Nobunaga's Ekiben at OSOZAI-YA Minomishou

What's better that starting the new year with a post about food XD ?

For this first post of the year I decided to dust-off something from the year that just ended, and give you a review of an ekiben dedicated to Nobunaga that I had the chance to find during my last trip to Japan:I bought this at Nagoya Station in a shop called OSOZAI-YA Minomishou-- It's by the "Taiko-dori" exit, a few steps away from another lovely ekiben shop, the Nagoya Daruma (which is definitely my favourite).
As the name implies, this shop is specialized on Nagoya food with a charm for the Mino region, so you can keep it as a focus to taste the various delicacies in need of a quick snack.

The whole thing presented itself as a sumptuous banquet.
Unfortunately it was cold T_T But that's part of the charm of an ekiben, isn't it..?

Let's check the contents and try them out!

Let's start with the main dish, the misokatsu!
Delicious and crispy, it's my favourite part of this bento.
As it's quite strong-flavoured, the rule implies that you have to eat the rice with it.
The rice section of this bento is quite luxurious, two rich servings in different colours and dressings.
Unfortunately the extra ingredients and the colours are just for show: it's the usual vapid rice that you'd eat everywhere.
It went down well with the flavoury misokatsu though, so I won't complain too much.
The "pink rice" is relished with azuki beans and sesame, the "orange rice" is decorated with carrots and mushrooms-- But seriously, everything had practically no flavour. Which is probably a merit, given the strong-flavoured side-dish.

I broke through each bit of misokatsu and rice with some veggies to clean up my mouth.
It's boiled beans in a sauce and the renkon, recognizable by its peculiar shape, the lotus root.

Last task, the tenmusu, another Nagoya delicacy:
The version of Osozai-ya is a bit different from the "orthodox" tenmusu, in fact, instead of just one proper shrimp, they like to squeeze a handful of fried baby shrimps inside.
They call this original recipe "Yume Tenmusu". --The rice balls sure are huge and in my opinion waaay too filling-- I had an hard time eating them after I ingurgitated all that rice XD

My general opinion of this ekiben is not extremely positive, then.
The misokatsu sure was delicious, but I didn't like the idea of having it on a pitiful leaf of salad instead of the canonical slices of cabbage, which is used to temper the saltiness of the miso, and also the tenmusu were a bit hard to digest with all the rice and the huge size-- It was definitely a flavoury filling meal, though, and the fact that it was dedicated to Nobunaga-- Well, it's just positive extra points!