Those little white fish -- rice with eyes!

I was trying to remember the name of those little white fish Japanese put on their rice, so I googled it. "What do you call those little white fish Japanese put on their rice?" Surprisingly, in an age when you get an instant answer to almost any question, that particular question pulled up zilch - until now. I like to give things a permanent link when the opportunity arises!

You call them "Shirasu", which I eventually found by tweaking my initial search query. I call them "rice with eyes" (which also, for the record, didn't uncover the answer I was looking for on Google). When I first came to Japan in 2000 I stayed in a home stay with a Japanese family in Gunma for my first three and a half months here. The "okaa-san" served a typical Japanese breakfast each morning. I was completely freaked out by the rice with eyes for about a week, before I finally found the courage to voice my terrible Japanese and ask what they were.

I think I truly believed that very first morning that they were in fact rice with eyes! In my defense, I was completely unfamiliar with rice and Japanese food before I came here! When I told my husband this story when we first dating he thought it was hilarious that I thought the rice had eyes. So much so, that he started to call them "rice with eyes" and until this day it has stuck. Even my kids call them rice with eyes! Hence I had forgotten what they are actually called. 

In English I think they are most commonly called whitebait or at least the worldwide web tells me so. Linguee also refers to them as being young anchovy or sardines, both of which I had eaten (cooked not raw) before I came to Japan as we do eat quite a bit of fish in Ireland too. But I had never seen the small shirasu until I came here. Now we eat them frequently. And always raw. I introduced them as part of our regular family diet when my eldest was a toddler because he has dairy allergy. Shirasu are a great source of calcium and very easy to add to any meal. You simply sprinkle them raw on anything at will! If a child is under one you can pop the shirasu into a cup of boiling water for a couple of seconds to be on the safe side. 

Back when I had my first experience of shirasu, I never imagined I'd get to point of eating them almost daily. They are quite tasteless and don't have any crunching bones like so many other small fish, so they are quite palatable to even the fussiest of taste buds. They are easy to slip into a child's meal too as they can't easily differentiate them from the white rice or they may just possibly mistake them for rice with eyes!