Going Japanese

Saturday will see a rare event occur – I have just booked to go out to a restaurant for a meal with my wife and daughter (it will be a birthday meal for my wife). I almost never go out to eat in restaurants and when I do eat out the venue is generally a pub or a chain restaurant (cheap and easy). The chosen venue (my wife’s choice) is a local Japanese restaurant which should be interesting as I have only eaten Japanese food a few times and my only real recollection of eating it is from around 45 years ago when we had a Japanese visitor (a member of a group of teachers visiting local schools) staying with our family. If my memory serves me well his name was Mr Natsume and the occasion of us eating Japanese food with him was quite a memorable one…

Mr Natsume (I will assume I have remembered correctly) stayed with us for perhaps two weeks and at some point towards the end of this period he announced that he would like to cook real Japanese food for us. After a little thought he decided what he would make (Tempura was the main thing I remember), relevant ingredients were bought and the evening came for him to cook. I remember him setting to work in the kitchen and it getting later and later and later with no food appearing. Eventually (and I really do mean eventually), the dishes were ready and much later than planned and so absolutely starving hungry we tucked in (the food was absolutely delicious). Conversing as we ate, it turned out that he had NEVER cooked before as his wife always cooked for him, and his efforts were based entirely on his observations of her preparing and cooking food at home. This went some way to explaining quite why it had taken so long for fairly basic ingredients (vegetables, batter) to transmogrify into delicious morsels.

So, as I look forward to Saturday evening I have two key things going on in my mind. First, I am excited because I can still recall just how delicious Mr Natsume’s Japanese food was and I am looking forward to more of the same. Secondly, I am wondering how many snacks I should eat on Saturday afternoon, just in case it turns out that slow preparation is not only something for a first-timer trying to mimic the efforts of their wife but, rather, is a general characteristic of Japanese food.