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)