Lunch in small town Japan

After a morning hike and not quite ready yet for lunch, we whiled away a happy hour or so sitting outside a small grocery store on the main road through Yunishigawa (yes, that's the one seen below), watching the world amble on by while munching on some shrimp crackers (Ritesh had a beer) and pondering our options for lunch.

Before we knew it, we'd made a friend in an older gentleman who just came back from a fishing trip with his daughter and who decided that since I was letting Ritesh laze in the sun with a beer before noon, his daughter would have to let him, too. So he joined us and offered us some of his fresh wasabi - spicy stuff, as you can imagine.

And then the granny who runs the grocery store offered us some home-brewed nigori (unfiltered sake) on the house - and it was delicious! If we hadn't been at the beginning of the trip and dreading to schlep it all over the country, we would have bought a bottle or two. Of course, nigori is very uncool these days (it's the kind of thing that little old ladies offer you in the countryside, precisely) and I kind of made a fool of myself later on requesting some in a very hip sake bar in Kyoto where of course they didnt't carry any, but ah well, I think this is seriously good stuff.

The place we settled on for lunch, right across the street from our grocery store

Ritesh's curry rice and tonkatsu (fried pork)

My own katsudon, which is a bowl of rice w/ tonkatsu, egg and condiments. Very good, homey comfort food.

Dessert courtesy of the Honke Bankyu back in our room at the ryokan - a soft cookie with a nutty filling in the middle. Not quite as good as yesterday's sweet, which was so amazing that I went out and bought myself a whole box of it, whether I'd have to schlep it across the country or not...

Here's the box:

since we were the only non-Japanese around, this was composed especially for us :)

what you get when you remove the paper, open the lid and remove the plastic lining (the Japanese do some serious wrapping):

And here is one of the amazingly light and almost transparent yuzu (Japanese citron) daifuku. Oh wait, I've blogged about these before? I'm not surprised. Eating one of these is a quasi-spiritual experience, the mind goes still with this much deliciousness, so never mind some reiteration here...