Festival Food!

As promised, here is a post about some of the festival food my friends and I ate at the Setsubun Festival the other week. First off is some corn on the cob. Usually a fairly difficult item to find in standard Japanese restaurants/convenience stores, yet tasty nonetheless. Imagine if convenience stores sold corn on the cob, I would totally buy that all the time. This also reminded me of my days in Cambodia (see older posts) when we would snack on corn on the cob from street carts for like 20 cents or something amazing like that. Speaking of southeast Asia, I just made plans with some friends to go to Vietnam for Spring break in TWO weeks! I'm super excited, but still have a LOT of planning to do.


CORN!

Next up are some ginormous takoyaki dumplings. Usually made about a quarter of this size, these octopus-filled dumplings are standard street and party food (playing a central role in the "round things" party my friends and I threw in which we made and ate lots of round foods). Other ingredients in takoyaki include cabbage, ginger, egg, and flour. I didn't buy any of these, but they're usually pretty good so I can only imagine how delicious these giant ones are.


Mammoth Takoyaki (Octopus Dumplings)

More griddle-fried goodies, here a variation on Okonomiyaki, sometimes erroneously called Japanese pizza. Perhaps it could be better thought of as a combination omelet and pancake covered in tasty sauce and in this case, egg, bacon, and fishcake. Okonomiyaki seems to have evolved sometime in the Showa period after a long evolution beginning around the 16th century and through several eras and permutations before it reached its present form. This particular style of okonomiyaki also has noodles in it, a characteristic of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. Don't worry about the raw egg, as they crack it over the okonomiyaki right when you order that gives birth to gourmet gooey goodness.

Okonomiyaki

Finally, here's what I bought: Ayu, a.k.a. Japanese Sweetfish, skewered and roasted to crispy, salted perfection. Ayu is typically a summer food, but luckily for me, they had it here. It was pretty good, not the best I've ever had, which was probably either in Nagoya or Yamaguchi, but tasty nevertheless for being out of season. Its crispy texture, salty flavor, and sweet (not fishy) meat were just what I wanted after a freezing fire festival.


Roasted Salted Ayu (Sweetfish)

Setsubun Matsuri and Food

Flaming INFERNO!

Sorry for the late post, dear readers, but here it is. Last week was Setsubun Festival, which celebrates reaching the half point of winter and involves throwing soybeans at demons in order to ensure good luck for the year. I went with some of my friends to Yoshida Shrine near Kyoto University to see the festivities. Here are some photos of a mound of stuff that they burn at around 11 at night and you can throw paper and stuff into it. There were throngs of people at the temple as you can see, so it took a while for us to get to the fire, but when we did it was glorious. It must have been below freezing that night, so passing by an open bonfire was a welcome relief from the frigid February air. It was so cold indeed that I had to borrow my friend's hat (the blue one if you couldn't tell).


Warming my icy hands by the bonfire

Another peculiar custom of Setsubun is the eating of Eho-maki rolls or really big unsliced sushi rolls stuffed with all sorts of goodies. An Eho-maki is basically your standard futomaki (thick sushi roll), but with the added twist that you have to eat it facing the lucky direction specific to the year. This year's lucky direction happened to be West-South-West and luckily thanks to Kyoto's orthogonal grid layout arranged in the cardinal directions, it was very easy to determine which way west-south-west was from our convenient location inside a Family Mart convenience store. Usually you buy the Eho-maki from some sushi place or perhaps a more legitimate joint than a common convenience store, but we realized that at the last moment on our way home from the festival at Yoshida that we had yet to eat the Eho-maki in the lucky direction, so we stopped by in a Family Mart where they luckily (maybe all that setsubun stuff really did work) had four Eho-maki left for our consumption. I'm sure we also appalled the poor store workers by ripping open Eho-maki in their store, consuming it all in one go (you're also not supposed to talk until you finish eating it), and then requesting them to take a picture of us (using the most polite language, of course). The Eho-maki was tasty, but I was really full after an evening of festival food, which I shall report on in an upcoming blog, so stay tuned!


Pre-Eho-Maki