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| Udon with carrot, greens, onion, daikon, processed fish cake, chicken. Plain hotdog bun. Kabocha (pumpkin) mochi. Cucumber and cabbage salad. 200ml Hokkaido milk. |
Today's lunch is brought to you by weird-uses-of-western-food. It seems like every time I come to this school, a hot dog bun makes up part of the lunch. One week, we got a packet of peanuts cream to put on it (like a super sweet, whipped peanut butter) but usually it is plain. I went back for seconds of the salad and udon. The kabocha mochi was pretty good, and very season appropriate. it had sort of a sweet brown sugar coating on the outside, the pumpkin flavour and gummy mochi texture inside. Mochi is made from pounding cooked rice until it turns into a gummy solid - there are some cool videos on youtube of the process.
Speaking of mochi, I forgot to take a picture of my lunch yesterday. It was plain rice with a flavour packet, milk, and something called "oden": where you simmer a bunch of different ingredients together in broth. The school lunch version was mediocre at best - it was a mochi, a big slice of daikon, and some tubular processed fish cake served on a plate without the broth. Convenience stores sell a much better version of oden - usually with egg, more vegetables, etc and simmered in a super flavourful broth.
After lunch yesterday, I got to go harvest rice with the 5th grade elementary students - we cut it down, tied it in bundles and hung the bundles under a shelter. They will dry here for 1 month, at which point the grains will be separated from the husk and stalk. Then in December, the students will use that rice to make mochi (for something, I don't know exactly what). Here's one picture I took that doesn't have anyone in it:
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| rice bundles before being tied up |