Sorry about not posting yesterday - the internet has been extremely glitchy of late, and ended up going out for a whole day. In fact, I panicked because I was told that it would be gone for ten days, news tantamount to being told that I have to live the next ten days just like normal, only without my spleen. I mean, I don't necessarily love my spleen, and if I had to choose between dropping it or a baby over a cliff, I would probably choose the spleen, but that doesn't mean I want to live ten days without it. Anyway, crisis averted with almost no major organ-harvesting surgery on my part.
Today I had the option of going to an okonomiyaki sauce factory or sitting around in my apartment watching the rain and reading. I spent about half an hour split on the horns of this ferocious dilemma, but the argument ended when my brain pointed out the key word in the former option: factory. Any factory, anywhere, is worth visiting for any reason at all. If the Totally Hazardous and Precaution-Free Anthrax Factory offered free tours, I would be there faster than you can say "fatally fun." When I was in New York over the summer, I was so close to visiting an ice factory that I could taste the chilling flava of x-treme ice production, but sadly it was not to be. Would you believe that there has been an ice factory just minutes from Teresa's house for years, and she doesn't even know if they offer tours? How is this possible?
Anyway, I didn't get to visit the factory part of the building, which is a sizable tragedy, but I did get to learn how to make okonomiyaki instead, which I think is a fair trade. Don't bother looking okonomiyaki up, because japanese-english dictionaries translate it as "a savory pancake," which manages to be a definition without any relation to the object defined. It's a Hiroshima special, in fact the Hiroshima special dish, and is basically a thin layer of pancake-like dough topped with cabbage, rice crispy-like things, green onions, pork slices, soba noodles and egg, all in distinct layers. I've never been able to eat it because of the obvious egg ingredients, but now that I have learned the secrets of its creation, I can pound out an attractive little mock-up of it for myself. The photo above is the first dish of okonomiyaki I made at the factory today, and I am as proud as a new father would be if his wife had just given birth to a delicious plate of okonomiyaki. I plan on making the first non-lethal batch of okonomiyaki tomorrow, so I'll keep you up on that as it develops. Woot.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
