chapagetti

Have you tried chapagetti? It was my first time.

I had thought it was the same dish that I saw in the movie "Parasite", but it is different.

Chapagetti, is an instant noodle dish that resembles jajangmyeon.

Cha comes from chajang which is black bean sauce and pagetti is part of the word spaghetti.

The dish in the movie is apparently chapagetti mixed with neoguri (a spicy ramen) to get chapaguri

Anyway, since Satoshi didn't need dinner on Tuesday, I decided to try chapagetti and add steak for protein.

I thought I might not like this because I don't really care for chinese black bean sauce, but this was delicious.

Not spicy and the flavors were not overpowering.

I don't know that I would have this again, but I'm glad I tried this.

biang biang men

Have you eaten biang biang men?

I have been wanting to try it after seeing it on someone’s Instagram, so I was glad to find them the other day while browsing Kaldi.

The kanji (chinese character) for biang has 57 or 58 strokes?! like art yeah?! (picture from wikipedia)

I like saying "biang biang" 

I served this for our Sunday dinner.

The only p.i.t.a. thing is that you need a tall pot to boil these l-o-n-g wide noodles in.

AND you cannot throw everything in at once when the water boils, you gotta put them in one by one and make sure they don't stick to each other...

I did this in 2 frying pans...so I was kinda going krazy trying to unstick the noodles...

I added some steamed chinese cabbage, cabbage and sugar snap peas.

It comes with a szechuan pepper and oyster sauce packet but I also added some spicy pork that I had in the freezer.

This was delicious.

The noodles are thick, chewy and hard to slurp.

Still, I enjoyed this and would get it again if I see it at Kaldi.

meh

All hype...this wasn't something to try especially if you are watching your sodium.

You cook the noodles...add a tablespoon of the cooking water to the contents of the soup packet and garlic butter oil packet.

Since abura soba is a soupless dish, the tablespoon of hot water to soup packet makes everything super concentrated.

Add your own toppings.

If after hearing me out, you still want to try to make this at home, buy a package of the shoyu flavored ramen, add a tablespoon of the cooking water to the contents of the soup packet, then and add your own garlic, butter & toppings.

We still have one more package of this and I will use only half of the soup packet next time.

We also still need to try the mazesoba, but I'm not getting my hopes up...

nishikiya

We recently tried Nishikiya's instant curry.

Apparently the main company is located in Miyagi Prefecture.

I love the packaging.

So far we've tried the two on the left. The top left is a yuzu keema. Very clean flavors.

The bottom left is a tomato beef curry. Lots of tomato and some pieces of beef.

Even though the packages said spicy, these were very mild.

I noticed that they have other items like okayu (rice porridge) and soups and will probably order from them so we can try.

p.s. we have sun today but another typhoon is approaching...boo!

peach curry

Another thing we bought were these instant peach curries from Yamanashi prefecture.

I had heard about this before and had it in the back of my mind.

I love the name of the peach farm...Ariga-to-en (it is a play on words "garden of thanks" and Ariga Peach Farm)

We bought a spicy version and a beef version.

They incorporate peach chutney and also pieces of peach too.

Both were delicious.

The spicy version was good, the burn lingers.

I'm glad we got to try these.

okinawan instant curries

A couple of weeks back, we tried two Okinawan instant curries, for Curry Friday.

One was a soki (sparerib) curry, this one had lots of tender spareribs in it. And an awamori (Okinawan liquor) keema curry.

The awamori one is on the left and the soki one on the right.

I didn't care for the awamori one, it had a really heavy alcohol taste to it, like the alcohol wasn't cooked off.

I'm glad we got to try these and would definitely buy the soki one again.

instant nozaki corned beef curry

We recently tried Nozaki's instant corned beef curry.

I bought the medium spicy and it had lots of shredded corned beef in it. Serve it with lots of rice.

I saw on their website that they have sausages that look like vienna sausages. I'm gonna keep an eye out for them.

curry fridays

Did you know that the Japanese navy eats curry on Fridays?

I can't remember where I heard about this but it was so that they knew what day of the week it was.

Being at sea so long, the days kind of "blend", so to know when the end of the week was, they were served curry on Fridays.

Satoshi picked up these two curries when he went to Hiroshima for business recently.

I checked back on my archives and we had tried this one before.

I liked this one because it had lots of goodies in it.

It was a mixture of nikujaga & curry, so it had beef, potatoes, carrots and konnyaku (devil's tongue jelly).

If you're interested, you can look back at our adventure to Kure here, here, and here.

Have a nice weekend!

playing tourist (day 2)

Monday, I met D and his friend at the Instant Ramen Museum in Ikeda.

It had been about 10 years since I last went and they renovated the place since then.

The museum is dedicated to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen. His family home is located right across the museum.

Someone tell these kids that they weren't standing near the Statue of Liberty...that's what the smaller of the two was saying, "it's the Statue of Liberty"...

Most of their exhibits are in Japanese, so it may be hard to understand, but you can see how instant ramen has grown. These days, Nissin not only makes instant ramen but instant pasta, udon & soba too.

The highlight of this place is definitely making your own cup noodle.

For 300 yen, you get a cup to decorate. Choose your soup flavor and 4 toppings.

I chose the regular cup noodle soup, kim chee, cheese, roast chicken and the chicky naruto (like kamaboko (fish cake))

It was cool to see the diversity of visitors to this museum. From pre-schoolers to senior citizens. There were also a lot of foreigners.

This group was making LOTS of Christmas presents...

There is also an area where you can taste different instant foods made by Nissin.

D's friend insisted that we needed to eat ramen for lunch, so we went to Senri Chuo to his favorite ramen shop, Hokkaiya.

