I Love Yuzu (Both the Fruit and the Band)

Satsumanma
Yuzu flavored miso oden
Tofu and nameko (a type of mushroom) miso soup
Milk
(823 calories)

Notes:
Satsumanma is a type of maze-gohan in which the rice has been mixed with diced satsumaimo (a type of Japanese sweet potato that has purple skin and yellow flesh, and is very prevalent in fall cooking) and satsuma-age (a flat, fried fish paste cake). And, despite not having the word “satsuma” in it’s name, there was also some pork thrown in with our rice today as well.

Oden is a common dish seen in the winter, as it’s composed of several ingredients (most commonly hard-boiled eggs, firm or grilled blocks of tofu, thick slices of daikon radish, cabbage or konbu rolls, blocks of jellied konjac, and a variety of minced fish cakes) that have been heated over a long period of time in a sweet soy sauce-based broth. Most people then eat these simmered ingredients with either spicy mustard or yuzu kosho (another spicy condiment flavored with the Japanese citrus, yuzu). You can of course make oden at home, but it tastes best when the ingredients have been simmering for several hours. That’s why many people choose to just order some at an izakaya (a type of Japanese bar, where you can also order many different kinds of foods to snack on as you socialize and drink) or pick up a bowl to-go from any local convenience store (it sounds kind of odd, but I really do love to pop on down to my 7-11 for a big bowl of hot, tasty oden when the weather is cold and gross).

While oden ingredients are often served in the broth they were cooked in, the oden we’re served at school gets plated up without much, if any, of the broth. Today’s oden, however, is a variation known as miso oden, which is commonly served covered with a thick, sweet miso sauce instead of the broth the ingredients were boiled in (as the broth used for this type of oden is just a plain and simple konbu stock without any additional flavorings). The ingredients you see here are boiled quail eggs, carrot, daikon radish, white jellied konjac, and chikuwa. The chikuwa are the tube-shaped pieces in the picture. To make chikuwa, a sweet, white fish paste is wrapped around a round rod that rotates over a grill, giving this fish cake it’s characteristic bamboo shape (hence “chikuwa” is written using the kanji [Chinese] character for bamboo).

While miso oden is not a particularly rare sight, it’s not common to have the yuzu flavor with the sweet miso sauce. Yuzu is a yellow Japanese citrus fruit that is sometimes referred to as a Japanese lime. It’s got a very unique and delicious flavor, but many of my students didn’t like it with today’s dish because they found the addition of yuzu to this familiar dish too strange. The city I live in apparently has some historic ties to Kochi city (in the Kochi prefecture), and so they’re now sister cities. Kochi is famous for yuzu, so this month there were a couple days that featured yuzu as a main flavor in our school lunches to celebrate this association. 

Additionally, today’s miso soup featured nameko. Nameko are these little, slippery mushrooms that are practically impossible to catch with chopsticks (particularly if the miso soup you’re eating is composed almost entirely of just the round mushroom caps with no stems to grab on to). They’re delicious, but I hate battling with the mushrooms to eat this soup... Nameko might just be the reason why Japanese people usually just drink miso soup right from the bowl. (I'm kidding, of course... but I swear, it's impossible to eat them otherwise!)