Kyuushoku for 26 Feb

Friday

Bean day

White rice（ごはん）

Milk（牛乳）

Grilled smelt shishamo（焼きシシャモ）

Five bean stew（五目豆煮）

Boiled rape and bean sprouts with sesame dressing（小松菜ともやしのごま和え）

851 Kcal

37.4 g of protein

I’m not sure how it happened that komatsuna came to be called “rape”. A lot of Japanese foods have unfortunate or just undecipherable names in English. For example: lotus root, burdock root, potherb mustard, rapeseed and my favourite, the devil’s tongue.

The salad thing was pretty good. Komatsuna is a crunchy plant so it doesn’t get soggy when sitting in a plastic bin all day. The bean stew thing was good, but I’m not sure it should have been translated as “five bean stew”. It literally means “five eyes bean stew”, so I thought that it would mean five beans. I was wrong, there was one kind of bean and lost of other things.

Then there were the shishamo. Oh, shishamo. I usually eat lunch with the rest of the teacher’s so I can get away with not eating the heads of the tiny fish, but today I ate lunch with the commoners. The 5th graders were not very happy when I refused to eat the heads. They learned how to say, “eat head!!” so they marched around me like little imps demanding the whole fish be eaten. If you don’t eat the heads, shishamo really aren’t that bad. They might even be good, but that head is just pure nastiness. It tastes like grilled trash with dehydrated fish eyes.

I’ll leave the fish their heads.

5 shishamo