Japanese Food

lol..
i also don't like sth that is too saucy, actually..
but at most okonomiyaki restaurant in Japan, you can choose if you want to make it by yourself or have it done by the chef..
and i always choose to make it by myself..so that i can put the sauce as much as i want..^^

i like wasabi..only a really good wasabi,tho..

wasabi in sashimi restaurants are delicious..
they have kind of sweet taste in your tongue after a while..

here it's typical to mix wasabi in soy sauce and dip the sushi that way you don't get too much wasabi, but i've heard that's not really the proper way to use it and in Japan they look at us foreigners weirdly when we do it lol but i have no idea what the 'proper' way to use it is. i also realize wasabi from a tube that we get here is not quite the same as what they use in Japan. i really hope i can go to Japan someday and have authentic stuff (as much as i can being vegan that is)

we went out for sushi again friday. so good. my favourite chef wasn't working though. the quality seems to really fluctuate depending on who's working. the one i really like also tends to play C-pop and sings along while working which amuses me :D anyway i'm going on my trip this weekend, being a bigger and more multicultural city we should be able to find some really good sushi places. there's one right across the road from the hotel, i should check out the reviews

there's one or two asian fusion restuarants we'll most likely hit up too, i'm excited for that. even though they're not fully Japanese. but i like asian food in general so it's all good

ooh nice. i'd like to make friends with the c-pop singing chef if ya know what i mean ;) hehe jk
so what's the 'real' way?

i had sushi in toronto on friday night and figured it would be closer to authentic than the all you can eat place here at home but turned out to be the same lol. almost the same menu and the staff were chinese there too. almost wondering if it's part of the same chain or something. i ordered all the same stuff i normally get here and tasted pretty well the same. with the exception of shitake mushroom rolls, which helped me realize that... i don't like shitake mushrooms. second time i tried them and didn't like them. they're fine in something like hot and sour soup or curry or something like that cause all the tastes and textures blend together but on its own blah.
we had japanese style curry saturday for lunch too, was really really good (even with shitake mushrooms in it haha) i'd never had japanese curry, it was amazing. it was from a vegetarian restaurant where most menu items are vegan including this one, not sure what they use in it but the curry was nice and creamy and perfectly seasoned with a really good variety of veggies (i finally tried okra for the first time and some strange looking mushrooms that i've never seen before but taste phenomenal) reeeaaaally hard to eat with chopsticks though lol. oh also tried some gyoza there, so good!!

that's what i figured but what we get in restaurants tends to be harder than authentic wasabi i think, so it's hard to add a "dab", you either get nothing or all of it lol. i guess that's where the western tendency to mix wasabi in with the shoyu comes in. the place we ate at in toronto had softer wasabi than what i'm used to at home and it seemed milder to me too, so i probably could have done it the "proper" way without setting fire to my sinuses rofl but didn't even occur to me at the time. plus being veg i mainly get rolls so it's just easier (except for inarizushi but i prefer them as is since they are sweet)

fair enough. but although i can handle spicy food, wasabi always hits my sinuses and makes me tear up if i get too much in one bite lol so i usually try not to overdo it anyway just cause it's embarassing when that happens haha

no it's not pretty lol. it usually involves some squeeling and flailing

so my brother in law and his fiancee (squeeee!) brought me some mochi from Japan. i'm not sure what to do with it. any suggestions? i meant to ask for daifuku but i mentioned mochi so that's what they brought. she said that daifuku probably wouldn't have lasted the trip anyway since it has a short shelf-life.