Sylvia's Scenario

There are no Mexican restaurants in Japan so when Nick needs a Mexican food fix, he'll have one of his favorites:  Taco Rice.  They offer this dish at some restaurants in Japan and Nick ordered it for lunch when we went to one his favorite places he likes to go to during work, called One Shot.    It's a lot like a taco salad only there is a layer of rice on top of the salad greens, then the taco meat and then cheese. (Notice that it's mostly salad) I like that the rice adds another dimension to the otherwise typical taco salad.   At home, Nick layered it differently with the rice on the bottom, then the meat mixture and cheese  and then we added our salad fixings.  Nick's version of Taco Rice is more the Western style - lots of meat and carbs and less salad. LOL   We did find some salsa in the grocery store in a little jar, similar to a small mustard jar.  Then we added some tomatoes and avocado.  (We looked for tortilla chips but there weren

Nick has been living in Japan now for five years full time and he feels that he has gotten to be a pretty good judge of ramen. We visited a ramen place near his house that he believes is one of the best ramen places around. I blogged about ramen during our first visit to Japan - here .  It's one of my favorite foods in Japan.  But there are so many kinds of ramen.  It did not originate in Japan but in China.  How it arrived in Japan is sort of a mystery but somehow between the 17th and 20th centuries, it ended up in Japan.  In 1910, a restaurant opened in Tokyo called Rai-Rai Ken by a customs agent who'd worked in Yokohama's Chinatown. He served what was then known as "shina soba": shina for China, soba for the noddle dish that was already well established in Japanese cuisine.  It caught on with the blue-collar workers because it was cheap and filling.  Today, eighty percent of ramen shops are small businesses with ramen chefs who are proud of their creation

The day we went to Tokyo on the Saturday before Mother's Day, we stopped for a few hours in Yokohama for a sushi making class that Sachiyo had arranged for us.  It was so much fun that I would highly recommend it to anyone visiting Japan.  Our teacher was a professional sushi chef named Hidetomo Mizobe or "Hide", who teaches out of his home by appointment.   To become a sushi chef requires nine months of classes and then you must pass seven exams.  Hide works a day job but loves making sushi so much that he teaches on weekends and hopes to make a career out of it someday.  He has wonderful teaching skills and used a very professional slide show throughout our class. He started out by giving us an exam and we had to raise our paddles with a green check or a red X to answer each question about sushi and Japan in general.   It was a lot of fun and, of course, Nick won the contest with the most correct answers but he gave us all prizes just the