My new favorite condiment

This stuff is my newest favorite sprinkle-on seasoning. Furikake actually comes in lots of styles and formulations, this just happens to be the one I have right now. And it says "rice seasoning" but I've been using it on soba (Japanese buckwheat noodles) with soy sauce and sesame oil, and it has been just the best thing ever. Obviously it's great on rice, too. I'd like to try rolling some glutinous rice into little balls and rolling them in seaweed & sesame furikake; I think that would be awesome. Especially when I start packing a little bento box for lunch every day. Stuff in bento boxes is supposed to be all cutesy and stuff, right?

I've even used it as a coating/crust when I pan-fried some ahi tuna steaks in a mixture of coconut oil and ginger canola oil, and it was tremendously tasty. Like, fall over in a dead faint kind of tasty. It was just that good.

I have found that most Japanese foods seem to agree with my system better than other ethnic foods (Chinese included). They don't use as much cornstarch or corn syrup (or any sort of corn derivative that I can think of) except in tempura batter; they do occasionally use potato starch, though, so I have to watch the label for that. One of the things I've seen potato starch on is a dusty coating on the outside of mochi, but not all mochi uses it, so I just watch for it. I'm going to make my own mochi as soon as my special rice flour arrives (interestingly, they don't carry it at the WalMart grocery store... can't imagine why). But when the Japanese do sweets, it's just generally not as heavily sweet as stuff you find in the West. The Chinese restaurants around here use tons of cornstarch in soups and sauces.

本当にありがとうございます, Japan!! (That means "thank you very much") (I hope)