32 posts tagged “japanese food”
I’m feeling full and content, but a little sore after making "mochi" at Amy’s school today. Mochi is hardened cakes of edible rice paste, that’s made from pounding piles of steamed rice until it forms a substance somewhat thicker, and a lot stickier than tapioca.
Yesterday at school, the kids, teachers and moms washed about 20 kg of glutenous rice, and then put the rice into buckets full of water, to sit overnight. This morning they drained the rice, and divided in into a series of large bamboo steamers; like those used in a Chinese restaurant for making dim sum.
The rice was steamed over a fire and then batches of it were dumped into huge, stone and wooden bowls. Next, the fathers took turns pounding the rice into a malleable, dough-like substance, with heavy wooden mallets, that were build like an axe, and were heavier than a sledge hammer.
After that, the mothers and kids tore off pieces of the dough and rolled them into bite-sized balls. They were later covered with cocoa powder, sheets of seaweed, "anko" (sweet red bean paste), "kinako" (soy been flour), and “natto” (fermented soy beans), and then were served with bowls of pork and vegetable soup, called “tonjiru”.
Here is a short video in Japanese with English subtitles about sushi, made by the Japanese comedy troupe, "Ramens" (ラーメンズ). Don't take the advice in it too seriously! You may recognize the guy with the glasses and pony tail in the video, as the guy who plays the role of the PC, in the Japanese "Buy a Mac" series of commercials for Apple.
For the past three days we’ve been dining on “osechi ryori”: traditional Japanese New Year’s cuisine. "osechi ryori" is a collection of dried, boiled or pickled seafood, vegetables, and other non-preishable foods; served up in a multi-tiered, lacquer-ware "jyubako" box. It may not sound very appetizing, but the foods in "osechi-ryori" are quite tasty, and each one has symbolic meaning. Eating those foods is supposed to bring you happiness, prosperity and progeny. Traditionally, "osechi riyori" was also designed for convenience. In the days before refrigerators, homemakers wanted to be able to prepare a lot of food for the whole family and relatives coming to visit, before the New Year's holiday began, that would keep for several days, and could be served and stored in the same container. That way they didn't have to cook and clean so many dishes over the holidays, and they could spend more time relaxing with their family. Even though we have refrigerators nowadays, we like most other families in Japan continue the tradition of eating and serving "osechi ryori". However, few people continue to make the more than a dozen dishes that go into "osechi ryori" from scratch anymore. Like us, most families buy the foods at the supermarket, and then just arrange them in their "jyubako" box on New Year's Day. Or a lot of people like Aki's parents place an order at a restaurant or department store for a ready made "jyubako" full of "osechi ryori" to be delivered to their door by courier on New Year's Eve. The foods in “osechi ryori” are traditionally eaten together with a kind of soup, called “ozoni”.
We don’t have the Good Humor ice cream wagons here in the summer, but we do have “yaki imo” (Roasted sweet potato) wagons and tucks here in the winter. On cold nights, you can hear the familiar sound of the “yaki imo” salesmen, as they makes their way through residential neighborhoods, all across Japan; chanting:
Roasted sweet potatoes! Roasted, sweet potatoes! Sweet potatoes roasted on hot coals! Sweet potatoes! Sweet potatoes! Delicious sweet potatoes! Get em while they're hot!
When I came to Japan over a dozen years ago, sweet potato salesmen were mostly retired men, who pulled a wooden cart around the streets, in search of some supplemental income and something to do on a lonely winter’s night. Nowadays, many sweet potato salesmen are middle-aged men in small pick-up trucks; in need of a second income. They sell sweet potatoes by the gram; piping hot, right out of the wood-fire oven in their back of their cart or truck. After they're weighed, the sweet potatoes are wrapped up in newspaper, so that they're easy to hold. People gradually unwrap the top half of the sweet potatoes, break it open, peel off the skin with their fingers, and bite pieces off of them. They're really tasty, and in Japan where most buildings don't have insulation and central heating, a baked sweet potato and a kerosene heater may be your only sources of warmth. So when people hear the call of the sweet potato salesman, people often answer.
On clear September nights like this, when the harvest moon looks bigger, brighter and more beautiful than usual, people take time out to celebrate that beauty, with simple, family moon viewing parties. When westerners look at a full moon, we see a man's face looking back at us. But the Japanese see a rabbit, pounding rice into rice paste cakes, with a wooden mallet. Looking at a rabbit making rice paste cakes, usually makes Japanese people want to eat rice paste cakes, so at this time of year, confectioners, supermarkets and even convenience stores, all sell small, round, rice paste dumplings, made from rice paste cakes. People usually washi down the rice cakes with some sake (rice wine) as the gaze at the beauty of the harvest moon.
Show us a birthday cake.
Submitted by kite.
