I’ve been too busy to eat out lately, so I don’t really have anything special to post. So here’s an assortment of the things I’ve been eating at home as side dishes and such.
Tottori Daisen wagyu, cut for steak
With marbling this heavy it’ll melt at room temperature, so you have to handle it carefully. Among wagyu, the branded ones like this guy usually go for about 1,000 yen per 100 grams. What you see in the photo is about 200 grams. It had way too much fat for me to finish in one meal, so I cut it in half.
Cooked well-done, with wasabi
I meant to cook it medium-rare… but the timing of the thawing and the timing of the cooking got a bit out of sync, and it ended up well-done. Well… it still tasted pretty good. Dabbed with wasabi, the meat melts away in your mouth like ice cream without feeling greasy at all. After eating wagyu like this, it’s hard to understand why Australian beef gets called “Australian wagyu.” Of course, it’s true that the same ingredient tastes better once brand power is attached to it.
Okra and squid
Okra is a vegetable that you only find in Japan and that doesn’t make it to Korea, and it’s used a lot in side dishes like this. People also eat it with natto. I guess you could call it a Japanese-style salad.
Oysters for cooking
With the main dish ready and the side dishes done, now it’s time to make soup. Oysters were cheap that day, so I picked some up. The flower-like fragrance of winter oysters really is captivating.
Miso soup
Besides the oysters, I made the broth with shijimi clams, daikon, carrots and so on. The broth is nice and refreshing.
Brown rice
Brown rice tastes much better than white rice, but it’s a pity that nowhere serves brown rice when you eat out. The only option is to make it diligently at home.
A whole tray of uni
This was for the next meal: uni was cheap, so I bought a whole tray.
Pasta with a whole tray of uni
So I whipped up a light uni pasta… Compared with the previous day’s herring roe and mentaiko pasta and the broccoli and bacon pasta, it was a bit weak. Once again it confirmed that among fish roe pastas, herring roe (kazunoko) pasta is the undisputed champion.
Amaou strawberries
Can’t skip dessert, right? These are strawberries from Fukuoka, each about the size of a small child’s fist. They’re not just big: the fragrance is strong enough for aromatherapy, and they’re really sweet, too.
When you eat like this, cooking at home isn’t much cheaper than eating out. Sometimes it’s even more expensive. But you’ve got to eat well and live well. I’d love to study cooking properly, but right now I have no idea whether I’ll find the time. Well… someday I’ll have time…
I’ve gotten a bit tired of eating at home, and the weather has warmed up, so starting this weekend I’m finally planning to travel around here and there. I’m worried about whether the weather will be clear. I’ll try to post more often from now on~