Kyuushoku for 2 Feb

Tuesday

Bread roll（パン）

Milk（牛乳）

Cheese and egg salad（たまごチーズサラダ）

Pot-au-feu soup（ポトフ）

Ponkan orange（ぽんかん）

844 Kcal

35.6 g of protein

Since they serve the teachers lunch in a cold room with steel tables, the food gets cold pretty fast. Luckily, the room is the home ec room, so there are some microwaves we can use. Most people will just heat up their soup or rice and deal with a few extra cold things. But there is one teacher who heats everything up, and I mean everything. She puts her entire tray into the microwave oven and zaps it for like 5 minutes on the highest setting. Usually there are a lot of pops from whatever food she is heating up unnecessarily. Lately, she has been putting a hole in her milk carton so that it won’t explode as before. I think I’m the only one in the room that worries about her need to overheat all her food. It comes out looking almost radiated. I don’t know how she has any taste buds left after burning them all off.

As for the meal itself, no complaints. I like the cheese and egg salad mixture. As appetizing as that picture up there looks, it’s actually pretty good. They scramble eggs, mix it some cheese, let it cook and add parsley and cucumber bits as far as I can tell. I think that it goes great on bread as a sandwich, but apparently since it says, “sarada” (Japanese for salad), you are supposed to eat it on its own. It’s kind of like they make “hambaagu” and forbid of eatage between buns.

Today was another orange affirmative action day, with the ponkan being represented. Ponkans are almost like mikans (Satsuma), but the skin is sturdier and the skin inside is a little tougher. It could be that today they actually brought us ripe ponkans, but the last time it was like eating an orangey flavoured appley texture sour ball of nasty. Today, the ponkan was pretty nice; a goldilocks ponkan if you will.

Then there’s the soup. I just checked in the dictionary and pot-au-feu is a French soup consisting of boiled meat and vegetables. How original. I remember when I was living in Tokyo in that dormitory and they would serve this for breakfast every now and then. The flavour was that of water if you passed a potato through it and then put boiled cabbage in as an afterthought. The kyuushoku variety tends to have more flavour and ingredients though, turning into what I think of as a very typical vegetable soup (with pork bits).

5 shishamo