In Japan, there really is only one type of birthday cake: strawberry shortcake. Every cake shop has them. I’ve seen colorful ice cream cakes at Baskin Robbins, but I’ve never actually seen anybody buy one, and I’ve never been served any kind of birthday cake, other than a white, round, strawberry shortcake. They all look the same, and they all taste the same. After attending a half dozen birthday parties each year, eating a slice of one no longer seems all that enjoyable. To break up the boredom, I always drop hints that I’d like a cake from the Japanese confectioner Topps. They’re not all that exciting to look at. Except for one square cake, they’re always rectangular, and there aren’t so many varieties either. There’s rare cheese cake, chocolate, "King's Chocolate", and tea-flavored cakes. Also, most of their cakes are decorated with an identical floral pattern; made of the same color icing that covers the rest of the cake. But their cakes are always nice and moist, and the icing is always really creamy, and not sickeningly sweet, because they make it with real cream; instead of cheap sugar and edible oil. They may look and sound simple, but Topps’ cakes simply taste great, and having one gives even a fairly subdued Japanese birthday party, an air of wild rebelliousness.
Since construction started last month, just about every Sunday we hop on our bikes and head over to inspect the site of our future house. On the way there, we often stop into a Mos Burger restaurant along the way. Look at their menu, and you can see that Mos Burger is a distinctly Japanese chain of hamburger shops. Sure they have regular burgers made up of a meat patty sandwiched between two halves of a bread bun. They have French fries, too. But up until a month ago, when Burger King returned to Japan and opened up one outlet in Tokyo's Nishi-Shinjuku District, there was no other hamburger chain here, that sold onion rings. Also, Mos Burger tends to use a lot more vegetables in their recipes, and they’re really fresh. Their salads are nice and crispy, and their soups are heavenly on a cold, winter’s day. But what makes Mos Burger truly unique, is their rice burgers. Imagine a hamburger with two compressed patties of warm rice instead of a bun. I still remember my first Mos rice burger. An American friend of mine introduced me to them, when we stopped into the Mos Burger outlet in Ryogoku, for a bite to eat, on our way to watch sumo at the Kokugikan arena. It was love at first bite! Even though I love Mos Burger, I generally only eat there about two or three times a year. They don’t have many locations, and a meal there usually costs about a $1.50 more than you’d pay at McDonald’s. But the food at Mos Burger is worth every extra penny, or in this case, Yen. I’ve never eaten at another burger chain, where people can’t help but stop two or three times during a meal, to praise the quality and taste of their food. Their kids meals come with a paper craft toy instead of a plastic figure of a highly commercialized cartoon character. To make things even better, they’ve been handing out coupons recently at train stations, so that now a meal at Mos Burger is more affordable than ever.
What do you absolutely refuse to eat?
I don't think that there's anything that I would refuse to eat, but there are plenty of things that I would prefer not to eat if I didn't have to, and wouldn't choose to eat if I were given a choice. The one such food that comes immediately to mind, is "natto" (formented soy beens). It's quite a popular side dish for any meal, in many parts of Japan. They say it's an acquired taste, but I certainly have acquired a taste for it. I can eat it, and if I'm a guest and someboy has served me some, I'll eat it to be polite, but I can't get myself to fake a smile while I eat it, and I don't ever think that I'll be able to feign a liking for it.
About three weeks ago, Coca-Cola Japan started selling its “Coke Zero” in a black can. It tastes like the Coca-Cola 2, or “C2” for short, that was test marketed in Japan two years ago in June. It was said that if it were successful here, Coca-Cola would start selling C2 worldwide. I loved it, but unfortunately it seems like not a lot of other people did. Sales weren’t anywhere near as close to the company’s expectations for the product, and it started disappearing from store shelves after only a two weeks. It was completely gone by the end of the month. This time, the product has been put into manly black cans. It has been nicknamed “black Coke”, and it is being marketed as the masculine counterpart to Diet Coke in silver cans, which has a more feminine image. I sure hope this product succeeds this time around.
On the other hand, I don’t think Pepsi will be so successful with its latest product: Ice Cucumber Pepsi. It’s green like mouthwash. It doesn’t taste like either cucumbers or Pepsi. It has a strong, artificial mint taste and smell. It’s kind of like a cheaply made, non-alcoholic mojito. Pepsi has said that the product will only be on sale for a limited time this summer, but I think the product’s run may be even shorter than the people at Pepsi had planned for. I think it's something that everyone will feel they have to try once, but after they've tried it and have experienced the novelty of it, I'm not sure how many people will actually go back to the store to buy seconds.
Whenever I go to western countries, meet someone new, and the person finds out that I live in Japan, it usually isn’t long before the person says something like “You live in Japan. So you eat raw fish everyday?” or “Do you like living in Japan? I couldn’t live there. I couldn’t eat fish everyday”. It might surprise a lot of people to know that the Japanese don’t eat fish for every meal, everyday, either. According to a government report released today, on average Japanese people nowadays eat just about as much meat as they do seafood. I’m not surprised. Nowadays in the supermarket, there are corn dogs where the mackerel fillets used to be. The Mega Mac hamburger, with four beef patties, has been such an overwhelming success in Japan since it was introduced at the beginning of the year, that McDonald’s outlets across the country can’t keep up with the demand for it. Actually, my Japanese father-in-law eats more steak than I do.
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