soak over night – one pack ftw.

next morning, get some salt, 1 onion, teaspoon of curry powder and boil until soft.

in a separate fry pan get some garlic 2 buds about half an inch of ginger, one tomato, and some pepper (cayenne optional). olive oil. crush / grate ginger and garlic. heat olive oil, couple of spoons. saute ginger and garlic about 5 mins, add tomato, saute till becomes a sauce. poor into lentils

***

soup

lentils. olive oil, onions, saute onions and lentils, low heat for 5- 10 mins.

add water 125-150 mls. (depending on consistency wanted)
cook that till done.

then get a big bunch of parsley. chop it up fine. once boiled add parsley. add a big whack of grated ginger (4-9 tbs).

turn heat off and add ginger.

nom nom with bread or rice.

nb: both of these are untested!

Tamachi is a station on the Yamanote loop line in Tokyo. There are a lot of offices in the area – including the head office of NEC so there are a correspondingly large number of restaurants and bars in the area.

At the top the sign says “Motsu Dining and Global Restaurant” – with motsu being Japanese for offal. Being a global restaurant I wonder if they sell haggis?

And the real question – if they relocated, could you call that a “bowel movement”?

Apparently this McDonalds Hamburger was bought in 1996 and still looks as good as the day it was sold! You can read more about it here: 1996 McDonalds Hamburger.

Think I would rather stick with a decent felafel pita from Pita the Great.

The photo was taken by Noface2 and the original can be found here.

That sense of humour is something I do miss about New Zealand. Here in Japan I have never seen a job post anything like that. Hope they find a good burger flipping existentialist.

And who said flipping burgers was a bad job?

In New Zealand we don’t have much in the way of Israeli restaurants (at least not that I am aware of), but we do have a lot of food from that area, particularly Lebanese restaurants – and these have long been a favourite of mine. It wasn’t until we moved to the Kansai area in 2001 and discovered a great little Israeli felafel place in Nara (which I have heard has since moved to Kyoto) and I was very happy to discover that they served wonderful food much like I was used to in New Zealand. I suppose it should have been obvious that Israeli food would be very similar to Lebanese food, but my image was more of New York deli style grub.

So we rode the Oedo line from Azabujuban station out to ShinEgota station which took a bit under half an hour. After getting out of the station we had a nice stroll through the streets of Nerima ward. That area is very Haruki Murakami – peaceful semi-urban Tokyo and it wouldn’t seem so strange to stumble upon a character from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

After a bit of a walk we found the restaurant. The area it is in has a pachinko parlour, a book store, and even what looked suspiciously like a bia hoi (sp?). From the outside Shamaim didn’t look like much, still we were hungry, hungry as polar bears as we went up the stairs. Once inside we were pleasantly surprised – the decour was nice and homely and would have been fine in any half decent cafe in New Zealand.

We ordered the all you can eat 2100 yen vegetarian special and dug in. It was damn good. Nice veggie soup to kick things off and then a great selection of dishes to dip our pita bread in. The all you can eat special lasts 2 hours – but we didn’t. After an hour or so, and a couple of extra orders we were as full as could be and very sleepy! Too much food A mighty fine repast.

Shamaim is highly recommended. If you click here, you can get a map to the restaurant as well as a coupon you can print out to get free Shamaim special dessert “Marabi”, or free Arabian spicy coffee, or free mint tea – the choice is yours.

One thing that stood out was the music. A lot of restaurants like this try to play traditional local / ethnic music. Shamaim didnt – some great beats to keep the dining kicking along. Gotta appreciate that!

“つくば飲食店メモ　Eatout Tsukuba

Memo for daily eating out in Tsukuba. Classified by areas.

Eatout Tsukuba is a blog with mini reviews and information about restaurants around the Tsukuba area. Seems to be updated on a reasonably regular basis.

The reviews include the type of food on offer as well as the price range, with notes in both English and Japanese.