While I was in Japan, I had a delicious dish at a cafe in Shimoda: tarako (タラコ）spaghetti. It's really simple, just spaghetti fried in a sauce of butter and soy sauce with cod roe, and often garnished with slivers of nori (dried seaweed). Usually we would have roe as a filling in onigiri (rice balls) for breakfast. It's the most delicious Japanese-Italian dish I can think of.
The other week I picked up a container of mentaiko （明太子／めんたいこ）, marinated pollock roe, from Daruma grocery in Bethesda. Last night M. used it to make a version of roe spaghetti, adding green onions. We ate outside on the deck (the air surprisingly thin). Next time we want to try it with the spicy version of mentaiko, karashi-mentaiko. I read here that pasta is a good way to use cheap mentaiko, although the stuff we used had a very clean flavor and would probably be good in onigiri as well.
The more I think about it, the more I think that it wouldn't seem that strange to an Italian from a coastal area of Italy. Even the addition of seaweed might not be so weird. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar dish enjoyed there. At the moment I'm too lazy to look into this, but am filing it away.
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