10/13/2006 - Would You Like a Rice Ball with That, Ma'am?

Remember this?  If you don't, it's an o-musubi, a traditional Japanese dish made with plain rice wrapped in a strip of nori.  When I last wrote about o-musubi here, I mentioned that you can find them at a shop that I've mentioned frequently throughout this past week: JiPan.

One of JiPan's more popular luncheon offerings is its extensive menu of lunch sets that are available from 12:00 NN to 2:00 PM on weekdays.  Most of these are your usual donburi / rice topping / Japanized Western plate lunches, but I don't really care for that sort of thing.  Instead, I opted for the most unusual set on the menu: the o-nigiri set lunch.

O-nigiri is the polite plural form of o-musubi; these rice balls are never sold as individual units and always come in pairs because o-hitokire, the singular form, sounds too much like hitokiri which means "murderer" in Nihongo!  (If you're an anime nut, you probably know where you last heard that word.  =^w^=)

The set starts off with a bowl of miso soup, a cabbage salad with tomato and cucumber dressed with a sesame vinaigrette, and a small bowl of tsukemono [Japanese pickles].  The tsukemono I got with this particular set was a small dish of spicy-sweet eggplant strips; definitely great for opening up your tastebuds for the treats to come.

Ah, now here's where things get really good!  The main course consists of o-nigiri (one filled with kanpyo [sweet-pickled gourd strips] and the other with umeboshi [those salty, lip-puckeringly sour pickled red plums]), karaage (Japanese-style fried chicken), coleslaw, and two slices of cold, sweet tamago-yaki.  There's just one tamago-yaki up there because I already ate one by the time I remembered to take a picture!

The sweetness of the kanpyo and the salty-sour umeboshi went very well with the bland rice which was deliciously fluffy and served at the right temperature.  Considering how breast fillets were used for the karaage, it was splendidly juicy and flavorful.  The coleslaw was a little lighter than the kind normally served in most restaurants and was quite refreshing.  

This set, along with all the others in the JiPan luncheon specials menu, costs PhP 180.00+ (excluding drinks).  As mentioned above, it's only available between 12:00 NN and 2:00 PM, so I'd head right over if I were you. 

10/17/2006 - JiPan

10/18/2006 - thanks for dropping by!

10/20/2006 - Untitled Comment