Weekly Food Update

It is Sunday so here is the obligatory food update!

Today I had natto on rice for breakfast - a very typical Japanese breakfast.  The taste of natto cannot be easily described - the closest that I can come up to is the taste of raw yeast but who eats raw yeast :P.  It's basically and acquired taste.  I even asked some Japanese people in the lab and they don't like the taste.  You can buy natto in the grocery store in packages such as this:

 which is composed of three smaller individually packed packages:

 that look like this inside (on the left is some sauce and mustard; on the right is the natto):

 So you basically mix the natto slowly such that the sticky beans separate easily.

And here is a selection of the foods I had this week:

This is some dessert I bought at the campus convenience store.

A very spicy soup at a Chinese restaurant.

This week was a special on kare (basically curry) at the school cafeteria.  This one comes with two port cutlets and looks like a happy face!  This whole thing cost around $3.

Balanced lunch of some squid in tasty sauce and some friend chicken bits.

Kare udon!

Soup with tiny crunchy shrimp.

Pork on rice.

A cheese bun for dessert.

Supermarket bento.

Some dessert - not too tasty.

When I went to OSU to buy the keyboard and mouse, I was quite hungry.  I walked around for a while to find someplace to eat but most of the places there are eat out places.  So finally I saw a bunch of people around this one take out place and so I bought this.  I was happy since I could read both the hiragana and the katakana in the name of the dish so I could ask for it at the counter.  The person asked me if I wanted to eat it there - which I also understood.  So I ended up with this very tasty dish.  It was basically some baked bread like thing with squid and other things inside and on top is egg and mayo.  Probably not the most healthy dish but it was quite tasty!