Cooking class in Kyoto, January 2015

(Resurrecting a post that’s been sitting in the Drafts folder for almost 2 years now, and testing a new crossposting plugin at the same time.) We are not social people. Well, okay, we’re selectively social. We have our groups of friends that we see now and then, but we don’t generally seek out new acquaintances….

New Year’s Kaiseki

When we stayed at the ryokan in Kyoto on the night of January 1st, we laid out for the full kaiseki dinner experience. A kaiseki dinner is a formal, traditional, multi-course Japanese meal. (That link goes to the Wikipedia entry, in case you want to read more.) On to the food!

Pastry: The Unboxening

Japanese department stores usually have 1 or 2 floors on the ground floor or in the basement devoted to selling food. Not restaurants, but pastries, teas, pickled things, etc, pretty much anything you can put into a really fancy package and sell in small amounts. Toby and I wandered around the basement of the JR…

Hiroshima Ichiban!

Today started with an early dash to the station to catch the 8:39 Shinkansen to Hiroshima. We had breakfast at the station–seriously, there’s good restaurants at train stations here–and then got on the train. Continued under the cut: food report and a quintessential Japanese okonomiyaki experience!

Ekiben! And other food!

(Posting from the Kodama Shinkansen bound for Shin-Osaka. I love living in the future.) And now it’s the first ekiben of the trip! Eki means ‘train station’ and ‘ben’ is short for ‘bento’ (a boxed lunch, basically, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it). So an ekiben is a boxed meal sold to…