The ramen is a tonkotsu soup with other flavors added. I ordered the shoyu kim chee ramen. The kim chee was actually buta kim chee (pork with kim chee).

Delicious!

Then D's friend took us to the Banpaku Koen, the site of the World Expo in 1970.

The theme of this expo was the future so there were many futuristic displays and pavillions back then.

One pavillion is still around and this is where they exhibited some memorabilia from the expo.

The size of the park is 264 hectares (652 acres)...huge!

There is a small admission into the park, 250 yen. And an admission to see the memorabilia...400 yen. But it is a great place to hang with nature.

I ate my cup noodle the other day for lunch...so good!

D is off to other parts of Japan before he returns to Hawaii, I hope he enjoyed his time in Osaka. We enjoyed spending time with him and his friends.

Instant Ramen Museum
8-25 Masumi-cho
Ikeda, Osaka
Phone: 072.752.3484
Closed Tuesdays
Hours: 9:30-16:00
Admission: free

Hokkaiya
1-3 Shinsenri Higashimachi, Senchu Pal 3F
Toyonaka, Osaka
Phone: 06.6832.2662
Closed Wednesdays
M-F Hours 11:00-16:00, 17:00-21:00
S, Su, Holidays Hours: 11:00-21:00

instant spam curry

When I saw this at the market I knew I had to try it...Instant Spam Curry.

Made by Okinawa Hormel, the curry comes with potatoes, carrots and spam.

The spiciness was medium hot, but I thought the spam was a bit spongy.

Oh well, it was worth trying.

maruchan seimen

Been seeing commercials for this recently...Maruchan Seimen. I think when cooked it is supposed to resemble the "freshness" of eating at a ramen shop.

Boil 500 mililiters of water and stick the noodles in for 3 minutes.

Using a pair of chopsticks, separate the noodles while it is boiling in the water.

Add the liquid soup packet into your bowl and then pour the water from your pot into the bowl along with the noodles.

Add your own toppings.

I made a han-juku-tamago (half-cooked egg) as one of our toppings.

I put an egg straight from the refridge into a pot of cold water and brought it to a boil.

When the water came to a boil, I turned off the heat and left it for 5 minutes.

After the 5 minutes, I put it into a cold water bath and then peeled it.

Voila! an egg that isn't hard boiled yet not super runny.

I also topped our ramen with some lup cheong and green onions.

I prefer my noodles on the harder and thinner side, but this was perfect for the rainy day we had last Saturday.

p.s. This past week, Okinawa started their rainy season, apparently 5 days late from last year's stats, so we're headed for our rainy season soon. The weather is still kinda weird, we had a couple of days where it hit 30C (86F), it's only May...and then the temps dropped rapidly 10 degrees...I think summer in Japan is gonna be blazing!

ryu ryu

Friday, Satoshi called me to say he wouldn't be needing dinner...boo!

I wasn't in any mood to cook after that call, so I boiled some pasta and heated up this sauce.

It was a gyu-suji (beef gristle) carbonara by Ryu-ryu, a well known pasta place in the Kobe-Osaka area. The gristle is simmered in a shoyu-sugar sauce until tender.

Combine that with a cheesy cream sauce....different, right?!

I topped this with some broccoli and some colored peppers just because I needed some veggies...

I really liked this. The sauce was on the salty side and the beef on the sweet side. Definitely not something to eat all the time, just in a pinch.

u.f.o. sobameshi

I think I first talked about sobameshi here.

Nissin recently came up with a Cup Noodle flavored dish, but instead of the noodles they replaced it with rice, which I think they call "Cup Noodle Gohan", gohan means rice, I haven't tried it.

Since they figured out instant rice, they paired it with their U.F.O. instant yakisoba and came up with a sobameshi.

You pour about 3/4 cup of water into the container, then add the noodles and rice, mix well.

Then you nuke it for the directed amount of time...about 5 or 6 minutes depending on your wattage.

When it comes out, let it sit for 2 minutes then add the yakisoba sauce and mix well. Then top with aonori (green laver) & dried ginger bits.

I decided to take this dish to another level, and added an over-easy egg.

So good! I'm glad I tried it.

fukubukuro

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered some things from DHC. I knew of DHC when I was in Hawaii (they were originally a Japanese company which sold out of SF in the U.S. I would order some of their cosmetics and skincare off and on when I was in Hawaii.) When I moved to Japan, I kept ordering their cosmetics off and on and noticed that the company had also branched off into clothing and gourmet foods.

So when I ordered some things online and they said that I had collected enough points to redeem them for a fukubukuro. I wrote about fukubukuro in the past and was kind of leery as to what I would receive, but decided to redeem my points anyway (if you don't redeem them by a certain date you lose them).

My package was delivered a few days later...I opened it to find the items I ordered, plus a 750 ml bottle of olive oil!

Since the price of gasoline went up, so did the price of our cooking oils (as well as many other products). Apparently this one is worth 2000 yen (about US$20).

Also in the box were several instant products...curry, o-kayu (gruel) & okara (soy lees) cookies. Things I wouldn't buy but grateful as they are great for lunches in a pinch.

Here's a little review of the products I received: okara cookies...healthy maybe, but very bland, I imagine this is what styrofoam must taste like. If you are ordering this, please tell me what flavor is the best....

Keema curry: spicy and delicious. Portion probably not enough for guys.

Curry flavored o-kayu (gruel): 12 different grains + rice and curry flavor...spicy but kind of sweet....seemed like there was a lot of cardamom or coriander in it. Again, the portion is probably not enough for guys.

I'm glad I redeemed my points and happy that they didn't send me anything that I couldn't or wouldn't use.