Fun food adventures!

Since moving to Japan I have had the opportunity to try a lot of new foods. Some are very strange but most are delicious!

My first fun food experience was on my birthday when Martin and Chigusa took me out to this great restaurant by my apartment. You order skewers of meat and they grill them right there in front of you. The sauce they used was delicious! Some of the lovely grilled food included heart and liver. I had never had liver before and never thought I would be eating heart. However, they both were delicious!

Other fun food is matsuri food. It reminds me of fair food, a lot of it comes on a stick! There, I have had delicious shave ice and an everything pancake. These are made when everything you can think of is thrown together on a grill, topped with egg, grilled, smeared with mayo and then topped with fish flakes. They are alright. I think I would like them more without the fish flakes but it is greasy, delicious fair food!

Another thing I have tried is smelt. The first picture below is of me eating it. It looked to me as if the fish had not been cleaned and I felt a little strange eatting something with a tail and eyeballs. I couldn't eat the head but Naomi quickly grabbed it-telling me it is the best part!)

These are their heads. Creepy!



Naomi and I went out to this great bar that we had heard has alcoholic milk drinks (chocolate mint....delicious!) last Friday night (9/5). We ordered some appitizers off the specials menu. The woman told us the first one was meat. She then mimed a horse and said "horse meato." We thought, "let's try it!" This is what we were then served: (yes, that is RAW horse meat!)

We were very nervous. We thought it would be cooked but new we had to try it! First, ofcourse, we took pictures and then made ourselves little rolls. We used the lettuce, shredded radish and the delicious sause to make a roll. Then we grabbed a chunk of meat and with hesitation...made our appitizer.
We were ready! I was nervous but knew we were doing this together so on the count of three (an d with a picture!) we took our first bites:

It actually tasted pretty good. the flavor was really good and the texture was the same a sushi. It was mostly the mental part being the idea that 1. we were eatting horse and 2. we were eatting raw red meat. I enjoyed my roll and even made a second! It was a pretty big feat and we were both very proud to have tried it...and know that we will never eat it again!
(the meat tasted really good but did mess with our stomachs a little...we both had tummy ache by the time we caught the train home...oh well...now we know never to eat raw horse meat again!)