Yakiniku

Yakiniku is Japanese style indoor BBQ.  We use a table top hot plate, and cook meat, seafood and vegetables on it.  We cook on the table, and eat from the table.  One the food is cooked, pick it up and dip in a sauce (or sometimes with lemon juice, salt, miso sauce etc) then eat!  

I do yakiniku often at home, because there is no much preparation for it.  I just need to cut meat and vegetables, then it’s dine.  After that I just sit back, turn on the tv and relax while enjoying yakiniku on the table in front of me.

Mainly I use yakiniku sauce as dipping sauce which I buy from a grocery shop.  (Ebara brand is the popular one in Japan)  It goes with any meat such as beef, chicken, pork, as well as vegetables and seafood.  For beef tongue, I prefer eating with just a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkle of salt.  It’s delicious.

I sometimes enjoy yakiniku with ponzu sauce.  Add grated daikon radish into ponzu, it becomes very refreshing.

Enjoy with steamed rice, or just few beers.

Hair Salon in Japan and Jakarta

My hair is now getting messy again and need to get trimmed …  It’s shame that I didn’t have time to go to a hair salon while I was in Japan.  I think I need to color my hair soon too..  My hair is originally dark dark black, and not straight.  My mum used to cut my hair when I was little, and I always looked like I was wearing a black helmet :p  I don’t like my hair because it’s little wavy, and go messy if I don’t take care of it using treatment and hair wax.

I’m flying off to Jakarta sometime soon and I’m thinking if I should go to a hair salon there… but I doubt if they can do the job as I expect.  I mean, I can’t speak Indonesian and they normally don’t speak English, so it’s gonna be hard to communicate and tell them how I want my hair to be done.  

If I end up going to a salon, I will be with mother-in-law.  If she goes to a salon, she offer me to get “cream bath”.  … I think I wrote about it long time ago on this blog, but when I heard about this “cream bath” thing I thought it was something like a “special treatment”.  Then I found out that hair salons in Jakarta and Japan are pretty different.  :p  I was surprised when they used cold water for shampooing too!  It was a kind of culture shock…  

I think some foreign people will experience culture shock too when they visit Japan’s salon.  I mean, there are some weird hair salons across Japan.  One of them is “maid salon”, where all the staff wear costume of maid and serve you.  It is a kind of cos-pure (short term for costume-play in Japanese)  Some of the salons have a few different kinds of costumes, and their services don’t only limit on hair-cut but also nail care, heard spa, ear cleaning…  Of course they are targeting on male customers ( ? ) though customers are not allowed to take photos inside and touch the staffs.

Well, I heard that hair salons in Perth don’t normally do shampoo and hair-blow as a service (or include in their prices).  If so, do customers go home with hair all over their clothes?  Or with wet hair?   It’s just surprising to me that Japanese salon usually does shampooing and blow-dry as a part of the procedure.

Except for the surprise of cold water, hair salon in Jakarta was fun to me.  Once they spread “cream” on my head, 2~3 staff come over to me and start to massage my arms and shoulders.  Ummm writing about this makes me want to get the massage!  Yes I think I will go to a hair salon in Jakarta.  Not for a hair cut, but a massage perhaps :p

Grand Opening of Esther’s

Again, another good news!  Esther’s, a Chinese style bakery shop in Northbridge, is opening its second shop in Winthrop Shopping Village this Friday October 30.  Esther’s in Northbridge has been there for about 1 year or so (I think) and the bread and cakes are popular among Japanese people too.  

On the opening day, you can buy the first 3 items including buns, tarts, cake slices for $1.00 each.  Sweet bread, pandan cake, savoury buns…  $1.00 each is a really good deal!  The normal retail price applies from the third item.  

This special offer is available only in the shop in Withrop village on Friday October 30.  

Shop 25 Winthrop Shopping Village (cnr Somerville Boulevard &Jackson Avenue)

OPEN 7 days, 8:30am ~ 6:00pm

Gather up for Free Donuts!

I was browsing today’s community paper just now, and I saw a ad of Dreamy Donuts (I wrote about the donuts in here) saying that they are giving away donuts for FREE!!

On October 24 the first Dreamy Donuts store in Booragoon opened its doors, and they are cerebrating by giving away free donuts for 5 minutes every hour on the hour between 10am and 2pm this Saturday, October 31!  This “Free for Five” promotion is only available in Booragoon store in Garden City shopping centre (near Wendy’s, T2 area).  

If you live somewhere around Perth, why don’t you take advantage of this offer?  Free glazed donuts … remember, it limits one donut per person.  The family with lots of kids must go to Garden City this Saturday.

Food You Like and Dislike

Since I was a kid, eating was one of my hobby and I could eat almost any food.  The common food that kids normally dislike include green capsicums (called “pi-man” in Japanese), carrots, tomatoes… basically vegetables.  Like other kids, pi-man wasn’t my favorite food either because of its bitter taste, but I started to like it since I was 10.  Now it’s one of my favorite food.

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To reduce kids’ dislike food, Japan’s school including kindergarden started to take “food education” seriously and worked hard to make kids like vegetables.  Most of schools in Japan (mainly public schools)  serve lunch to students (called “kyuushoku”), and cooks prepare meals to students everyday.  Those cooks try to make the food interesting to kids, so that kids would eat them and reduce their dislike food.  They cut vegetables into shapes of stars and hearts, and create a face or some scene with those cut vegetables.     

To recall my memory, I started to like lots of food as I aged.  I hated natto (fermented soy bean), rakkyo (a kind of pickles), umeboshi (pickled plum), chili powder, wasabi, etc etc before, but I love most of them.  (now I even love eating fresh chili and sambal)   I also didn’t like beer few years ago, but now I often feel like drinking it.

There are actually three food that I still can’t eat …  and I had never been able to eat them since I was a kid.  They are raw eggs, yama-imo (yam potatoes) and okura (okra).   I think the reason is their slimy texture…  Lots of Japanese enjoy a bowl of steamed rice mixed with raw egg and soy sauce, but I hate it and watching people eating it makes me feel like vomiting.. :p

Anyway, I may be able to eat all of them eventually as I age, but I’m not sure…  I can’t think about it at this point!  Do you have any food that you never thought you could eat them but it happened to be your favorite food??  Aging changes people’s food preferences … I think so.