Mondays are short days for my children. I go pick them up from school at 12:30 pm and come straight home. While they are changing out of their uniforms, I usually make some quick lunch for us if we don’t have any leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. For a while, their favorite was this quick dish called Niratama Donburi (ニラ玉丼ぶり), or Chive and Egg Rice Bowl.
What’s Niratama?
Niratama literally means garlic chives (nira) and egg (tama shorten for tamago). Sometimes we add a little bit of thinly sliced pork (buta) and that’s called Buta Niratama (豚ニラ玉). Eggs and garlic chives are cooked on high heat till fluffy outside and still soft inside. We like to eat it as a single main dish, so we serve it over steamed rice. The chives I use for this dish are garlic chives (or sometimes called Chinese/Asian chives) and different from the chives used as herbs in Western cuisines.
Niratama Donburi – Perfect One Bowl Rice Dish
I don’t quite know how to explain the flavor, but this simple one bowl rice dish is really, really delicious. The first time I made this for my husband, he had a strange look on his face. When I told him the dish I was making, he didn’t believe the combination would work and definitely thought it would not taste good. After the first bite, his eye sparkled and said, “wow, the flavor is so unexpected and so good, can you please make this more often?” The gentle hint of garlic chive mixed with the fluffy egg and rice complement each other really well. I think most non-Japanese never heard of or seen this dish before because we eat this at home rather than at a restaurant. This is one of the recipes that I cook to use up the big bundle of garlic chives. Here in the U.S., garlic chives come in a big fat bundle. I don’t mind a big head of lettuce but garlic chives… I can’t eat it every single day. So if you got a bunch of garlic chives at home and not sure what to make, try this recipe! With carb, protein, and fiber, it makes a perfect one bowl rice dish.
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