Japanese Food Bites: Indulging in the Taste of Summer

Hello there! It’s me again (Jeremy Green). No novel-length post about baseball this time, I promise. However, I do once again have the tricky task of blogging about one of our free days. As you can tell from my terrible 90s alt-rock pun in the title, we always look forward to free days around here.

Side note – Phoebe Bridgers has a great cover of Friday I’m in Love, and she also has a song called Kyoto. These puns have layers, people. 

Yesterday (July 18th) was our third full day in Kyoto, and we were at liberty to pursue whatever activities we wanted. Now that we’re two and a half weeks into the program, everybody has a pretty clear sense of a) what they want to spend time and money on and b) which people to team up with for those plans. Despite the extreme heat and humidity and a hectic past few days, many people formed ambitious agendas and set off in the morning with energy and enthusiasm. 

I started my day around 9:30 with a non-traditional breakfast of curry and pork cutlet at the awesome little fast food spot a few doors down from the hotel. Costing less than 1000 yen and ready in around five minutes, this was a solid way to fuel up before my first activity. 

On my way out, I bumped into Kerem, Andy, and Frederick, who were on their way to breakfast. I later learned that Kerem spent his day on a solo adventure back to the Arashiyama area to see the monkeys and the river.

I walked 15 minutes or so to the Kyoto Aquarium, which I had pinpointed from Google Maps as an excellent nearby option to spend time doing something fun and mentally stimulating in an air-conditioned setting. I got an unwanted bonus lesson in human endurance, as the shortish walk took way more out of me than I expected. It’s not much hotter here than it was in Tokyo, but something about the extreme humidity combined with more direct sun meant this was the most oppressive-feeling air I had felt thus far in Japan. Once I made it to the aquarium, I began to recover my energy thanks to the coolness, both literal (temperature) and figurative (awesome exhibits). I won’t bore you to death with an environmental science major’s soliloquy on cool aquatic species, but here are some highlights:

Funnily enough, it also turns out that Gillian, my fellow environmental science major, also went to the aquarium (about an hour after I did). Great minds think alike! 

Here are a few other highlights from around the group:

After the aquarium, I headed to a nearby grocery store to stock up on ingredients for my other big to-do item for the day. I had come up with an idea for using mostly prepared ingredients to cook a meal that would satisfy our assignment to create a meal following the washoku guidelines we learned from Elizabeth Andoh, while also making use of some of the cool Japanese pantry ingredients provided by Yukari Sakamoto. I picked up what I needed, made a quick pit stop at the FamilyMart for a dessert component, then headed to the hotel’s awesome basement kitchen to get cooking.

I sauteed some bacon and then stewed a vegetable called komatsuna, known as Japanese mustard spinach (it’s technically in the turnip and napa cabbage family) with some miso soup base, for something approaching a Japanese version of collard greens. I topped these with fukujinzuke pickles and daikon radish sprouts to add a little extra color, flavor, and texture. This came out a little salty and the vegetables wilted down more than I was hoping, but it was a cool experiment and overall tasted solid.

Following the sort of Southern American theme, I made a little open-faced fried chicken sandwich with Japanese mayonnaise, chile crisp, and pickled cucumbers. This was OUTSTANDING. The chile crisp soaked into the fried chicken coating just enough to let the slightly spicy but incredibly complex flavor permeate, and that was offset beautifully by the slightly sweet mayo and the crisp, sour freshness of the pickles. This combination will certainly be going into my repertoire at home.

As you can see, the last component of my meal was unagi (eel) over rice. I doctored the grocery store’s prepackaged meal with wasabi furikake (rice seasoning) from our Yukari-san stash, which added a nice hint of spice and saltiness. Across the dishes, including my dessert of strawberry ice cream and Pocky, I fulfilled the guidelines of washoku, which are to include each of the five tastes, five colors, and five cooking methods. I definitely felt like following these tenets helped my meal be more interesting and diverse, and it’s an approach I hope to incorporate into my cooking for the long term. 

Meanwhile, as I was busy wrapping up my “No-More-Hunger Games” (sorry), another group of students had formed a Fellowship of the Ring (oof, sorry again). What I mean by that is, a number of people had booked an appointment for a really cool opportunity to hand-craft some rings. Despite my fervent encouragement, I don’t think any of them intend to throw their rings into a convenient volcano. I guess they’re just too precious (ok, I’ll stop with the jokes now before J.R.R. Tolkien rises from the dead to beat me up).

Later on, after a very chill afternoon, I went out to dinner with Jayden, Gillian, and Logan. We went to a local gyu katsu (fried beef) spot we had identified when we walked past en route to the bus a few days prior. We had to wait in line outside for a few minutes, but they took our order ahead of time and managed to time things just right, so the food was ready basically as soon as we sat down. The food was delicious! High-quality beef, coated in crispy breadcrumbs and fried until golden. Then, at the table, you grill it yourself to cook the beef more thoroughly, and eat it with one of several delicious sauces and rice (obviously). We were also given the shredded cabbage that is synonymous with any katsu meal, miso soup, and an onsen egg! 

The restaurant was bustling, with the waitstaff and chefs shouting enthusiastically to welcome and farewell happy diners. We got the lowdown on Logan’s exciting day, which included a chance encounter with three California teenagers who kindly invited her to join their table at a pancake restaurant and then extended that invitation to include dinner, a trip to Universal, and their seemingly misguided plan to climb Mt. Fuji without a guide. She politely turned down those further offers, but we all had a good laugh over the situation. 

And that was that! We made an obligatory FamilyMart run for dessert, then headed up to bed since we had an early start the next morning. Despite the mounting fatigue that comes with a busy itinerary and extreme heat, it appears that our first free day in Kyoto was a resounding success! I’m already looking forward going to Osaka for our next free day on the 24th, including a soccer game between Cerezo Osaka and Borussia Dortmund! In the more immediate future, today (July 19th) was our day to journey further into the area around Kyoto and visit a tea farm and some other great spots. Watch this space for Mokkh’s post on that coming soon!!