Chris got me a food tour in the Kichijoji neighborhood of Japan. The tour leader was a woman named Elizabeth who I had actually heard speak before. Basically, Elizabeth has lived in Japan since 1967, studied Japanese Cuisine, has written three books on Japanese cooking and writes for Gourmet Magazine. In addition to giving tours, she gives lectures out of her studio about Japanese food and sometimes does tastings (miso, sake, etc.). So, needless to say, she knows a lot about Japanese food! It was a good tour, she brought us into a market and talked about rice, miso, mirin, flour and various other staples of Japanese cooking. We then went to a great outdoor market and saw some of the dried ingredients that are useful in making dashi (soup stock) and saw a fish sausage store. The fish sausage is not a traditional sausage with fish stuffed inside. That's what I thought it would look like. What they actually do is they take a white fish that is similar to Cod, take out the white meat and put it into molds and fry it. The fried fish is then put into a type of soup called Oden. Well, I learned a lot and now I'm going to actually try to make some of the recipes she included in our packets. I may even buy a Japanese cookbook to help me get started. Here's a picture of Kichijoji's market. It's not very good but it's the only one I took :(
