Vegan MoFo: Simple Onigiri (U is for Umeboshi)

Brief post today. The Emperor came home from preschool this evening with a fever-- one thermometer said about 100 degrees, the other said about 102. From feeling him, I'm leaning more towards the 102. :/ He's all out of sorts, all slow and groggy and a little whinier than usual and just obviously not feeling right. Poor guy.

I'm not feeling great today either, though my bad feeling more comes down to stress and just having a crummy couple of days. (I also felt fevery for a few hours earlier at work, but that's over now.) I decided to do something really, really simple and traditional with today's ingredient: umeboshi!



Umeboshi are salty pickled plums from Japan. I l-o-v-e them and will eat them straight up, but understand I am in the minority here. Probably the most common thing to do with them is to stick them inside of onigiri, or rice balls. And that is exactly what I decided to do today.

Ingredients-wise, onigiri is the simplest thing in the whole world. It's rice with stuff inside, in this case umeboshi. It can be a little tricky to make, and I've tried before with mixed success... but I found a really good guide today and had good results.

Here's the completed onigiri:



And a picture of the process-- there's the rice on the plastic wrap with the umeboshi in the middle, before the shaping:



I always wonder if the umeboshi in the white rice is supposed to look like a Japanese flag or not. That's what it always makes me think of.

The Emperor ate a ton of white rice but was extremely, extremely displeased when he tasted the umeboshi. He kept telling me, "I can taste salty. I can taste salty. No salty. NO SALTY. I don't want to taste salty!" Here he is eating the non-salty bits of his rice ball though:



Something more exciting tomorrow I hope...