Dinner

Here in toyama many of the team members stay in an apartment building/dorm and there is a wonderful lady who cooks meals for the guys. This is dinner. Oishi (delicious) - Arigatou/thank you!

Typical Food #4

Another very popular thing that you will see here is: curry. It is a little bit different than Indian food curry and I would say it has a taste all to its own.
Here there is a restaurant whose main dish is just this:



It is called Curry House CoCo Ichiban. The main dishes here are obviously based around curry and rice. When you get your meal though, it isnt a bowl or dish or rice with curry on the top of it. You get a plate. Part of the plate is cover with rice and the other part is covered with curry. You can also get meat or other things with your rice and curry.

Even though this places specializes in this, it isnt the only place you can get curry. I would venture to say that pretty much any chain restaurant in Japan would have a curry and rice dish on the menu. One of the restaurants that we ate at in the beginning of the year had an all you can eat soup and salad bar and part of that was rice and curry.
Last year when we would stay at hotels and eat team dinners, there would always be a pot of curry next to the rice if you wanted some.
To be honest I think there were even some times that it would be served at the buffet breakfasts in the hotels as well. I do like the curry, but for breakfast?....I think I'll stick to my eggs.
If you ever get to Japan though, along with the 3 other typical foods, I would give this one a shot.

An egg for what?

Tonight at dinner we ate as team. The hotel we are staying at this weekend provided us with some spaghetti, some meatballs, salad, soup, fish, a pork chop and of course some rice. Rice is probably the most common food here in Japan. It can be eaten for every meal. When we go down for breakfast in the morning there will be a big rice cooker full of rice and many people have it for breakfast. Tonight, as with any dinner we have, everyone was eating the rice. Many of us were eating it with the porkchop and the sauce that was with it. I happened to look over though and see a few of the Japanese guys eating it a little differently. Eating it with egg. Here there are a lot of dishes that have egg with them. There are various noodles that you can get where the cooked egg is on top or the noodles are wrapped in an egg, sort of an omlete sort of thing - very good - I would recommend it if you make it to this part of the world (its called omusoba). This was a little different though. The guys would order and egg from the kitchen and have one brought to them in a dish. They would then crack the egg into the bowl, mix the white and the yolk together with their chopsticks, add a little soy sauce, and after a little more mixing pour it onto the rice...............Raw.    No heat, no cooking, no nothing, just soy sauce and a bare naked, nothing on, can see everything, raw egg.  Yup, it was raw.
 Bon appetit.

Now I like eggs as much as the next person (have them everyday for breakfast), and am willing to try pretty much anything once, but I'm not so sure I am going to dive into this one.
I know in the States the CDC (Center for disease control and prevention) recommends not consuming raw or undercooked eggs for risk of Salmonella, but over here the chickens must be different, or Salmonella isn't a worry, because "everybody's doing it."
Next time you're cracking an egg into a pan or dropping it into a pot of boiling water think about what it would be like to be cracking it straight onto a bowl of rice instead, and if that would fit your fancy.

And who knows, maybe you'd like it with fish eggs too?