Morning Markets: Takayama

This week, the dark lords of employment saw fit to give me a four-day weekend. So Peter and I, who have been planning a trip to Takayama, in the corners of our minds not preoccupied with other things, for a while now. Takayama is a small town in the central alps of Japan, about two hours outside of Nagoya. We took the Shinkansen down to Nagoya, and then a local train for another two hours or so into the mountains to reach this gem of a town. It's famous for a festival that's held there every spring and fall, where floats sponsored by various merchants are borne around the traditional streets of the town. Not since Kyoto have I seen such a collection of small, traditional Japanese streetscapes, and even despite the bus loads of tourists streaming through, the beauty of the place shone through. It's also famous for Hida beef, fabulously marbled beef grilled and served up in a variety of preparations at restaurants around town.

I have a full report on all the beef we ate there over on eGullet, but I wanted to talk about the gorgeous produce I saw in the morning markets. I go on a lot about the produce we pick up cheaply at Ofuna market, but what I get there is nothing on the gorgeous fruits, vegetables, and flowers I saw here in the mountains.

There are two morning markets: one in front of the jinya, a government building in the centre of town left over from the Edo period, and one along the banks of the river that flows through town.

The river market is larger, and features not only beautiful flowers and and handcrafts, but also spices, vegetables, fruit, delicious coffee, sweets, and grilled beef served with local microbrews. For breakfast? Why not?


Dango are another local specialty - balls of sticky rice, called mochi, are skewered, dipped in soy sauce, and then grilled for a chewy snack. The smell of rice grilling in this manner is an essential smell of Japan.

I couldn't resist picking up some beautiful little pickling eggplants (aubergines, dammit, I'm trying to retrain myself to say aubergines. aubergines. aubergines. Why do the British use a French word? Why?) no bigger than my thumb, and the vendor also had long ones, round ones, candy striped ones, and white ones, much to the amazement of the crowd. I never see diversity like that around town. Somebody call Slow Food! We need a chapter in Kanto!


I digress.

I got them home and decided they were too small to turn into grilled eggplant (aubergine) with miso (did I mention I bought a couple of bags of miso as well? From a soybean specialist? And some small-batch soy sauce? I'll admit it. I'm such a yuppie. I can hear my parents laughing at me from here.), so they're turning into Italian pickled eggplants (aubergine) from another project I'm working on.

There were also purple striped green beans, and I cannot resist a good green bean, quite frankly, so I bought a bag after sampling some of the vendor's home simmered beans, which she produced triumphantly from under the table when I expressed interest. She also had some gorgeous myoga and unwaxed cucumbers, but I resisted. I will be turning the green beans into Maki's fabulous ginger green beans, which keep great in the fridge for bentos.



There were all sorts of gorgeous flowers.



And beautiful fruit, which you could order by the boxful and have delivered to your home via Black Cat Delivery. Peter selected a nice pear for himself, and I chose an apple. At 100 yen each, that's all we could afford. The smell of cool air and apples made me think of home, and how much I love fall. Peter couldn't resist a bottle of fresh apple juice either, which had us thinking of fresh apple cider from Annapolis valley.



I bought some shichimi togarashi, which is a mix of seven spices, including chilis and sesame seeds, that the Japanese use to dip tempura into, or to sprinkle on ramen. It was so strange to see a spice vendor in Japan - I tend to associate spice mixes with South East Asian foods, and so the lady with her piles of dried spices and large mortar and pestle stopped me in my tracks.


Even this pigeon was curious.


My favourite thing to get in Japanese market is always tsukemono - pickled things. In Takayama, they specialize in pickled red radish/turnips. I struggled to understand the dialect of the granny that sold them to me, but she insisted I take a bag each of sweet and salty - and I wasn't going to argue for 500 yen for both bags. Tsukemono don't come cheap in Kanagawa ken.


Stay tuned to see what I make from everything.

Nikko and Shojin Ryori

After an incredibly busy few weeks at work, it was a relief to get some time off, and take our first trip out of the city since the fall. We took a train to Nikko, a world heritage site and national park, home of the Toshogu Shrine.


The town is beautiful, and at this time of year, incredibly quiet. Although the mountains were shrouded in mist and low clouds during our stay, the cedar trees that peeked out from time to time were a breathtaking enough sight. We stayed at the Nikko Park Lodge, a cosy and relaxed hostel with a selection of Spanish red wine and a huge music DVD collection - it was like visiting my parents! The cook at work in the kitchen, Nagisa, was clearly proud of the food in the hostel, and justifiably so. Hostel food doesn't have to be great as guests usually don't have much choice, and especially considering most of the sleepy town shuts down permanently at 8pm. The Lodge, however, along with offering some vegetarian a la carte dishes, and sturdy breakfasts perfect for trekking through the shrines and other sites, offers a vegan set menu styled on the traditional vegetarian cuisine of Buddhist monks, shojin ryori.


The set included an individual pot for each diner, filled with shiitake, enoki, maitake, and bunashimeji mushrooms. The mushrooms simmered over a flame in a light broth, along with some yuba, a specialty of Nikko. Yuba is the skin that forms on soy milk, as it is curdled to make tofu. It doesn't sound particularly appetizing to the western palate, but Peter pronounced it delicious, likening it a sweet-tasting cheese curd. My mission to convert Peter to a tofu lover continues apace. He had been quite hesitant about the idea of a vegan dinner, but the large pot of mushrooms won him over almost immediately, and he happily addressed the rest of the meal, which included a tofu "steak"; a slice of firm tofu that had been fried in a soy-ginger glaze; a pot of vegetable miso soup, with carrots and sato imo - a sort of hard-to-describe wild potato with a silky soft texture and potato-y taste; and a large tub of mixed-grain rice.


The whole meal was presented beautifully, in typical Japanese style, and I could barely push myself away from the table at the end of it, I was so full. It was a real treat to try this sort of cuisine, and I look forward to sampling more of it in the future.


There was so much to see in Nikko - we spent two days chasing waterfall views, racing the clouds for visibility- and between the shrines and the natural beauty of the mountains, we kept busy. We dodged school trip delegations from site to site, and, it seemed, had the whole place to ourselves at times. We met our friends, Niamh and Avinder, on the second night and had dinner at the popular Hippari Dako yakitori shop, which has a large international following by the looks of the business cards on the walls. Impassioned testimonials from past visitors thanking the proprietress for her vegetarian offerings gave a clue to the reasons for her popularity amongst the young Eurpoean set; and frankly I have to give her snaps for making them available - who goes to a yakitoriya looking for a vegetarian meal? Not that vegetables aren't usually available, but...her flexibility does her credit, I guess, and probably makes it a lot easier to stay open during the low season. That aside, her tsukune (chicken meatballs) and hot sake were just the thing after a cold, wet day in the rain, staring at misty voids where waterfalls should be. It doesn't get much more zen than that.