Typical food #2 - Sushi (rice balls)

This is the second post in a series about typical food in Japan. You can find the 1st post here: Typical food #1 - Beef bowls
When you think of Japanese food, maybe one of the things you think about is sushi. You would be right in your thinking as sushi is a popular food here.  There are different places you can get sushi - fancy places, running sushi places (where there is a belt that goes around the inside - tables are just on the outside - with sushi on it - you pay based on what you choose to eat), and among others convenience stores. The sushi you get at convenience stores is actually a very common thing for people to eat. And, people stop at convenience stores quite a bit here. I think it is part of the culture. Whether to get a coffee or some sort of snack it seems like we stop at convenience stores a lot when I am traveling with a Japanese person (many people get lunch there). The sushi that is normally found at a convenience store is a rice ball, or in Japanese: onigiri (oh-nig-er-ee - todays Japanese lesson).
 
Most of the time it is a triangle form. It is rice wrapped with seaweed and has some sort of filling: tuna and mayo, teriyaki chicken, salmon, fish eggs, spicy fish eggs, more seaweed. Last year, there were many times where our players would have these for lunch before practice and we always had some in the locker room for games.
This got me thinking that this is a pretty easy thing to make and maybe to try. So, I included a 1 min youtube video on the correct and simple way to make sushi. Have a look.
 
Or, if that is not quite your style maybe you could find a different recipe online.

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?