Earlier this month, my friends and I had a little gathering to celebrate a birthday. Birthdays are not a requirement for these little gatherings we call "salaryman party," but it's a pretty good excuse to get together once in a while. Usually we watch terrible movies over some yakiniku that we cook on my friend's electric hot plate, but this time we decided to make some takoyaki!

The recipe we followed was this one from a blog called Little Japan Mama, though we used crab sticks instead of octopus. It's still pretty good anyway!

The first time we had such a gathering, I brought a sparkling apple cider for us to drink. We poured it into fancy glasses stamped with the Heineken logo. It kinda looked like beer, and with the yakiniku, one of us joked about being salarymen eating out after a long day in the office. And so our "salaryman party" was born.

I don't remember how we decided to watch terrible movies during these salarymen parties, but since then we've seen It Takes a Man and a Woman, 50 Shades of Grey, and Talk Back and You're Dead. These movies tend to be a lot more enjoyable when the following conditions are met: there's lots of food to pay attention to instead, you have friends to yell at really stupid plot advances with, and there's a lot of space to faceplant at.

What should we watch next?

We got so excited to eat them that we hurt our tongues and I felt the inconvenience for days after. Maybe it's because we made it ourselves, maybe we were just so hungry by the time we got around to making them, but they were so good.

While it was unfortunate that we didn't have aonori, the dried bonito flakes was enough and we loved how they danced over the hot takoyaki we made. It was so beautiful and so so good. The takoyaki was definitely worth all the effort.

I wonder what adventure we'll take on next!