Everyone knows famous Japanese foods like sushi, sashimi, ramen and so on. But there’s a lot more to eating in Japan, and sometimes it’s fun to explore the less famous dishes that are part of the food zeitgeist here. The other night my mother-in-law cooked nikujaga for dinner, which is a simple yet delicious dish consisting of meat and potatoes stewed in a slightly sweet teriyaki-like sauce. (It’s famous for another reason, because it sounds like singer Mick Jagger’s name.) One of my all-time favorite meals is katsu, a cutlet of pork or chicken that’s fried and eaten with rice and that heavenly Bull-Dog sauce, and it’s one of the dishes the J-List home prefecture of Gunma is famous for. Another dish that’s quite popular is omrice, an omelette eaten over rice, preferably with a heart drawn on top in ketchup — yum. Finally there’s soboro, perhaps my favoritest food ever. It’s basically teriyaki chicken, flavored ground beef and scrambled egg eaten over steaming white rice, and I always have to fight with my kids for seconds when we have it at my house. (By the way, J-List has a large stock of cookbooks, bento books and more that are fun to browse and explore.)
One of the lesser-known Japanese dishes is nikujaga (lit. meat-potatoe).
