Although I enjoy all manner of Japanese foods from sushi to sashimi to oyako-don (literally, “parent-and-child rice bowl” consisting of chicken and scrambled eggs eaten over a large bowl of steamed rice), I’ve also come to love a number of “Japanese” versions of international foods I didn’t know about before I got here. The spicy pickled cabbage called kimchi is very popular in Japan, to the chagrin of Koreans who sometimes don’t like their national food being enjoyed by their enemy across the Eastern Sea, and I can really appreciate a breakfast of kimchi on white rice with a bit of nori seaweed on the side. I’m also a big fan of korokke, the local version of french croquettes — and like all fried foods, they’re made even better by that dreamy Bull-dog sauce, which the Japanese call with the generic English word “sauce.” The most successful culinary import in the history of food has to be curry rice, the Japanese version of the British version of Indian curry, which is eaten more than any food here except plain white rice. If you’re interested in learning more about Japanese foods, J-List has some really cool cookbooks and related books in stock.
Japanese croquettes are quite different from the ones in France, or so I’m told.
