Random Picture #172

Meiji's kinoko and takenoko no sato (mushroom and bamboo shoot) lines of cookie snacks is one of the most venerable in Japan. While I always thought that they were fine as a nice little morsel of cookie with some sort of chocolate, they were never the sort of thing I strongly gravitated toward. There were always bigger fish to fry than the generic combination of buttery biscuit and chocolate. For jaded sorts like me, Meiji has upped their game and released Bergamot Milk Tea and Honey Cafe Latte flavors of these snacks. If I were in Japan and could locate these for the usual price of around 150 yen ($1.50), I'd probably give them a try. Here in the U.S., as you can see, they're more than double that price. Since I don't expect a premium chocolate experience, I was unwilling to pay a premium price for them.

If any of my readers has a bigger wallet than me and popped for these, I'd be curious to hear what you thought of them and if they were worth the scratch.

Tea's Tea Bergamot and Orange

The cherry blossom season is in full swing as I write this, and possibly swinging toward its end by the time this gets published. My husband and I paid a visit to Shinjuku Gyoen (Park) early in the season to see what was up with the blossoms there. During that trip, we both got incredibly hungry and I opted to buy their "sakura sembei" and to wash it down with an expensive bottle of Tea's Tea from a vending machine.

The sakura sembei was pretty interesting in that it had some intensive soy sauce flavoring coated with a sweet frosted shell. It wasn't bad, but I wouldn't pay 150 yen ($1.76) for a single cracker of it again. I've had better sembei and had it cheaper. Still, it looked pretty, and it fit the season.

As for the tea, Tea's Tea seems to be what I buy when I'm out sightseeing in Japan. Readers with a good memory may recall that I picked up a bottle of their milk tea when I climbed Mt. Takao, and I loved it. I was hoping that history would repeat itself, but even the beauty of a well-manicured park and cherry blossoms couldn't influence my opinion of this drink such that I'd see it favorably. This was vile.

The main problem with this was that it tasted like orange Kool-aid with fake bergamot essence. Bergamot is what gives Earl Grey tea its luster, and this in no way reminded me of that particular tea. I'm sure part of the problem was that it was too sweet, but really it was bad because the orange part was just nasty and the "tea" part was almost absent. I drank about 1/3 of the bottle and poured out the rest. That's how bad it was.