Thursday's Lunch: Eggs

Oh, lucky you! You get to see one of my least favorite lunches of all time! Not only do we get one of Japan's most egregious takes on Western food, we also get... bread! According to the menu, this is a "butter roll":
I imagine them using one stick of butter for every 5000 of these they made, because that is about how much butter taste makes it into the final product. Basically, it's just a big lump of white bread, but without even the paltry serving of jam we got on Tuesday.

And it doesn't get much better from there...

Main Dish: Omuretsu no Mariana Sosu (Omelet with Mariana Sauce)

This is quite possibly the perfect example of the Japanese adopting things from the West with no real understanding of them. From what I can gather, Japanese people enjoy their version of omelets, so more power to them. For me, it falls near the lower end of "I can eat it if I have to", just barely coming in above "Only if I'm starving". Have you ever had the eggs you get in microwavable breakfasts? The ones that are lifeless and floppy and give you some doubt as to whether or not they actually came from a chicken at all? Well, get a big chunk of those (no, don't break them up or fluff them in any way that might make them look a bit more appetizing), cover it in what is essentially watery ketchup, and then throw some soggy onion strips on top. Voila! Japanese Omelet! What? How is this an omelet at all? There's nothing in it. It's just bad eggs formed into the shape of a croissant. Sadly, this thing shows up on my lunch tray about once a month. As a bonus, you can get little chunks of the same eggs on top of rice at every sushi restaurant in Japan. Because, yeah, when I go out to eat some delicious fish and seafood, I'd like to chase it down with some cold Egg Beaters product. Yeah. Sure.

Side Dish: Sotei (Sauté)

Why this dish is called sauté was not only beyond me, but every other teacher in the room as well. What part of this was sautéed? The whole thing? I find that hard to believe. Considering the only meat in it was actually fish, and even then it was chikuwa (a kind of steamed fish paste), I don't think sautéing came into the picture at all here. Besides the non-sautéed fish paste, it also included bean sprouts, cauliflower and green peppers. Overall, the dish wasn't too bad although they used a bit too much pepper. Actually, now that I think about it, pepper was about all you could taste. Maybe they just forgot to sauté it and threw pepper in instead? We may never know.

Soup: ABC Soup

Pretty much what it sounds like: soup with little pieces of pasta shaped like the alphabet. I have always wondered why they don't have soup with Japanese characters here. Maybe they're too complicated to turn into pasta. Anyhow, this is like a mediocre chicken noodle soup, but with shrimp instead of chicken. You get the little macaronis, shrimp, parsley, carrots and celery. Nothing exciting, but almost the highlight of the meal. Fortunately, I got to finish off with...

Bonus: Iyokan (Tangerine)

Recently there was some discussion in the mailing list for Miyagi Prefecture JETs about what to call different versions of oranges here. Is a mikan an orange? A tangerine? A mandarin orange? A clementine? Or should we call it a mikan all the time? The iyokan didn't come up in the discussion, and it's not in my dictionary either, so I'm calling it a tangerine, because that's what I thought it was until I looked at the menu afterwards. So, yeah, just imagine a tangerine. Pretty tasty, but as I mentioned on Monday, citrus is overall disappointing here as compared to Florida. Still, after the above meal (especially that stupid omelet) this was the best part of lunch today.

Total Calories: 821

It's hard to decide which lunch I liked less: yesterday's or today's. At least today I had the tangerine and the soup, whereas yesterday was completely devoid of any kind of flavor at all. Despite my genuine dislike for the omelet (keep in mind this did not stop me from eating it), I think I will have to say yesterday's bland meal was worse. However, these are both very common school lunches here. Lucky me.