Food - a little different and good English

Here in Japan there is some really delicious food. I do have to say I thoroughly enjoy the food and going out to eat here.

Some of the foods are completely different and some just have different ingredients.

(ex. pizza with rice cake slices on it)

Other times the food may be the same but what the menu says it way off. Some times reading the menu makes the food experience all that more enjoyable. I think google translate or some other translation service gets used as the translations don't always work out. Or maybe I should say they work out, just not in the way the restaurant wants.

Prostitues pasta with tomato sauce

Pasta with meat sauce and many rocket

Risotto kind to a body from Italy grew up in the sun

Yummy

Tonight I was lucky enough to be invited out for dinner. We went to yakiniku, which is a restaurant that has a grill in the center of the table. The wait staff brings you beef, pork, chicken, squid or whatever you order (all sliced very thin) and you cook over the flames of the grill. Delicious! One of the beef plates they brought tonight was a type of beef that literally melted in your mouth. It was so good!

And., we also tried beef sashimi tonight. Sashimi means raw, so they brought a plate of raw slimy beef - it actually wasn't too bad. Don't know if I would eat a ton of it but it wasn't too bad.

More food - Nabe

To go along with the other posts that I made about typical food here in Japan, I thought I would highlight another type of food that is pretty common here:
Nabe - pronounced Nah-bay
Nabe or Nabemono is a Japanese dish where you cook all the things you are going to eat in one pot.

Nabe is the broad term for cooking everything together in one pot, but each sauce has its own name, as there are many types of nabe. For example one type of nabe is Sukiyaki (pronounced Soo-key-yah-key). This type of nabe is usually with thinly sliced beef, slow cooked or simmered at the table in the same pot as vegetables and other ingredients. All the food is simmered in a shallow pot of soy sauce, sugar and mirin (a kind of rice wine with less alcohol content and more sugar than sake). With Sukiyaki, before the food is eaten the it is usually dipped in a small bowl of beaten raw eggs.
Sukiyaki is only one type of Nabe and there are many! The sauce aisle here in the grocery store is filled with sauces for Nabe and since many times everyone eats out of the same pot, it is considered a very social way to eat. And good too.
If your looking for something different to try for your next dinner, why not give Nabe a try. I am sure you can find many recipies online and since you can choose your vegetables and ingredients, you can basically make it to your liking.
Bon appetit or in Japanese,  いただきます (ee-tah-dah-key-mas)
 

Typical food #3

Ramen
If you read my first post about typical food in Japan you know that beef bowls are very popular. Another very common thing is a bowl of ramen. This differs some from the instant ramen many of you may have had in college or bought when you had to bring items to school for a food drive. I would argue (some of you may stongly diasagree after your ramen-loving earlier years) that a bowl of ramen here is quite a bit better.
 
There are all different types of ramen with different noodles, meat, eggs, flavor and thickness of sauce and various veggies. Each region in Japan has there own version/flavor of ramen. So, if you were traveling around Japan you would be able to order a ramen bowl probably everywhere you went and have something similar but get to taste the different regions idea or take on the dish.

Typical food #1

A very popular and common thing to eat here is: a beef bowl (gyudon - beef bowl in Japanese)
Beef bowls consist of thin strips of beef and usually with onion (in some sort of sauce) and placed over a bowl of rice. This is a pretty inexpensive meal in Japan as you can get a beef bowl for about $4 - $5.
 
Places:
Yoshinoya
Sukiya
Matsuya
There are other local beef bowl restaurants but these are the 3 main chains that sell beef bowls and there always seems to be many people in the restaurants, even if only to scarf their food down and leave. (I think one of the reasons these places do so well is: you get your food really fast and even with chopsticks it is a relatively easy and speedy thing to eat).

You can get your beef bowl plain, with cheese on top, with a mayonaise sauce on top, or the one thats the most interesting to me: a raw egg on top. (yes the person who ordered the bowl in the picture got a lot a bit aggressive with the eggs.
How would you eat that you ask? In Japanese slurping is allowed and very much apart of the culture. Sometimes I think people might overdo it a little, because.......well, because they can. But with this dish the eggs would get mixed in before you ate it and not slurped off the top)