The Good, The Bad, and some pickles...

Herein lies the shady underbelly of the aforementioned school lunch experience. In addition to the delightful school cafeteria lunches I also have access to box lunch (bento) sets from an order in company. I have no idea what the actual name of said company is, although I have taken to calling it "Russian Roulette Bento inc." in a mixture of humor and bile laden spite.

The meals from RRB still cost only 500 yen but are considerably larger and possess more variety than their cafeteria competitors. Along with the typical meat, pickles and sides these bentos also come with a massive (comparatively) portion of rice and often a small treat or snack in the form of fruit or sweets. Also unlike the school bentos is the dish variety offered by RRB. Fried foods, Oden (more on this in a future post), noodles and a much larger variety of sides make the RRB lunches a near constant suprise. These bentos occasionally (and far to infrequently) offer a dish that is so mindbogglingly, knee-weakeningly, nirvana-inducingly delicious that I give a small shudder every time I hear its name. However as per the rules of alchemy, "Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy`s first law of Equivalent Exchange." So in order for this amazing dish to exist their must also exist its opposite... Foods so unappetizing and nausea inducing that to consume them for lunch would surely end in catastrophe... In addition the contents of the lunches from RRB are always a mystery until they arrive, I find myself standing in front of the order box at 10 every morning rolling a 500 yen coin and my hands and trying to decide how brave I am.

So I pose a question unto you! Would you opt for the safe but average school lunches? Or bravely challenge fate and play the deadly game of culinary Russian Roulette hoping to taste the sweet ambrosia that is the perfect lunch. Ladies and Gentlmen... The evidence!

Exhibit A: 75% Awesome

A fairly standard and semi-frequent lunch from RRB. From top left: Potato salad, tamago-yaki (rolled omelette), Panko shrimp with sweet brown sauce, seaweed and lotus salad, konyaku salad, and fried chicken piece with cabbage.
This meal is very nearly ideal except for the konyaku salad and the plain-ness of the rice. The rice here (while plentiful) is just simple white rice that serves primarily as a filler. The Shrimp are amazingly good as is the seaweed salad and potato salad. The salad in the bottom center is konyaku (brown mostly flavorless gelatin made from Konjac leaves) has the texture of a shoe sole and the flavor of a dirty shoe sole. Placing it in a sweet mayo sauce with cabbage and serving it for a meal seems more like a cruel insult than a culinary decision. Were it not for these two factors (rice and konyaku) this meal would be perfect.

Exhibit B: 55% Awesome

This meal is a perfect example of both the great and evil sides of a RRB lunch. From top left: Bitter greens salad, sour pickle salad, tempura veggies, pork dumpling, "bloomin stick", random veggies, sweet fish and eggplant.
Here we have some of my favorite foods in the form of the dumpling, tempura veggie bundle, sour pickle salad, and sweet fish and eggplant. All of these foods are quite good but are offset by the others
The bitter greens salad is only mildly less appetizing than freshly cut grass, the random veggies all taste like salt and aluminum (note the huge chunk of the previously described konyaku), and the "bloomin stick" (my name) is a pile of room temperature squishy fried onions wrapped in an over salted panko breading. All of this again accentuated by the white rice which (I failed to mention before) always seems to have a slightly metallic aftertaste to it from the RRB.

Exhibit C: 0.000000000001% Awesome

Words cannot describe my absolute abhorrence of this meal, like if this meal was a toy I would break it in a petulant and violent fashion then bury its remains deep within the ground in a mirror lined box where it can never harm humanity again. If this meal were running for president and its sole opposition was a garbage bag full of dirty diapers I would gladly serve as the diaper bags campaign manager.

THIS.MEAL.WAS.TERRIBLE.

In fact I struggle to call it a meal because I only had one bite of each item before simply tossing the whole meal out. This collection of mismatched and poorly conceived foods was the Country Music of foods, it made me sick to my stomach and we would all be better off if it never existed. Allow me to catalogue the items contained in this red plastic box of awefulness.

