Another Saturday in Boston.

Having been out until just before getting on a bus to Boston, breakfast on Saturday came from one of those fast-food joints. Bacon, egg and cheese on a croissant and hash browns. There are worse ways to start your day. Also, because partying until well after dawn takes a lot out of you, my beverage of choice with this meal was water, and continued to be water for many hours to come.

Once in Boston I met a friend for lunch at a Shabu Shabu restaurant. This is a Japanese style of cooking where you are brought plates of raw meat, here I went with pork, on the right, and lamb, on the left.

Thinly sliced pork and beef, and cuts of chicken are very common in Japanese shabu shabu restaurants, but this restaurant also had lamb and ostrich. As tempted as I was to try the ostrich, the pork and lamb were available at a very reasonable combination price.
You cook this meat yourself in boiling broth right at your table. This sort of cooking at the table is popular in several versions in Japan. This particular restaurant was more of a combination of shabu shabu, usually cooked in a pot resembling a bundt pan with an over-extended central cone, with nabe, a Japanese winter specialty usually cooked in an earthenware pot.
Aside from the cookware, the primary difference here is technique. Shabu shabu is an active cooking experience where you hold the meat in the boiling broth until it's cooked to your liking, and then eat it immediately with an option of sauces or other additions. Nabe is more of a stew. Ingredients are added at different times according to the necessary cooking times to bring everything together at the perfect moment. After all of the larger pieces of meat and vegetable have been eaten, partially cooked rice is added to finish in the broth and form a fried rice finishing course.

This shabu shabu is nabe-esque in that there was a very large selection of broths available beyond the standard mild, salty fish broth. Here you can see a kimchi based broth on the left and a very rich broth made from pork bones on the right called tonkotsu. To the side are standard additions you can add to the broth or directly to the meat after cooking: green onion, garlic, chili paste and hoisin sauce. Also next to my plate is a dare (dah-ray) made from soy sauce, vinegar and a little ginger. The meal also comes with quite a bit of equipment, although none of it is really necessary. The wire scoop did prove useful when cooking vegetables, and the bowl and spoon proved handy for making the most out of the cooking broths, but I preferred to use chopsticks for most of the shabuing and I never used the fondue fork.

This was not an all meat affair. There were lots of vegetables to be boiled and eaten too. There was spinach, watercress greens, sliced daikon, cabbage, shitake mushrooms and corn. Also, on the vegetarian platter in the background you can see cellophane noodles, fried blocks of tofu and bundles of tofu skin. Also, each lunch order came with your choice of noodles to be shabued. We both went with udon.

The meal progressed as a playful experiment, seeing what would match which broth better and what were ideal cooking times. The lamb was extremely good, especially when cooked in a bundle in the tonkotsu just to the point the pink was gone from the outside, but still had traces on the inside. The corn took forever to cook and wasn't really worth the wait in the end. However, the very bold broths and the great selection of meats made this possibly the best shabu shabu I've ever had.

And, since I was already on a Japan kick, why not go sushi for dinner. Boston boasted some very good Japanese fare, and at about 60% of the cost of similar food in Manhattan, so I intended to make the most of it.

On the far left of the plate, the nigiri (sushi over a rice block) shown is a piece of hotate (ho-ta-tay, scallop) which is a delightfully subtle and succulent texture experience that really comes alive with a little drizzle of lemon juice. Together with hokigai (red clam), large shellfish are my favorite type of nigiri. They boast the most amazing textures and delicate flavors that don't usually overwhelm the palate but come across like secrets whispered while walking on the beach at dusk. Be very careful not to bury their sublime characters with soy sauce and wasabi.
The foremost maki (rolled sushi) was a shrimp tempura roll. This was easy to pack in, more of an American version of Japanese food than a traditional favorite, but I'm not a sushi purist and these were just plain good.
Center stage went to an "Alaska roll" which, if you couldn't tell by the name, is also not a traditional Japanese maki. "Alaska rolls" can also vary greatly by restaurant. I didn't ask what was in this one, but there seemed to be salmon and another lighter-textured fish along with avocado. This was also on the more subtle side of sushi although I did abuse a piece or two with a heavy dose of wasabi and soy sauce because this was my least favorite of our options and I had to get a shot or two of wasabi in there somewhere.
All the way in the back is a California roll that I did not take part in because I have had problems with crab, fake or otherwise, and just avoid it across the board. My apologies if you wanted to read about my impressions on this California roll in particular.
And not pictured was eel nigiri. I've had some terrible eel experiences in the U.S. but my friend is a big fan and I didn't want to rain on any parades, so onward through the fishy valley we pressed. Much to my surprise, this eel was quite fresh. There were no signs of storage abuse where the eel is allowed to go gamey and the fish stink is allowed to take over what is otherwise a distinct yet delicate piece of fish. These were cooked with care to preserve the moisture of the fish and presented very tidily. It's too bad we ate them before I thought to take a picture.

I also decided to expose my friends to one of my Japanese favorites, age dashi dofu (ah-gay da-shee do-fu), a block of soft tofu fried in a delicate batter, topped with shredded daikon and green onion and served in a salty fish stock. Maybe because this is a personal favorite and I have had it prepared to perfection on a regular basis in an izakaya (tavern) around the corner from my apartment in Juso (just north of Osaka) but this was a disappointment. The tofu itself was treated well, but there was only about 3 tablespoons of soup to go with 4 blocks of tofu. If you'd never had it before, you wouldn't know what was missing, but I came away missing the old neighborhood.

I also snuck a bite of some tempura from my friend's bento. This was sweet potato tempura, I believe. Sweet potato is actually very popular in Japan in forms as diverse as tempura, roasted french-fry-like snacks, kit-kat bars and ice cream.

And speaking of all those sweets, we had desert back at home, iced molasses cookies and Magic Hat #9, an apricot-flavored lager from Magic Hat brewery. Beer and cookies, maybe not the best mix, but better than beer and milk and cookies.