Food Foible #3 (?)

Yesterday, I ate raw egg for dinner. Well, all right, that’s an exaggeration. I ate other things, too. But everything I ate was coated in raw egg. So, Mom, if I get salmonella, it is partially your fault – you always told me life wasn’t worth living if we couldn’t eat cookie dough, and I figured, if I eat cookie dough, I might as well eat other forms of raw egg. If the Romans are doing it, anyway…

And the Romans (aka my host parents…) were doing it. It was my host father’s birthday! (I didn’t ask how old he was turning.) So we ate sukiyaki. Which is, apparently, a very famous Japanese food. You’ve heard of it, right? Or anyway the song with that name? They asked me about it, which made me feel silly, because I’ve heard that they named a Japanese song after food to make it easier for English-speaking audiences to pronounce. But I’ve never actually heard the song. So that was an interesting dinner conversation.

Anyway, sukiyaki – in the states, we don’t usually do it with the raw egg, now, do we? I’m sure, if you’ve had sukiyaki, you’re familiar with the fashionable tendency to call the cast iron pot you cook it in a “nabe,” which just means pot in Japanese, and with the variety of ingredients bubbling away in the pot – beef, lots of mushrooms, cabbage, etc. My favorite part were these 1-inch diameter brown smushy rounds called “fuu” (and aspirate the f, now please – no real ‘f’s in Japanese, that’s why when my host family first told me about my Air Force brothers, I heard Air Horse, remember?). Yes. “Fuu.” Delicious! Mostly because, as I discovered, they are made of flour – my host mother had to look on the packaging to see what they were made of – no one could remember. So these little dense but fluffy flour-rounds soak up all that delicious soy sauce and salt and vegetable juice that’s hanging out in the nabe, and then they get great-tasting. So I ate a lot of those. And the other things. (Yes, even mushrooms. Yes, even beef…)

BUT, you haven’t forgotten the reason this was weird, have you? Of course not. But even if you have, don’t worry - I’ll give you a little review. It was weird because we had a little extra dish at each of our places, and in it was a raw egg – we whisked it ourselves, with our chopsticks, and then dipped everything we ate into it before we put it in our mouths.

So let’s call this Food Foible #3. It may be #4. It may only be #2 (Food Foible #1 I remember clearly – sashimi + Callie = just a little bit of gagging. But could there have been others? Probably! ) Not because it was gross but because I thought it would be – it was really pretty fine – you barely tasted it. BUT I still felt very aware of the fact that I was eating raw egg.

So, it was weird. Not something I’m bringing back home with me, that’s for sure.