Since we will be travelling the next two months and have tight budgetary constraints, we had to get into the habit of eating fairly cheaply... So unfortunately, fugu and marbled kobe beef was off the menu... next time japan next time! Despite the limitations, we were able to sample many fine offerings from convenience stores and bakeries, and become well acquainted with the numerous delights Japanese fast food establishments had to offer!
Here we made a cheap meal out of pickled cabbage and soba with egg strips, spring onions, wasabi, soba dipping sauce and seaweed flakes from the convenience store.
You can have a wonderful picnic for about 1000 yen with a good number convenience food delights, as we did in Nara - We had soba, tofu, noodle salad, and (not shown) a rice ball and sandwiches. Nearly all sandwiches are sold with their crust cut off - or perhaps they've found a way to make crust free bread?
First Kitchen is a ubiquitous chain serving western style pasta and burgers. I had pasta with eggplant and minestrone soup which were all quite delicious! The pasta tasted more like udon noodles than spaghetti but I think I preferred it that way! It was also quite nice to have some tomato based dishes after two weeks of beef don and ramen.
Coco Curry House - you could get curry drizzled on almost anything here in five levels of spiciness. There's sausage curry, hamburger curry, even fried quail eggs with curry etc. This one is the very popular pork katsu curry with cheese.
More curry but this time in pastry... delicious in a way only a curry filled donut can be!
This one had an egg in it!
We had ramen a lot. The ones we had at this ramen bar in Osaka was probably the best! The funny thing was because there was no english in the ordering vending machine, we didn't know what we actually ordered until we got it.
The noodles were served cold for dipping into hot broth which gave the noodles a firmer, chewier texture which I quite liked. My dipping sauce was a very rich pork soy broth and a fish flavoured broth. Joe had one with curry sauce.The pork broth was the best - rich, very flavoursome and salty.
We were in Osaka - apparently the birthplace of the takoyaki!
Even though I was quite full that night I just had to try some takoyaki. The octopus chunk in each ball was huge! Almost too big I think and took quite a bit of chewing to get through each chunk of tentacle.
Yakitori experience take two. Our first experience with yakitori was a bit weird - chicken butt and chiken skin on skewers wasn't really my thing. This time we tried it at the 'Yakitori alley' in Shinjuku, Tokyo - two alleyways crammed with tiny yakitori bars. this area is very atmospheric and apparently was inspiration for scenes in Bladerunner.
We stayed away from weird chicken parts this time. Here is the vegetarian plate - skewers of capsicums, mushroom, leek and garlic. We ate a whole skewer of grilled garlic cloves (six cloves) which was pretty good, although probably made us smell pretty bad after that..
This was the meat plate - chicken and pork grilled with soy sauce. Simple and tasty.
See part 1 of our food adventures
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