Intensive Purposes

Japanese Food

Okay, I don't really want to start a whole new category just for food, since I'm not much of a foodie, so I guess I'll just lump this in here.

One of my favorite foods is tonkatsu. The transliteration I usually see for this is "deep fried pork loin". You take a thin slice of pork (not paper thin, like half inch thin, maybe a little thicker), dust with flour, dip in beaten egg, roll in the bread crumbs, then deep fry it. Awesome. The only way it could be made better is if it was injected with cheddar cheese and wrapped in bacon prior to deep frying. But I have yet to see that attempted. Anyway, there's a certain dish called "katsudon" that I absolutely love. "Don" is the japanese word for "bowl", and yes, the "katsu" comes from "tonkatsu". Basically, you have a bowl of rice. Put some sliced onion and a sauce (it's kind of teriyaki like) over them and the rice. Then slice up the tonkatsu into strips about an inch wide. Place them on top of the onion. Crack an egg over the tonkatsu, cover the bowl and put it in the oven. It's done when the egg is cooked. I've also seen it where they heat up the bowl without the egg, then crack the egg on it just before serving so that the heat inside the bowl cooks the egg on it's way to the customer.

So we get Japanese heat and eat meals from my in-laws. Which is a great help to us. Sometimes neither one of us can be bothered to cook. Those are the days that we like to heat up yesterday's rice and break out the curry in a bag, which can be surprisingly good. Last night, though, my wife tells me that I have katsudon as one of my choices for dinner. So I jump all over that, of course. In the back of my head, I'm thinking "don't do it. It'll taste like crap." It didn't. It wasn't quite katsudon, but it was pretty damned tasty. They even included little (say 1.5 inches squre) chunks of pork that may or may not have been deep fried at some point prior to it's being sealed in a plastic sack. All in all, a good meal, but now I've got a craving for real katsudon again. I know one of the sushi places around here has it, but it's not on the English menu. It's only on the "special" Japanese menu. We may have to head out there again next time the boy's spending the night at some friends.

posted by Sir Phobos on 24 Feb 2006 at 10:08

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