JDM Photosafari - 4

These are the last photos from Colin Chu's epic trip to Japan with Bulletproof Automotive. Pictures of food is pretty off-topic for a car blog and I promise not to do it all the time, but it's pretty photography.

I actually own another domain that I used to host a food blog on, but I haven't touched it in a long time.


Wall of Sake.




Okazyua! I see sanma, shiozake, misoyaki, etc. This is where I'd stop.



Pretty sure everyone knows what Uni looks like, but I thought it was a nice shot.



This is the craziest ice cream selection I've ever seen, and apparently this is only a fraction of it.



This is painful, because there's *nowhere* in DC you can get REAL ramen.

Fish parts

One of my favorite foods is "Hamachi Kama", or broiled/grilled yellowtail collar.

Hana sells the collars frozen, so I picked up a couple and took a shot at making my own. I'm never going out for it again, it was every bit as good as my favorite spot on my first try. Just make the cuts, salt, let it sit, and grill.

Slurping

To continue the review of all the goodies I picked up at Hana yesterday, I made a bowl of Myojo pork-flavored Ippei-Chan ramen today at work.

Very good for instant noodles, a million times better than Top Ramen or whatever, and also much better than the "Nong Shim" bowls.

These are like $3 at Hana, which is kind of a lot for instant noodles, but I think it's worth it. I'm going to start keeping a drawer of them at work.

I wish I could find a curry one.

OISHII!!

There's a little Japanese grocery store in Bethesda that I used to go to on the regular (Daruma), but that's a little far from my office now, so I hardly ever get to go.

Today, thanks to Yelp.com I discovered a new one, called "Hana". It's considerably smaller and doesn't have a prepared foods section, but it has all the basics and at much better prices than Daruma. The owners are very nice and I will definitely be a repeat customer.

It's located at 2004 17th Street NW, in the U St Corridor of DC.





While I was there, I discovered this thing called "Cream Bread", this particular one being made by a company called "D-Plus". I tried the Hokkaido Cream flavor, and it is the truth. Go buy some.

Sanma Shioyaki

I finally got around to buying a grill, as I felt like I was the only male in all of suburbia who didn't have one.

I christened it with Sanma, which is the Japanese nomenclature for Pacific Saury, sort of like a long slender mackerel.

They look cool and taste amazing. Heat + Shoyu + Fish. Simple.

DC Street Food 1

DC has an admittedly lame street food scene. There were obnoxious regulations in place until very recently that pretty much limited us to the same group of hot dog vendors. This has recently changed, and now we have Korean, Salvadoran, and all kinds of other madness.

Homage must be paid to the hot dog vendor however, primarily due to the ever-ubiquitous DC street treat, the half smoke. Think of it as a tasty middle-ground between a true smoked sausage (i.e. kielbasa) and a hot dog.

These people probably wondered why I was taking pictures of their half-smoke/egg roll cart.



$2.50 for a half smoke is a pretty serious ripoff, but this was admittedly down by the museums, where everything is 200% more expensive for the tourists. Hot pepper sauce is a MUST. It tastes sort of like Siracha.