of chalk rolled on the floor of a fish market. It's actually better than that, but I just didn't like it. Of course, the Japanese usually eat these as a snack when drinking beer. We gave them away to one of our friends here who likes them.I also
picked up some odango at the store. Odango are commonly translated into English as dumplings. They are made of mochi (sticky rice which has been pounded into a doughy texture. The glaze is mildly salty; mostly sweet. I love them. Nat doesn't like them as much. More for me!
Mmmmmm!I made spanakorizo again,
so I took a picture of the shiso leaves so that you can see what they look like. Not that it's an exciting thing to look at. It's just one of the things we get here. I mentioned before that it has a bit of a minty flavor. It's actually somewhere between mint and parsley, I think. In the end, it just tastes like shiso.We also ate a bit of an incorrect
version of sukiyaki this week. Mostly because we don't have the right pot for it. We used our clay pot, instead. Sukiyaki is typically cooked at the dinner table and you pick the food out as it cooks and eat it. I used a few ingredients which are not normally included in sukiyaki, like lotus root and udon noodles. The reason why one doesn't typically use a clay pot for sukiyaki is that the very thinly-sliced beef used in the dish is supposed to be fried at the bottom of the pot before the broth and vegetables are added. I fried the beef in a frying pan, instead and then started up the clay pot. We had Japanese leeks, shitake mushrooms, mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, lotus root, tofu, udon noodles, komatsuna (a leafy vegetable which appears to be translated as Japanese mustard spinach) and hakusai cabbage. There may have been more, but I don't remember it all. Traditionally, 
when one eats sukiyaki, they dip the hot food in raw scrambled egg just before eating it.Yesterday, we ate shabu-shabu with several of the JETs and people from two of the town's English conversation groups. Shabu-shabu is similar to sukiyaki in that it is cooked in a pot at the dinner table and everyone grabs what they want out of it. Major differences are that the meat is cooked in the broth, the broth is more simple and you dip the food in sauces instead of raw egg. Shabu-shabu broth is a simple dashi broth (large pieces of dried kelp are boiled in water for roughly half an hour and then removed, leaving the broth). Sukiyaki broth includes dashi broth, soy sauce, sake, mirin (a sweet cooking sake) and sugar; the result, however, is not too sweet (unless you want it to be, some people like sweet sukiyaki).
The shabu-shabu party was fun and we were really glad to see everyone. We ate way too much food, though...and that was before they pulled out the snacks for tea afterward!
One of our dishes.