Of a Delicious BBQ

I went on a little trip with my coworkers on Sunday up to a place called Katsuura in Chiba prefecture for a BBQ. The trip overall was a lot of fun, and I was finally able to see some green again. No matter how much I like Tokyo for its convenience and variety of things to do, I'm still from a country with wide green fields and beautiful tree-topped mountains. Katsuura was really beautiful though, and I was finally able to spend some time near the ocean. The water was a beautiful blue, and the weather was perfect for a cook-out.

I was also able to meet some really wonderful people while I ate some fantastic food. Although I won't load pictures of people up for privacy reasons, I can share what we ate. The culinary adventure began with some Japanese lobster (伊勢エビ). They were live and freshly caught. Interestingly enough, the Japanese lobster does not have giant pinchers, so you're free to pick them up without worrying too much about getting hurt. We ate them raw first, and they were surprisingly sweet. I didn't know you could have lobster sashimi, but it was fantastic. After that, we cooked them and ate them properly.

After the lobster, we started eating some type of shellfish called sazae in Japanese. I honestly don't want to call these in English. Wikipedia suggests Turbo cornutus but I find it hard to believe we don't have more generic name for this animal. Basically, it's a type of sea snail though. We cooked it with salt and soy sauce, so it had a hard coating on the top of it. It was good, but not my favorite. We also ate ikayaki (grilled squid) and the most delicious of them all awabi, or abalone. I feel like I had eaten abalone once before, but it definitely didn't taste like this. Since it was freshly caught, the taste was phenomenal. I was told that the reason may be because there are two types of abalone: red and black. Honestly, I just think it was because abalone is extremely expensive, so I haven't really grown accustomed to it. 

The other things in the picture below are pumpkin (kabocha), eggplant (nasu), beef, and ham.

And last, but definitely not least, we ate something I had never tried before. We encased a large type of tai (or sea bream) though it may have been ishidai (striped beakfish) in a mixture of salt and egg whites and put it on the grill. The salt formed a protective shell around the fish, which we had to break later. This type of cooking is called shiogawa, or salt pan grilling. I was assured that I was not the only one who had seen this for the first time. It ended up tasting like it had been steamed, and all of the flavor was locked in since the juices started oozing out later. It really didn't taste salty at all.

Overall, it was a really wonderful event, and I'm glad I got the chance to meet some new people and to spend some time with my coworkers outside of work. I'm off to study and sleep.