Our first Japanese meal at home

This posting is dedicated to our friends, Adam and Yoko, who taught us that the best Japanese food is the food you prepare in the comforts of your own kitchen.



Japanese food is more than sushi.

It's noodles and eggs. Lots of eggs. All kinds of pork, beef and chicken. I've been pleasantly pleased with the pork selection here, even though I'm not yet eating any more of the pig than I did in the States. There is tofu, eggplant and cabbage.

The staple of all Japanese meals is rice. God, this country loves their rice.


Benny and I sample these native dishes as often as we can. The one problem with being a culinary guinea pig is that we haven't been invited to any houses for home cooked Japanese food yet. If we want to shock our taste buds we have to eat out.

This trial-and-error system can be a pricey way to discover that I don't care for custard soup or a deep fried rice ball. The feel of each one on my tongue is what turned me off more than the actual taste.

So to cut costs and to get the most out of our overseas experience, Benny and I decided to learn how to cook Japanese food.

Benny talked to his female co-workers about his plan. At first they laughed, since he was eating macaroni and cheese for lunch, but asking how to make okonomi-yaki for dinner. But they kept listening and decided he was serious. So they told him the secret to making okonomi-yaki is to buy the okonomi-yaki sauce at the local grocery store.

Armed with this vital information and "The Joy of Japanese Cooking" cookbook I checked out from the base library, I went to the commissary. No luck. No okonomi-yaki sauce.

On Saturday we visited a grocery store in the basement of a mall outside of the base's gates. The shelves were lined with noodles, sauces and rice varieties, we had never seen before.

There was only one problem. It was all written in Kanji, so we couldn't read the bottle to know if we were buying okonomi-yaki sauce or low-sodium soy sauce.

A few food samples later, a helpful store employee tried to guide us in the right direction. Alas it was all lost in translation.

Instead we bought dried soba noodles and a bottle of sauce recommended by this clerk. With her limited English advice, the borrowed cookbook and visual boiling instructions on the package of noodles, we were able to successfully make our first Japanese meal at home.

I have to say it tasted nearly as good as the zaru soba we had in Tokyo. An added bonus was that we used our chopsticks that Darrin gave us as a farewell gift for the first time.

Now if we can only find that okonomi-yaki sauce ...