Omuraisu

Everything I really wanted to make for dinner tonight called for cooking sake, and of course I'm out. So at the very last minute, I decided we should have "omuraisu," which is a Japanese smash-up word that means "omelette rice". You see it here with tabasco on top and a salad of romaine, cucumbers and caesar dressing on the side. What you can't see is the ketchup-flavored stir-fried-with-onions-and-ham rice on the inside. I don't care for ketchup as a general rule, but it makes sense in this dish.

Great for Aogu and I; not such a hit with the kids, though as usual it was amusing to see them having opposite reactions. Izumi immediately gobbled all of her omelette and then started picking the ham out of her rice (she's very carnivorous, if I haven't pointed that out before). Koji scarfed all the cucumbers I gave him on the side and screamed and cried about eating even the rice without the eggs, which I generously excused him from (he's practically a vegetarian, with the notable exception of processed pork products, in other words, the kid will eat any amount of hot dogs).