Rice with egg, Chinese chives and tomato recipe

The Japanese rolled egg omelet, known as tamagoyaki, is a classic dish that kids love. However, Hiromitsu Nozaki didn’t like him too much.

The type served at home was hard in texture and sweet with sugar. Although eggs were so valuable back then that people brought them as gifts for the sick, he did not like the dish.

He was in the upper grades of elementary school when he came across a completely different rolled tortilla.

A neighbor cooked him a fluffy rolled tortilla containing flour in exchange for babysitting his son, who was five years his junior. It was like “okonomiyaki”, a tasty Japanese pancake.

Cooked with green onion and Chinese chives, the rolled tortilla is seasoned with soy sauce. The young Nozaki was impressed by how good it tasted.

Around that time, gas became available at his parents’ home in Furudono, Fukushima Prefecture.

Although men rarely worked in the kitchen at the time, “I asked my neighbor how to do it and he cooked in secret when no one was home.”

He managed to recreate the rolled tortilla the first time he tried it. After that, he started cooking what he wanted to eat as snacks.

This motivated him to become a cook, and Nozaki went to Tokyo to enter a training school for nutritionists.

After training, he became the head chef at Tokuyama, a restaurant located in the Nishi-Azabu district of Tokyo that offers puffer fish dishes, when he was 27 years old.

Photographers Tadahiko Hayashi and Shotaro Akiyama were among the restaurant’s regular guests.

Akiyama once told Nozaki: “Cooking and photography have something in common. They extract the best of the ingredients and themes.”

Nozaki said: “What I learned from the exchanges at the counter has become assets in life.”

Nine years later, he was told to take over Waketokuyama, the new restaurant serving traditional Japanese multi-course “kaiseki” dishes. Hayashi came up with the name of the restaurant.

Nozaki eventually became the head chef who oversees all the affiliated restaurants.

For this week’s rice dish, Nozaki put a twist on the rolled tortilla he had at his neighbor’s house.

He not only enhanced the flavor by adding Chinese chives and tomato, but also paid attention to red, green, and yellow coloring. The egg should go on top of the rice while it is still half cooked.

BASIC COOKING METHOD

Main Ingredients (For two)

3 eggs, 3 stalks (15 grams) of Chinese chives (nira), 100 grams of tomato, just under 1/2 tablespoon (8 grams), light-colored soy sauce, a little pepper, 1 tablespoon of oil, 2 bowls of warm rice, a few sheets of dried seaweed (yakinori)

1. Cut the tomato into cubes and the Chinese chives into 5mm wide pieces.

2. Crack the eggs into a bowl, add the tomato and spring onions and mix. Season with light colored soy sauce and pepper.

3. Pour the oil into the pan, place it on the heat, and pour in the egg liquid. Heat until soft.

4. Serve the rice in a bowl. Tear the dried seaweed with your hands and sprinkle over the rice. Place the boiled egg mixture on top.

Approximately 530 kcal and 1 gram of salt per serving
(Nutrient calculation by Kagawa Nutrition University Nutrition Clinic)

You can capture the sense of the seasons by switching the vegetable herbs from Chinese chives to shiso leaves, “myoga” or daikon radish (“kaiwarena”) sprouts. Adding “edamame,” or green soybeans, is another fun twist.