After a busy day of sightseeing Stephen and I arrived into the city of Tomakomai. Tomakomai is located on the southern coast of Hokkaido and is the fifth largest city. We are only stopping over for the night, but we managed to walk around the streets a little bit and have the most delicious dinner.
Let me introduce you to shabu-shabu. Shabu-shabu is a Japanese hotpot dish of thinly sliced meat and vegetables boiled in weak watery broth (called dashi). The term is an onomatopoeia, derived from the sound your food makes when the ingredients are stirred in the cooking pot and served with dipping sauces. It’s a great experience because you cook the food piece by piece at the table, and then dip it into whatever sauce you like. There are 2 traditional sauces: ponzo and sesame. Ponzo looks like watery soy sauce but has a kind of bitter tart taste. Sesame is literally sesame seeds crushed up with a tiny bit of dashi added to make it smooth.
Tonight we chose two types of dashi – the traditional style, which is water and kelp; and a spicy chilly dashi. The deal was all you can eat (tabehodai) for 120 minutes for 2,800 yen per person (pretty sweet deal, about $30 aussie each). We consumed a lot of meat and vegetables and finished the meal off with a scoop of creamy icecream, and it was all delicious!!
↓(Below are some photos of a shabu-shabu we ate in Kutchan back in February. I never got around to writing a post about it back then, but that one was a bit more traditional in that it we ground our own sesame sauce, the dashi was in a traditional clay pot, and the food was presented to us thoughtfully and artistically in a deep bowl).
Hope you enjoyed the photos, and we’ll shabu-shabu with you when we get home.
M & S.
Steve & Meegs 