Kyuushoku for 29 Jan

Friday

A taste of the Tamba area

Rice with black soy beans（黒豆ごはん）

Milk（牛乳）

Grilled smelt “shishamo”（焼きシシャモ）

Boiled spinach and potherb mustard salad（ほうれん草と小松菜のおひたし）

Wild Boar soup（ぼたん汁）

Satsuma orange（みかん）

747 Kcal

33.1 g of protein

To finish off the Hyogo tour, the kyuushoku ladies took it back home to Sasayama.

Today’s menu included two of Sasyama’s famous foods: wild boar and black beans. Black beans aren’t like the black beans we’re used to in America. They are soybeans, so they are a little sweet. Well not actually sweet, just not as beany as American ones. Basically, you can add sugar to black soybeans and it still tastes good, unlike a lot of beans that we are used to. The kyuushoku ladies also had sense not to add the soybeans when the rice was cooking, as is normally done, but to wait until the rice was finished or almost finished, meaning the beans were still firm. Since kyuushoku rice can lie there in that plastic bucket thing for hours, things tend to...mushify. Or to use a more scientific word, sogginate. Thank you ladies for thinking of our delicate palettes.

A few complaints though, first of all, another day of the smoky trash salad. I don’t know why they insist on this atrocity, but it seems to be showing up more and more lately. I don’t remember feeling the taste of smoky trash as much before I started recording in this blog. If you just don’t add the petrified fish shavings, this salad would be ok, lunch ladies. Until then, I cannot, in good conscience, give any kyuushoku with smoky trash salad a five-shishamo rating. It doesn’t matter how great whatever comes with it.

Second complaint, they over seasoned the boar soup. I guess a lot of the kids don’t like the taste of boar. I don’t really know why, but they don’t. To me, it tastes like a beefier pork. But to the kids, it tastes like rotting sour cat flesh. So the kyuushoku ladies decided to put some more seasoning in the soup today to counteract the “strong” favour of the boar. So you could barely tastes anything besides the peppery seasoning, sansho, they doused the soup in. Bad decision ladies. I wasn’t alone in this opinion, all of the teachers I ate lunch with thought the same.

And then there’s the shishamo. Oh, shishamo. I should probably hate you but I’ve grown to like you. The other small little fishes that come in kyuushoku barely have any meat and more often than not, they’re dried out and chip a tooth or two. (no joke, I think I chipped a tooth on Wednesday’s fish jerky) But the shishamo are soft, easy to eat, and actually have meat on them.

Sure, the meat may actually be the pregnant shishamo’s eggs, but it’s better than fried tiny fish bones.

3 shishamo