Kyuushoku for 18 Dec

Friday

Winter Solstice menu

White Rice（ごはん）

Milk（牛乳）

Seashore style fried fish paste tube (Chikuwa) （ちくわの磯辺揚げ）

Pumpkin and adzuki bean stew（カボチャのいとこ煮）

Pork Soup（ぶた汁）

Satsuma orange（みかん）

881 Kcal

39.9 g of protein

Now I know that fish paste tube sounds rather nasty, but it’s the same stuff they use to make fish sticks or imitation crabmeat. In Japan they just roll it into tubes and eat it like that. Today they battered the chikuwa (the fish paste tubes) with some sort of tempura batter and salty seaweed. It was kind of like a Japanese fish stick. I’ve tried to make them on my own to give you an idea of how much I like these things.

Unfortunately someone decided that they would put the pumpkin-adzuki bean nastiness on today’s menu. I like Japanese pumpkins. I like adzuki beans. I don’t know what happens when you stew them together, but the result is truly foul. Almost all of the teachers said that they didn’t like this dish too. I’ve got to give it to the kyuushoku ladies though; it takes a special skill to make two delicious things that incredibly offensive.

To make matters worse, this dish in Japanese is called “Cousin Stew” because someone deemed adzuki beans and pumpkins “cousins”. Incest usually leads to crippling disorders and painful memories; this dish is about the same.

The rest of the meal was a five-shishamo kyuushoku, but the addition of the cousin stew brought the whole thing down. I’d brush my teeth to get the taste out, but I’m pretty sure the toothpaste would spark some sort of deadly reaction.

3 Shishamo (reduced 2 for the incestuous stew)