Jan. 7 is National Tempura Day so we stopped by our neighborhood sushi spot to have a taste of tempura.

 

Our Medley Moment

Although the boys have actually had tempura before, they didn’t remember what it was, according to our pre-tempura interview.

They knew it was a Japanese dish because I told them that we had it before at sushi restaurants. Z thought it might be Japanese noodles, J thought it was kind of like sushi and A thought it was fake shrimp. (There’s a veggie restaurant near us that serves “fake shrimp.”)

I found a Japanese restaurant near us that has a Sunday afternoon happy hour (Akaihana in Phoenix – yum!) and we ordered the tempura vegetables, which include sweet potato, eggplant, green pepper, squash and broccoli. It was tasty, but the kids were fine with eating just one piece of vegetable tempura. It sounds like a great deal of work to make from scratch so judging from the enthusiasm factor, I’m glad we didn’t make this one from scratch and instead tried it at a local sushi place.

But if you are interested in giving it a try, I found this recipe from thespruce.com: “Easy Japanese Tempura Batter Recipe.”

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