From top left:
-Those little white and purple bundles of joy are squid... not pieces of squid... not squid flavored something... but whole baby squid. Served cold, lightly steamed, and full of each and every internal organ that squid was born with. It was liking eating a small rubber ball filled with offal. Everything contained within was mushy, slimy and not the least bit tasty. The masterful prep chef had even decided (in what I`m sure was a moment of unbridled malice) to leave the small ink sacs inside of each squid thereby adding a measure of embarrassment to this meal. Now not only would you suffer through the day knowing you ate these little monsters, but so would each and every individual with whom you interact over the next 12 hours. I can see the logic now, "What can I add to this lunch that tastes and looks horrible and will also turn any who consume into into a social pariah?". The squid were by far the worst part of this already terrible meal and after consuming only one of them I spent the rest of the day feeling queasy and trying to hide my tongue from everyone.
-Next over resting oh-so-gingerly on a bed of raw cabbage is not one BUT TWO bloomin sticks. Because sometimes one soggy, salty, mushy deep fried stick of onions just inst enough. Meanwhile in order to bring an air of sophistication and class to this meal they added a lightly fried piece of pork fat covered in ketchup as either a palate cleanser or the punchline to some joke I still don't get. I have seen toddlers eating sand with more refined palates than whoever designed this meal.
-The next contestant on the "Who Has the Weakest Gag Reflex" show is a cold salad made from wilted spinach, raw onions, and what I assume was spoiled yogurt. It was sour and unpleasant and had a texture akin to that of baby food. At this point I was earnestly looking around for a camera or some sign that I could stop eating this meal and be let in on the joke... There was no camera...
-Next around is the sour pickle salad I am usually quite fond of. However by this time I was so distraught I could only look at it and sigh, not out of frustration mind you but out of emphatic shame. I felt bad for this food in the same way one feels bad for a friend with bad neighbors. I could almost see the usually enjoyable salad shrugging its shoulders at me and mumbling an apology. I couldn't bring myself to eat it and instead just stared longingly at it thinking of better meals it could have been a part of.
-Next over is an assortment of vegetables, seafood products, and an egg that had apparently all been boield in the same stinky water for an unknown amount of time before being slopped into my tray. Each item tasted like sulphur and old fish and made my whole desk smell like a bible story for the whole day.
-Last but assuredly not least is the heaping portion of rice that accompanies every meal in Japan. However today instead f the same old dependable white rice it had been liberally sprinkled with a yellow powder THAT TASTED LIKE SULPHUR. They included the empty packet of seasoning along with the rice (either to add insult to injury or for allergy reasons... I dont know which) and it was apparently supposed to taste like eggs and not the cave from Temple of Doom. Mission Failed there seasoning packet.

This meal single handedly ruined my day and has made me very wary of ordering from RRB again... However, as you will see by my next post I am still lured to those red plastic boxes everyday by the tempting promise of Chirashizushi.

Exhibit D: 100% Awesome

Allow me to skip through the average parts of this meal to get to the main event. From top left: steamed broccoli flowers, sour pickle salad, pasta salad, steamed Japanese pumpkin, rolled omelette, and bone in fried chicken wings. Those items themselves are the making of an incredibly good lunch, everything works well together and is quite tasty. All of this however is eclipsed... nay, consumed... by the radiant delicious glow of chirashizushi. That box on the right of that picture is what happens when you take plain white rice and mix it with a unicorns tears. That innocuous looking box of rice mixed with egg, vegetables, pickled ginger and seasoned with what I can only describe as "What dreams taste like" is the be all and end all in Japanese lunches. I am incapable of explaining WHY its so incredibly good, I can only assert that is IS that good. Everything in the rice works so well together that it doesn't taste like any of its component parts, only something new and altogether amazing. If I could eat this everyday for the rest of my life I absolutely would. What that previous meal was to a bag full of used diapers, this meal is to a bag full of puppies made of rainbows... I love this lunch in a way that can only be described by Elizabethan Era prose...

So there you have it, the daily struggle that is my lunch decision laid out for all to see. I`m not proud of my inability to effectively choose what to feed myself on a day to day basis but the stakes are so unbelievably high that I feel like I deserve some modicum of credit. So that's it, those are all of my lunch choices and nothing else ever presents itself as an option for consumption at school.... Oh Wait... I lied... There totally is another option.

Only the bravest of men dare to tell the story of a meal that comes around less frequently than the new moon but possesses the power to turn the mightiest of eaters into sobbing heaps of joy... A meal spoken about in hushed whispers that contains not only the foods of the gods, but hope that lunch need not always be overshadowed by dinner...

Stay tuned for the next and final chapter in the exciting Alex Heichelbech bestselling trilogy "A Boxfull of Lunch"