Kyuushoku for 3 Feb

Wednesday

Setsubun Menu

White rice（ごはん）

Milk（牛乳）

Grilled sardine with ginger（イワシのしょうが焼き）

Japanese radish with sweet and sour dressing（大根のあま酢和え）

Miso soup with potatoes（じゃが芋のみそ汁）

Lucky beans（副豆）

819 Kcal

34.3 g of protein

 

Today is Setsubun in Japan. Setsubun is the day before the beginning of spring in the old Japanese calendar. However, February is the coldest month in Japan and I think this holiday is just cruel. Old calendar or not, it’s wrong. On Setsubun, you are supposed to wish for good luck in the upcoming year. Naturally, this is done by throwing beans at a demon screaming, “鬼は外、福は内” (oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi – Devil outside! Luck inside!) The demon represents all your potential bad luck in the upcoming year, so if you throw enough beans he won’t come around. Usually the dad wears a demon mask and the kids throw beans at them. My high school Japanese teacher did this once. I saw in the newspaper today some pictures of kids throwing beans at teachers dressed up like demons. So today, the setsubun part of the menu was the lucky beans. They’re basically dried roasted soybeans that have absolutely no flavour. I guess that’s why they throw them. 

Another part of Setsubun is that you are supposed to eat a sushi roll silently while facing the direction of this year’s lucky directional point. If you eat the entire roll quietly in one sitting, you get good luck for the year. This year’s direction is west southwest. I wonder whose job in the Japanese government is was to figure that out. Wait, I mean whose jobs, this probably took an entire floor of civil servants.

The grilled sardine was surprisingly nice; maybe it was the ginger or something. As long as you take the skin off and don’t eat the tail, sardines are quite alright. The daikon (Japanese radish) was amazing as well. This could be my luck for the new year working in my favour.

Unfortunately the “lunch room” ruined the lunch. Usually the teachers eat in the home ec room, but today the powers to be deemed the home ec room “uneatable in” and so we were sent to the “lunch room”. I put “lunch room” in quotes because it’s more akin to a ice box or a greenhouse depending on the season. There are about two weeks out of the entire year that it’s pleasant to be in that room, and today—like the other 350 days—was miserable. We might as well have been eating outside. All of the doors were open, leaving the wind to freeze any spot of open skin. And since they put out the lunch about ten minutes before lunch time begins, it inevitably gets cold. I don’t know what senile squirrel monkey they hired to design this building, but it should have been used for testing pharmaceuticals like the rest of its family.

3 shishamo (2 very cold shishamo deducted for bad planning)