This was one of those rare weekends when Kuniko has both days off. We spent most of the time doing odds and ends around the house, and cooking foods we’ve wanted to eat recently.
Friday after work we went to Tajimaya – a yakiniku restaurant that I’ve heard good things about for a long time. The quality of meat was excellent, and everything we ate was really delicious. The only thing I could possibly complain about was the karubi cuts were awfully fatty. We expect a lot of fat in the karubi, but this was way over the top. We were lucky we didn’t start a fire.
After dinner we walked around the new shopping center south of Kobe station – Umie. The building used to hold a Hankyu department store, but apparently they weren’t able to make it work. Now it is filled with specialty shops, and we walked around enjoying some window shopping in an attempt to burn some of the calories that we just ingested. It was a fun night, but we got home pretty early and pretty tired from a long week.
The big project this weekend was putting up some glass shelves in the kitchen to support some of our coffee cups. We went out to IKEA to buy the shelves, and then I hung them on the wall in a relatively stress-free exercise. While we were at IKEA we also picked up some LED lights to replace the standard bulbs in our kitchen, and I’m so happy with the lighting in there now. Things are looking better these days.
We also got our hands on some good food. Saturday I grilled some pork ribs that we were able to buy at a grocery store to the north of us. We don’t usually go there, but this time we asked about spare ribs and they sold us a big slab of ribs. Unfortunately, the pork had a lot more fat than we liked, and the result was that we had to be a lot more careful to avoid the fatty parts while eating. The flavor was pretty good, though.
Sunday we drove out to Miki to support Kuniko’s friend Kori, who was selling bread from her bakery at a sort of outdoor farmer’s market. Most of the booths were selling knick-knacks in the style of “farmhouse fashion”, which isn’t really our thing. But we could eat bread, and we bought a few pieces from Kori to help out. She was pretty busy while we were there, so that was a good sign. After relaxing at home during the warmest part of the day we walked out to the beach to enjoy the cold water, and then picked up some groceries for dinner. It was just salad with mini-tomatoes, some bread from Kori, and some cheese that included buffalo mozzarella that we got our hands on recently. The buffalo mozzarella was so good I am considering where we can stable a buffalo to keep us in supply. Yum…
This week should be a pretty standard week. Kuniko has a party on Wednesday, and I have two large group lessons on Wednesday and Thursday, but other than that it should be pretty normal around here.
