How Dark is Dark?

I like dark chocolate very much. However, it is almost impossible to find dark chocolate that can be gobbled up directly from the supermarket shelves in Kuching.

In Japan, I was spoiled for choice! I first bought one box of chocolate with 72% cocoa, but found it not dark enough.

When I came across a slab of chocolate with 99% cocoa, I quickly grabbed it from the shelf, paid at the cashier and went right back to my dormitory to taste it. Yes, you hear me right, 99%! There was not a clue of sweetness and the chocolate flavour was so divine! This has got to the darkest chocolate that I have ever tasted.

I am starting to miss my time in Japan.

Feasting with Sushi

When I was in Japan about four years ago, I was looking very hard for an eat-all-you-can sushi restaurant. Finally, with the aid of web searching, my friend finally found one in downtown Tokyo and we planned for a lunch trip there.

We had to plan for the trip as Tokyo is one hour away by train, so we had to depart one hour before our planned lunch time. You heard me right! We went down to Tokyo purposely just to have this meal. Luckily there were not that many people and we could still find a table. Frankly speaking, eat-all-you-can meal is not that popular amongst Japanese.

We first ordered something that looked good on the menu to sample the taste. Therefore, we had only two for each type.

The tuna hand rolls looked good and we had only one for each of us. We wanted to taste more variety, so we ordered small quantity for each type.

Our second 'sample' plate was with unagi (eel) sushi and some seashell sushi. We knew that the unagi would taste good, so we ordered more even though that was still our sampling round.

Once we knew what was good from the sampling rounds, we started to make 'bulk' order of our favourites. Just by looking at the amount of unagi sushi, you know which was our ultimate favourite.

Uni (sea urchin) is quite an expensive food in Japan but I was surprised to see it on the eat-all-you-can menu.

We had some sushi with kimchi also just to have more variety in taste and also to clear our mouth from the seafood smell.

The content of our fourth plate of sushi was purely unagi! This was the day in my life that I had the most unagi sushi.

For the final round, we ordered one different type again, which is the sushi with tamago (egg). You can see that we had never left out the unagi! We also had more of the seashells.

To cap it off, each of us had one fried-beancurd-pouch inari sushi. We were all too full with sushi after gobbling up this 'pouch' of rice.

All the rice in the sushi we ate was shaped using a machine. Traditionally, nigiri sushi was supposed to be shaped by hand, but with the price of ¥1050 per person for an eat-all-you-can sushi meal, I couldn't complain too much.