Okonomiyaki

 Every Sunday as we drive to church we pass by an Okonomiyaki restaurant. Kimball describes to me what type of food this is and I want so badly to try it - but its Sunday so we don't. It's a little too far to drive there any other time.

But on Saturday our Branch held a much needed, "Clean up the church grounds" activity. The grounds had fallen into a sad state during the building renovation and so we set out to whip them back into shape. Lots of work and still lots more to do, but it helped!

On our way home we realized we could stop in and eat at the Okonomiyaki place! 

On the weekends it gets very busy and we didn't have reservations but we were still able to get a table. We felt pretty lost and had not idea how to order or make Okonomiyaki. It's so frustrating to not be able to read the menu. (Google Translate is mostly helpful.....) We figured out enough to try to put in an order and then our waitress took pity on the gaijin and helped us - even cooking our meal for us!

Okonomiyaki is a dish that starts with some raw meat that you cook on a teppan (hot griddle in the middle of the table). Next a bowl of cabbage and other things (I don't know what they were) are mixed together with flour and egg to form a kind of chunky batter. This batter is poured over the meat and fried for about 5 min. Then you flip it and fry for 5 more min. Once its cooked you pull it off the griddle and top it with mayo and other sauces that reminded me of Bulldog sauce, and some dried fish flakes.

Another dish that is served with the Okonomiyaki is yakisoba noodles topped with an egg omelet topped with ketchup. So Oishiiiiii! Turns out I loved it and Kimball - not so much. haha








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wonderful Week in Tohoku

Image
  We took an extended trip over the Memorial Day holiday (and my birthday) and visited the Tohoku region of Japan. Tohoku basically covers the northern third of the main island of Honshu. It's a big, beautiful region with the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Sea of Japan on the other. We got a JR East rail pass that gave us unlimited use of the Shinkansen during our trip, so we were able to jump all around the area from Sendai to Hachinohe to Aomori to Akita. At the end of the trip we each tried to pick our favorite spot or activity and neither of us could pick just one. We loved everything about this trip! Our approach was to combine our Shinkansen trips with car rentals near the major stations. The Shinkansen gets you to the main city and then having a car allows you to easily and conveniently get out to the more remote locations. Just to give a feel for the travel times, it was about 2 hours one way on the train between the major cities (Tokyo to Sendai, Sendai to Aomori, Send...
Read more

Exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures

Image
  We spent a wonderful 5 days exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures over the Labor Day weekend. We had an early morning flight to Izumo and so we decided the best option was to spend the night in the Hotel Villa Fontaine which is attached to the Haneda Airport. It turned out to be a very convenient way to make the flight that left at 7am. On our way to the airport, we bumped into one of Kimball's co-workers. When he heard where we were headed he told us his wife was from Shimane. He highly recommend we stop at Izumo Taisha, a very old and famous shrine (Top 100, for sure!). So, on his advice we made that our first stop of the day.  It was a lovely place and by visiting we became educated on the story of the rabbit hopping from Oki Island to the mainland on the backs of many hundreds of sharks. Right at the end, the sharks got mad because they thought the rabbit had tricked them. So, they bit off the rabbits fur and left him to suffer in the saltwater and sun. Three brother...
Read more

Kanazawa November 2025

Image
One of the main reasons we applied to extend our stay in Japan until December, is so that we could enjoy one more autumn season.  We had heard that Kenrokuen Garden (one of the Top 3 gardens in Japan) was beautiful in the fall so we decided to make Kanazawa one of our last trips.  Kanazawa is known as the "little Kyoto", but we were surprised to find it is not "little" at all. It's quite a big city. It has a feeling of both modern and old all wrapped in one. We took the Shinkansen from Tokyo (our favorite way to travel in Japan). The Kanazawa train station has some very unique architecture.   At the station we were able to get on a Loop Bus that made stops at many of the sites in the city. Our first stop was Higashi Chaya, a very nicely preserved Edo period district. It is also an area where there are many tea rooms and Geisha working there. We saw a women dressed in Geisha clothing running down one of the side streets - she must have been late to something. (Si...
Read more