Third Full Day in Japan.

Travel Blog 2 Minutes
Today we took a cooking class from an amazing cook, Yuka Mazda.
Yuka has been in the culinary industry in Japan for over thirty years. She knows everything there is to know about preparing Japanese food.

We decided to take a class on sushi preparation. According to Yuka the key ingredient to good sushi is perfect sushi rice. We spent the first hour of our cooking class discussing and preparing perfect sushi rice.

Perfect sushi rice.

To make perfect sushi rice you need to start with good quality rice. According to Yuki California grows great sushi rice.

The rice needs to be rinsed three times. The cooking time needs to be followed to the minute and the rice needs to be worked in the wooden bowl to keep the rice from getting mushy.

Sara working on a salmon roll.
Dana working on her salmon roll.
My sushi creations.
From the left, bottom to top. Salmon nigiri, scallop nigiri, scrambled egg nigiri. Next row, salmon roll, fatty tuna roll, salmon roll. Next row, fatty tuna roll, fatty tuna roll and salmon roll. Fourth and final row, salmon roll, salmon roll and fatty tuna roll.
After we prepared our sushi we had a sushi feast. It was soooo good.

This afternoon Sara went on a shopping excursion, Dana decided to chill, whatever that means and I decided to walk over to the Hama-rikyu Gardens. This was the family garden of the Tokugawa Shogun and functioned as an outer fort to help protect Edo Castle.

In 1868 the Emperor Meiji defeated the feudal shoguns and became the emperor of all Japan. This is called the Meiji Restoration. Emperor Meiji modernized and westernized Japan. As a very rough analogy, think of Emperor Meiji as Japan’s George Washington.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868 the garden became the detached Palace of the Imperial Family.

Emperor Meiji.
The Garden is a beautiful well tended oasis in the middle of a bustling city of seventeen million people.
A tea house on the lake in the garden.
The Garden’s flowers were primarily past their full bloom but this bush was a beauty.
This is the restaurant where we ate dinner tonight.
This is the tasting menu.

This was a very small restaurant. A table that seated ten and a bar that seated six people. A group of three were seated at the bar and Sara, Dana and I sat at the table. We were there for almost four hours. It was an amazing meal. The owner/chef trained in France for ten years and then moved to Japan where he trained for another ten years. As you can see from the menu, the meal was a combination of dishes from France and dishes from Japan.

The owner/chef delivered every course and explained the dish and the sourcing of the ingredients. It was an amazing meal.

That’s it from Tokyo. I hope you are having a great day wherever you are.

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Published by abeandmarkonthecamino

I've been retired from the Union Pacific Railroad since 2017. I've been planning to walk the Camino for about 6 months and can't wait to get started.

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