Dining Out - Japanese style

I know most of you have heard of Bento meals. The craze is sweeping America, but Japanese have been doing it forever. Ben means Convenience and to means Set, so what you end up with is a convenience set of food. Bento's can be found at many restraunts, every Family Mart, and all grocery stores. Even the product mart I go to have a section of Bento box meals. Since I can't read Japanese it is always a guessing game as to what we end up with. A lady I met at my last Market day (her name is Spring, hence the conversation) said she had been buying a specific meal for years, they have been here 5. Just recently she befriended a local, and while out for lunch she got her normal bento box. She asked her friend to tell her what it was and was suprised to learn it was Gizzards.

We took the kids for dinner this last week, but we couldn't decided on a real restraunt. We all wanted something different, so we decided to hit the San-A grocery. Since I already had Sesame Noodles at home (Steph's favorite school lunch) we built an asian feast to go with them. Below is what we got:

Picture one is my Sesame Noodles, these are served cold. Stephanie likes taking a small container of these to school for her lunch. Give her some Edamame to go with it and she is in heaven.

Picture two is Onigiri. Onigiri is translated "take hold of with your hands". There are many different Onigiri. Steph likes it with plain rice wrapped in seaweed. Unfortunately she doesn't read Japanese either and what she ended up with was Salmon (we think) with some sort of black sauce. She braved a few bites before deciding she prefers the plain ones.

Picture three are the meat buns Lyle and I have tried before. The bread is so soft it almost melts in your mouth. One of these was barbecue, the other was pizza.

Picture four were Chris's picks. Anything on a stick has to be good, right? Turns out the stick food was pork and onions, skewered shishkebab style, then wrapped in bread crumbs and deep fried. They were very good! The sandwich behind them in the picture was spam and egg, wrapped in bread crumbs and fried. Also very good!

Picture five was Lyle's sushi choice. We have gotten braver with our sushi selection and I think we are almost ready to go to a real restraunt to get it. We have no clue what the rolled sushi was, except tasty :) The "breaded" sushi is actually white rice wrapped in a layer of sweetened egg. It tastes almost dessert-like and has become a family favorite.

Picture 6 was another Onigiri. But this one was cut in half so we could see what it contained. It looked like spam and egg so we bought it. We were suprised to find a layer of tuna salad between the spam and egg. It was an odd flavor combo, but it grew on me.

Finally picture 7. I put this last because it is dessert, but honestly we ate these first! The best, by far, was the raspberry pastry. It tasted much like a dessert my mom used to make with cream cheese, raspeberries and jello. The other two were typical eclairs, except the Japanese don't use a lot of sugar, so they weren't nearly as sweet as you might expect.

Our dinner cost less that $20 and we all ate WAY more than we should have! This, to me, is the best part of living overseas. These are foods that my kids (and hubby)never would have tried had we not come here!