Adventures in Japan

This weekend is all about food

We found pizza! It is very expensive! It has weird toppings! It may or may not have something to do with The Bible! We went exploring off in another direction today, and discovered a Domino's about six blocks from where we live. The Japanese do indeed put weird stuff on their pizza. Like corn, or broccoli, or mayonnaise, or mustard, or guacamole on salad. You can pay extra to get your pizza with a lattice crust on top (like a cherry pie), and I'm pretty sure some of them are cream-filled. Okay, they're actually full of camembert cheese, but it looks like cream in the pictures. And what will one of these culinary curiosities cost you? A 36cm "Pie On Egg" (that's scrambled egg, tomato and sausage, with a lattice crust) costs ¥3700. That's a 14-inch pizza for about $45.00 Canadian! Not all the pizzas are quite that expensive, but most of them are close.

And while we're on the subject of fast food chains, I tried the sukiyaki at Yoshinoya the other day. Yoshinoya usually serves meat on rice, but sukiyaki is more of an arrangement of beef, vegetables, and noodles, simmered in a sukiyaki sauce in a shallow, cast-iron pot. I was impressed with the quality of the little sukiyaki they served me. Pretty good for a fast food place. And cheap!

I'd bet you think rice is pretty cheap in Japan, right? Well you're wrong. The price is fixed by the government, and not as a favour to the consumer. The cheapest rice we saw today was a 5 kg bag for about ¥2500. For you Canadians, that's about $30.00. Looks like we won't be getting away from eating noodles anytime soon.

And finally, some of you may have heard of natto. It's a very Japanese food consisting of fermented soy beans. It's stringy and smelly and we'd been warned many times not to go near it, but today in the supermarket one of the sample ladies pushed it into our hands and insisted we try it. I think she thought it was funny. Ha ha, eat this you silly foreigners. But really, it wasn't as bad as it's made out to be. Sure, it smelled a little funky, but it wasn't too overpowering. The texture wasn't great, but it didn't turn my stomach. I didn't think it tasted like much, really. Take that, Japanese sample lady! And bring me some Vegemite!