Fry As You Like

There's one thing to be said about Americans. We've certainly embraced other cultures. Well some of us anyway. Some of us are under the impression that tacos are Navajo when they're hardly even Mexican. Not the way we eat them anyway.

I've been thinking about Japanese food lately. Mainly about the fact that I haven't had any decent sushi or any Japanese cuisine for that matter. I suppose it would have to do with the fact that I haven't been to one of my favorite haunts here in Provo called Demae in a long time. It's quite a popular place even if only to those who have experienced authentic Japanese food before.

The general American idea of sushi is not what sushi is all about. For example, I once met a guy from Hawaii who served me "Hawaiian" sushi. It was nothing more than Spam (Yes, Spam - or Stuff Posing As Meat) brushed with teriyaki sauce and wrapped, with sushi rice, in seaweed. Ick.

I once saw a Japanese nature show where a bunch of Japanese went salmon fishing in Alaska. One held up the salmon while another squeezed the roe out into the hands of yet another who slurped the salmon eggs right up. MMM now that's fresh sushi. There's a restaurant in Kobe where you sit aroung a tank of fish. Everything on the menu is in the tank. You order. The chef's assistant catches your order and the chef cleans and prepares the fish so fast that the fish is still gasping for air when it arrives to your table, sitting on a bed of crushed ice. And yes, I do mean the WHOLE fish.

There's more to Japanese food than raw fish, though. There are two things specifically that I miss. One can be found in many Japanese restaurants and that is Sukiyaki. Loosely translated, it means "Fry as you like". I was invited to dinner by this one family in a small town called Iwanuma. The husband was a carpenter who had built his own sukiyaki table. It was a small table, probably about two feet square with a gas burner in the middle. His wife filled a small cast-iron pot that reminded me of a cauldron Harry Potter might have used, with sukiyaki sauce, beef, bok choy, chrysanthemum and tofu among other things. The idea with sukiyaki is to take out a piece of whatever you want with chop sticks, dip it in soy and eat the piece with a bite of rice and then dive in for another piece. The difference is, in Japan, they'll take one egg per person, scrambled with the chop sticks in a little bowl. When you grab what ever it is you want from the pot, you dip it in the raw scrambled egg and then the soy sauce. Awesome! If you like over-easy or sunny-side up eggs, this is a treat.

There's one other thing I miss about Japanese food that you can't get here in America (But I bet you could in Cal or Hawaii) and it is called Okonomiyaki. Notice the yaki at the end? That means "fry" as in "stirfry". Another family I knew in a town called Shiogama took us to an Okonomiyaki-ya. We were given our own room. The table (we sat on the floor of course) had a flat-top griddle in the middle. It was kind of a self-serve Benihanna. Everything you could want was listed on the mural-like menu on the wall. The husband used an intercom to order for us. A young woman brought our order of raw vegetables and fish with a separate bowl of eggs and flour. After cooking the vegetables and fish on the griddle, he mixed the eggs and flour together to make a batter and poured it over the cooked food, making something like a stir-fry pancake. Top it off with a little seaweed flakes and tonkatsu sauce and it's like heaven!