Hitsumabushi~! Cheaper and more Fowl!

That is not an actual pic of what I ate today at lunch, I wasn't able to take a pic at all of what I ate actually. Anyway, it looks somewhat like that minus the miso soup. It was delicious and very fulfilling! And replace that eel in the pic with chicken.

I would like to explain how to properly eat hitsumabushi first. So I'm going to introduce another kind of Japanese food: okazuke. This may seem confusing at first, and may keep on becoming so, but I assure you, it's fun and delicious, and did I mention fulfilling?

Okay, where were we...? Right, "How to Eat Okazuke". Basically, okazuke is rice in a bowl, then you add some savory toppings (seaweed, pickles, meat, sesame seeds, seafood, etc) and then you pour either green tea or soup stock over it. I prefer the soup stock though, I mean, green tea plus seaweeds and sesame seeds???

Anyway, it's kinda like eating breakfast cereals with milk, only with rice and soup. I wasn't aware of this Jap dish until recently, it sounds so outrageously Japanese though. My coworkers surprised me when we went to a restaurant and they said that the dish is green tea over rice. I was like WHAT??? and they were HAHAHA but the waitress was like BEEF OR FISH STOCK? and I was OOOH!! BEEF!

So now that you know how to eat an okazuke, be rest assured that hitsumabushi is eaten just like that too. Actually, it IS exactly like that. I'm not sure why they made a whole new name for it, and I'm not sure of the difference, now that I think about it. I even asked what the name means and they said it was just a name, so didn't fuss over it too much. The name is actually 日妻武士 which reads hitsumabushi. 日= Sun, 妻 = Wife, 武士 = Warrior.

Soo... yeah. Sun Wife Warrior. Delicious.

Hmm, hitsumabushi is supposed to be okazuke with eel, but what I had was grilled chicken... maybe it wasn't hitsumabushi that I ate. But it said so in the menu...

If you haven't have one yet, you could try the fish stock. My coworker was spouting Jap slangs all over it. Oh and he was smiling, so I assume it was that good.