Bonus Salad: ソーセージサラダ from Coco Ichi Curry House

I’m super sick today which is a thing that happens when you suddenly switch to a healthier lifestyle with a fraction of the calories you normally consume and a drastic increase in exercise. Stupid stressed immune system. Anyway, I barely have the fevered strength to be typing this post, let alone making myself a salad, so here’s a salad I ate in a moment of weakness this week at Coco Ichi, a chain curry restaurant here in Japan.

Coco Ichi’s Sausage Salad

As you can see, the sausage salad has many key features of a Japanese green salad: the shredded cabbage, the corn and the hint of lettuce leaf to hide the fact that the salad is mostly just cabbage. When we can find a restaurant salad that isn’t 90% cabbage, we’re rather gleeful, however this usually isn’t the case. The sausages make it not the healthiest salad in the world, but it’s nonetheless tasty, and a nice reward for eating my greens for the rest of the week.

The sausages were a nice touch. Salty and chewy where the rest of the salad was crisp and sweet. I chose goma salad dressing, in part because I didn’t trust the vague wording of “classic dressing” and in part because goma is amazing. It’s a deep roasted sesame seed dressing that I’ve only ever seen in Japan. People over here get really excited when I say I like it. I guess because the concept of foreigners enjoying Japanese foods is still strange here.

Of course, salad wasn’t the only thing that I got for dinner. You can’t go to Coco Ichi’s and not get a curry. They have a spice scale from 0 to 10 which is ludicrous when you consider that Japanese people don’t have the highest spice tolerance. I consider myself decently able to handle spice, but level 3 spice at Coco’s is too much for me. I stick to mild now.

Beef katsu curry