Japan Adventure #8

Today, I had dinner at the hotel’s teppenyaki restaurant. Instead of beef, tonight I chose to have seafood, so I ordered a Scallop, which came in a Japanese basil sauce, and a shrimp, as well as a rice soup with sea bream. The chef started by sautéing paper-thin slices of garlic in lots of oil. This had two purposes – one is that it gave you these nice crispy garlic chips to munch on, and two is that it infused the oil with the essence of the garlic. He collected up all of the oil on his spatula and put it into a pan for use throughout the cooking process. The scallop was fairly straightforward. The cooking of the shrimp was more interesting. First, he started with a live prawn. He put down some oil, then either some water or rice vinegar and covered the whole thing with a copper bowl. This quick-steamed the shrimp, while searing the outer shell. I'm not sure how long the shrimp survived, but it probably was not the most humane of deaths. He then trimmed the shrimp, and further cooked the end of the tail tail and flattened the body (except the head) so that you could eat the rest of the meat available in those parts. This was served with a single leaf of Japanese basil, fried until crispy, a slice of lime, and Japanese sea salt, which was pink, for garnish. The sea bream soup was somewhat build your own. He kept the broth hot in a little earthenware teapot while he lightly seared the sea bream. He then put the bream on top of a scoop of rice, and then I got to pour the broth over everything myself. Quite tasty. We finished the evening with some dessert, which was a semi-sweet chocolate cake served with sweet cream, vanilla ice cream, and a mint leaf. The meal was a bit pricy, at 10000 yen/person, but quite good.

I walked off dinner by spending some time looking at and taking pictures of Hiroshima’s Dreamination, which is a display of lights (like Christmas lights, but not formally affiliated with the holiday) that they put up every year along about 4-5 blocks of Peace Boulevard for about 6 weeks. This year, Hiroshima prefecture decided to put out their display 2 weeks early so that it would be up while the IETF was here. They really have gone out of their way to be welcoming to our group! Among the highlights, there is a pirate ship, a carousel, a solar-powered Christmas tree, laser lights, and a 30M high Christmas tree called the Miracle Tree.