Mitsuwa Marketplace:

Yesterday, Mina and I took a drive down to Edgewater, NJ to do check out and do some shopping at the Mitsuwa Marketplace (http://www.mitsuwanj.com/en/index.htm), a Japanese supermarket complex. You may ask, "4.5 hours each way to go to a supermarket?", but my answer would be that the bowl of Ramen at the outpost of Asahikawa, Hokkaido's Santoka Ramen (http://www.santouka.co.jp/) was worth the drive all by itself. Santoka turns out to be more of a ramen chain than I would go out of my way to try if I was in Japan - it turns out that in addition to the original shop in Asahikawa, there are 42 branches in Japan, 1 in Singapore, and 5 here in the States), where I usually try to limit myself to one-off shops or at least to the original shops of those that have expanded, but here in the U.S., having not had a professionally made bowl for 18 months, and even not having had a passable bowl of instant noodles for that long? Again, easily worth the 9 hours I spent in the car yesterday to get there and back. The soup was rich, the noodles done perfectly, and the char-sui pork tender and flavorful.

For the lovely Mina, I think the trip was all about sea urchin. If you ask her, uni-meishi (sea urchin roe on rice) is the thing she has most been wanting to eat in recent months, so it was nice to go to a place where the yellow stuff was available. We also picked up some grilled eel and some fish marinated in saikyo miso that we will eat this week. We also picked up a bottle of kabosu (a Japanese citrus fruit) juice that will be nice for making marinades and dressings, top end ingredients for dashi soup, and other items. I also bought a very cool serving dish to add to my growing collection of plates and bowls.

The weather on the way back to Syracuse last night was much less than ideal, but with my belly full of pork bone soup, I really didn't mind.