Since I’m now a working woman, my daily routine as a Tokyo Housewife is no longer. That is a gentle way of saying our apartment is a complete mess, I may have let my kanji study slide, and I now fail regularly at keeping food in the cabinets. These days, more often than not I’m finding 7 pm roll around with nothing planned for dinner. And then I realize I ate cereal for lunch and I’m starving and ready to gnaw off my hand.
So what’s a housewife to do? I pester Dan. Here is what one of our chat conversations looked like this week:
Me: would you like pancakes for dinner? that is not a trick question
Dan: i’ll eat whatever you cook
Me: well, i can cook pancakes, mushrooms, a little bit of leftover rice, pasta with no sauce, eggs (again)
Me: oh, and there is avocado 🙂
Please forgive me for loving emoticons. I could blame Japan, but really, those smiley faces have been in my repertoire for years. (You should see the emoticons available on my cell phone — given the chance, I could compose my autobiography using only those things.) So, with that list of random ingredients, I decided to throw everything (well, almost) into the pot, cross my fingers, and hope for something edible. Dan mentioned he’d heard about eggs in pasta, and a quick Google search confirmed it exists.
I think the creamy-egg-in-pasta idea was suddenly less scary because in Japan, I’m not afraid of eating raw eggs. My new chef friend told me that the date on the egg carton – usually a week after purchase — is for when you need to refrigerate the eggs, not throw them out. They are that fresh. So, I went for it.
This is our kitchen, maxed out for space yet again. Thank goodness we only own two pots. I sauteed some エリンギ eringi mushrooms (if you are curious what they look like whole, you can peek here) and cooked up the pasta. When the pasta was done and drained, I threw in the cooked mushrooms, two eggs, the avocado, salt, and a splash of milk. And some black pepper. And… it was delicious.
OK, so maybe this is the least convincing photo ever, but you have to believe me. I was amazed at how good this was, considering I took (almost) every last bit of food left in our apartment and threw it all together. In the past this plan has not gone so well (translation: anchovies and tomatoes). This time, triumph!
Anyone else out there willing to try the Raw Egg Pasta Sauce?
Saké Puppets 
Angie – this reminded me of the first time I had this dish. I was in Rome in January – very off season. There was only one other patron in the restaurant and he worked for the USO. He very much hoped he could get us to admit some sort of military affiliation, so he could do something official for us, but we came up with nothing. Finally, he felt that the best he could do for us was some good conversation and a hearty recommendation for the spaghetti carbonara. Yup — it was DELICIOUS!.
Patti, what a great story!
P.S. Erengi mushrooms are said to stimulate the immune system (Wikipedia)
When’s this Hong Kong/China visit going to happen, young lady? You can help me open my own etsy shop and crawl out of the housewife pits (day drinking, boredom, excessive shopping…)
Haha! It’s happening this Spring, I think — I’ll be sure to let you know. Until then, maybe we should discuss your housewife duties… they sound more fun than mine.
As someone who cooks a lot and likes to experiment in the kitchen, I would just offer a friendly recommendation. You might want to try using pasteurized eggs. Anytime that I have a recipe which leaves parts of the egg raw, I would look to use them. With the recent egg recalls, you never can be too sure.
In Japan our chicken-to-table time for eggs (and pretty much all food) is much less than in the States, thus I’m more inclined to eat them raw and unpasteurized when cooking. Though always a good point — careful what you eat, folks.