The wife and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary yesterday and went out for a nice meal together. Since it was a weekday it was not convenient to find someone to watch the kids so we took them with us. Earlier in the day I had asked my wife where she would like to go and eat, normally she chooses a sushi restaurant, but this time she wanted to go to a yaki niku place (grilled meat).

I spent five years of my life living a vegetarian lifestyle, but changed that eating habit a few years ago.. I am still not big on meat and only eat pork now and then. I still never eat beef and chicken is very very rare. But I think every once in a while it is ok, besides Japanese portions are much much smaller than the huge thick steaks that are common in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Most of the time my family and I follow a Macrobiotic type of diet with lots of grains and vegetables. Mostly we eat brown rice and vegetables for our normal meals and a few times a week will have fish or a small portion of pork. We choose to eat this way for health reasons.

Living in the place where we live it is very simple to eat locally, in fact on a weekly basis one of the local farmers are giving us vegetables, in fact just today we got a huge sack full of potatoes.  And just 2 days ago received two cabbages and some leeks. Rice is bought from a farmer friend, and is almost always this years or last years crop.

We refuse to buy products that come from other countries most of the time, and also don’t buy things that are not in season. Some things you can’t help, like tropical fruits for instance, Hokkaido doesn’t grow bananas, they tend not to work very well in the extreme cold .

The 19th wedding anniversary dinner was at a place called Gyukaku which means (cow horn) and is a chain restaurant that has locations all over Japan. It was the first time that we had eaten at this place and I was excited about trying out the cuisine.

We started off with some kimchee and rice, the kimchee was not quite as good as the kimchee at Korean Village, but it wasn’t bad either. The daikon (Japanese radish) was the best part. Next course was the raw meat that we cooked ourselves on a grill of coals in the middle of the table.

The next course was a raw cabbage salad in a very tasty house dressing.  Then came an assortment of pork cheek, pork roast and beef  tongue. (I skipped the beef tongue).  A plate of mixed vegetables which included corn, cabbage, onions, and mushrooms were next.

After finishing all of this we were still hungry and ordered the kids some ramen, while the wife and I had scallops in butter and garlic cloves in a house sauce. The scallops were excellent and the garlic cloves tasted like potatoes.

For dessert the kids and I had a chocolate mousse over a scoop of vanilla ice cream while my wife had a custard pudding with brown honey sauce.  We left fat and happy and lost the kids to dreamland on the way home. If I wasn’t driving I probably would have drifted off to dream land myself.

Dinner was good, and we had a great 19th wedding anniversary, but we are still on the search for the great restaurants of Asahikawa.  Take care all.

1. 

   Snowman Japan says:

   November 4, 2009 at 4:02 am

   Hello Charles and Yasuko!
   Congratulations on you 19th wedding anniversary!
   Ikuko and I just had our 15th anniversary last month.
   Time really flys when your having fun, doesn’t it!
   If you go to that restaurant every week for the next 10 years, you will look just like me!!! YIKES!
   Take care and stay slim.
   It’s lot easier to buckle up your snowboard boots to the snowboard bindings, that way.
   Norman D.
2. 

   Charles Hamel says:

   November 4, 2009 at 8:03 am

   Congrats to you to.. Come on Norman I am waiting for you to go snowboarding with me again. Just take it nice and slow, no hurry.
3. 

   Call Center says:

   November 6, 2009 at 11:46 am

   Congratulations with your anniversary!! I hope you celebrate many more!!