We were lucky enough to have a three day weekend, thanks to the new Emperor’s birthday. I’m not sure what he did on his birthday, but we ate a lot of great food.
Starting with Friday night, we went out to eat to celebrate Kuniko’s birthday at Tajima-ya, a yakiniku place that we hadn’t visited in a long time. It is a very busy place and it is always tough the get reservations. They give you a short time limit too, so we had to eat the meat and hit the street.
There are a lot of yakiniku places in Japan that focus on quantity, but at Tajima-ya they serve some great cuts of beef. The Korean noodles and kimchi also help to set the mood, and we really enjoyed cooking up the beautifully marbled Japanese beef grilled over white coals.
On Saturday I put together a wine tasting of Umbrian wines, two whites (Orvieto Classico and a Grechetto), a monster red (Sagratino di Montefalco), an odd duck – a passito red also from Montefalco. Truffles are a big deal in Umbria, so I kneaded out and made my own noodles and then cooked them in a black truffle sauce. Kuniko’s contribution was a broccoli, bacon and mushroom salad, and that was how we got a little taste of Italy on Saturday.
We got an early start on Sunday by walking along the beach towards Akashi. This route we’ve been walking for years, and if the weather is nice it is very refreshing to take in the ocean views while walking briskly for a couple of hours. The last time we did the walk we were surprised to find that one of the old warehouses had been converted into a very modern beach-facing burger restaurant, and so we decided that today was the day to try it out.
The place is called “The Fantastic Burger” and while I’m not sure I’d call them fantastic, they certainly were delicious. We sat facing big glass windows looking out over the inland sea, and sipped on Yona Yona Ale while we waited. Burgers and beer at 10 am? It must be a holiday weekend! They had several kinds of burgers, and the ones we chose were well-made. The owner/cook was a young guy and he said that the location was a bit risky – while it is easy to get attention from people walking it is much more difficult to find by car. But it seems business is doing OK, and I hope that we can drop by again sometime soon. It does threaten to cancel out the calories that we should be burning by walking on the weekends… temptation at the halfway point.
Once we reached Akashi we walked down the fish market street and picked out some big hunks of freshly caught snapper, and that turned out to be our dinner. We are continuing to work on building seafood skillets similar to what we enjoyed in Reykjavik Iceland, and this time was one step closer. I worked on the sauce in two stages, which seemed to make for a more cohesive taste later on. Delicious with the leftover Italian white wines, too!
Then on Monday, we drove out to our new favorite local vegetable shop and stocked up on things for the week. Kuniko spent the day in the kitchen, making up ginger chicken soup, baking two kinds of bread for sandwiches, making cornbread, and also baking banana bread. Since the weather was beautiful I grilled up some big cuts of pork with plenty of BBQ sauce, and also some skewered fat erengi mushrooms. Kuniko threw together an Asian salad with cilantro, lettuce, avocado, tomato and sweet chili sauce, and it felt like summer again.
These holiday weekends are great chances to eat plenty of good food. Happy Birthday Mr. Emperor!
