A casual note about things I recently ate.
Nissin’s mysterious eel bowl
It seems to come out every year, but this was my first time eating it. The smell is strongly like the charred aroma of Cup Noodle negi shio. I also felt sansho. The taste overall is sweet and salty and good, but as for the crucial eel-like mystery meat, I had not eaten real eel recently, so I could not tell how much it resembled eel.
If I deliberately adopt the rough saying “eel is tasty because the sauce is tasty,” then the sauce is indeed sweet and salty and delicious, so it might be possible to say it is tasty as an eel bowl, but that would ignore the company effort to make the mystery meat closer to eel, so it feels a bit wasteful. In any case, I had no memory of eel, so there was no way to compare.
In summary, it was good. I don’t know how much it counts as an eel bowl.
Nissin’s chilled Cup Noodle
It looked interesting, so I ate both. The soup for both had a nice acidity and was tasty, but of all places I ate it in an air-conditioned room, so I felt like, in an environment where heatstroke was not a danger, why am I eating something cold? Even though I chose and prepared it myself. Well, this is an unimportant impression based on my own desire that if the room is cool even when it is hot outside, I want to eat something warm.
What matters more is that when comparing chilled Chinese noodles and the Cup Noodle-specific noodles in the genre of cold noodles, Cup Noodle’s noodles are too thin and lack substance and throat feel. Well, they can be rehydrated with just water, so it’s an unavoidable trade-off with convenience. However, as I wrote earlier about the room temperature where I eat, when preparing chilled Chinese noodles in the kitchen, boiling the noodles raises the kitchen’s temperature and humidity, and especially in summer it becomes sauna-like and hot, so then tightening the noodles well and tasting the plump, slippery cold Chinese noodles creates that gap that amplifies the deliciousness. So honestly, if I’m going to eat it, I feel like I should take the trouble to eat chilled Chinese noodles.
In summary, if you can prepare chilled Chinese noodles, that is what I would eat. Well, it was tasty.
Restaurant eel
By chance I had an opportunity to eat eel at a restaurant. Come to think of it, it was the Day of the Ox in midsummer. Personally, I do not support purchasing and consuming eels, a species that is endangered (reference: Japan Nature Conservation Society), in a way that would further their extinction, but this time it was served to me as a kindness, and if I did not eat it it would just be discarded, so I ate the eel as an eel bowl.
And I thought, as expected, eel is delicious. The savory aroma of kabayaki, the sweet and salty sauce, the flaky texture of the meat — everything goes extremely well with rice as a bowl topping. It’s so delicious that thinking it is endangered makes me feel like tears might fall from the irony.
Speaking of which, the Nissin mysterious eel bowl I ate a little while earlier was also reasonably tasty, but it still could not beat real eel. That was a summer day.