Onsen Eating

Shamelessly stolen from a recent email:

Yukari turned (insert number here) this weekend, so we went to a Japanese hot springs resort (onsen) that is known for their food to celebrate. Dinner was a 12 course meal, kaiseki style, served in our room.

Kaiseki can often be beautiful but bland -- all sorts of effort goes into how the food looks, but the food itself plays second fiddle. Also, dishes get fussed over so much that by the time you get them, everything is the same temperature: tepid.

Fortunately, not the case here. Hot dishes were served piping hot, including a fantastic fried fish ball served in a smoky dashi, with the rich, smoky flavor coming from some sort of green that was infused in the broth and floating in our bowl. My Japanese/English dictionary drew a blank on it, but it was incredibly umami, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Probably the best dish of the whole meal was an incredible one-pot stew, presented with the first course with instructions not to eat it until it began to steam. As it turned out, this took about 20 minutes or so, despite the fact that the bowl sat on top of a ceramic brazier that contained a few coals from the kitchen.

By either coincidence or design, the flavors from the stew slowly crept up on us as we ate some pickled mountain vegetables, a bit of sashimi (including an incredible hirame) and tiny squid served with grated daikon. The aroma evolved over multiple courses -- at first you barely knew it was there and by the time you started to think "Boy, I'd really like a bite of that" it was done and you could have it!

(Update: Forgot to mention that the stew was made of everyone's favorite neurotoxin-laden fish: fugu.)