Home Delivery

On the other hand, back to food...

We ordered in the other night, and you have to check this out.

When you order in food in Japan, they often bring the stuff in actual dishes. When you're done, you wash the dishes and they pick them up the next day. Neat, huh? No charge.

Now we've ordered all kinds of things -- noodles, sushi, whatever. But this time we ordered rice in a kaman, which is an old-fashioned pot. When you do this, you get individual kaman with slightly flavored rice and stuff on top. We had this way up north, in Tsukuba, and that inspired us to order it here in Kyoto. It's good cold-weather food.

Here's what you get:

A wood-lidded kaman in a box, a bowl, a dish with pickles, and a triple dish with condiments (wasabi, nori, and minced negi). Each serving comes on a tray, and has a little shamoji, a sort of rice spatula. You also get a pitcher with hot dashi stock for everybody.

What you do is, you scoop out a serving, eat it, scoop more, and so on. When and if you want to, you scoop more and add dashi to make a sort of soup, which is how you finish up what's in the kaman.

My version was vaguely Korean bibimbap: soft-boiled egg, kimchi, scallion, bits of shredded beef, and so on.

Mom got chicken and stuff -- pretty basic:

And Sam got fried chicken, weenies, and a hard-boiled egg that he devoured before I could take the photo.

In the event, the fried chicken was terrible -- that's a surprise, really, because usually it's wonderful here -- but the weenies were excellent, like good American hot dogs rather than Japanese-style crunchy wieners. For adults, I'd say the weenies were mediocre, but Sam prefers non-crunchy hot dogs and did fine with this. Mostly he ate rice and egg, which is no sin.

Mainly, I just think it's cool that this stuff was all delivered for less than the cost of two big pizzas at home. (Of course, one of these days I'm going to blog what happens if you order pizza here and don't ride herd on them -- the combinations they come up with are very, very disturbing. But that's another post... one labeled "horrors.")