Best Fast Food!

I'm basically a lazy person who doesn't much like to cook. So fast food is a good thing. Except when it's not. You know, when it's gross and tastes awful? Not.

But I've found the perfect fast food, and it's onigiri! I had my first onigiri on the airplane from Malaysia to Japan, a snack. And I had to watch someone else to figure out how to eat it. But it was worth the effort!

At the store, you buy these little green triangles with writing I can't read, wrapped in plastic (note the recycling information for the plastic, though!). See the directions on the side? I don't know what that means, either. But here's the idea. Inside, there's a triangle of rice about an inch tall, with something else in the center. The red package from this company has a sort of meat thing (first picture), while the pink package (that I opened), has salmon (I think).

The plastic wrap is actually two layers, between which is a sheet of nori, a seaweed paper thing. You can see that I've unwrapped the plastic from the rice ball, but the nori is still inside its part of the plastic. I'm guessing that keeps it crisp and nice! (I think if you make it fresh, you just put the nori right on. But if it's made by commercial machine, then the nori probably gets nasty waiting to be bought at the store?)

And here you can see that I've unwrapped the nori, and that it's ready to be wrapped around the rice. It's sort of shiny, but has a mild, pleasant taste that goes nicely with the rice and salmon.

It's a good snack: you have your all important rice food group, some protein, and a veggie of sorts! And it's a really good size for a snack or (if you're as lazy as I), the rice portion of dinner.

I was going to take another picture of the onigiri all wrapped up again, but I was hungry. One trick I've learned: the rice gets a little dry if it's been stored more than a day or two (even in the fridge), but you can make it have the right consistency if you nuke it for a couple seconds.

(You can make these yourself, of course, and real cooks do so all the time. But I'm not a real cook in the least, so I eat the prepared ones.)