Mosdo Box (promotional information)

Image from Mosdo - click this image to see a larger one with more detail.

I'm a fan of balancing things out when I eat, but some people really like to stay with the same theme. For me, if I have pizza, I want to have a salad on the side as a way of balancing the nutrition. I don't like to have, say, fried cheese sticks. Cheese plus cheese is not my thing. I'm not criticizing those who enjoy such pairings, but, simply saying that they are not for me.

If you are someone who likes to layer on the fatty food all together, then the happy marriage of Mos Burger and Mister Donut has something you might like. For a 2,500 yen (about $25), you can get 4 pieces of Mos chicken (breaded and deep-fired, onion rings and French fires plus 4 donuts and a couple of Mosdo mugs for your coffee. I suggest you make that coffee black and let that be the only thing you drink the next day after chowing down on this fat fest. 

Fast Food Christmas deals 2013 (product information)

Image courtesy of Domino's Pizza, Japan.

When you think Christmas dinner, you think of chain pizza places, right? Well, you would if you were in Japan - at least you would as a second thought after you found out that your local KFC no longer had any open slots for Christmas dinner meal reservations. They're the second line of defense in a country which doesn't give anyone the day off for holiday meal preparation. You'd look to fast food, too, if you had to try and pull a "special" meal together after a long day on the job. Domino's is offering the tasty-looking specimen above. It looks big and juicy, doesn't it? Well, if you view it in context, it's not so much a half "chicken" as a "half pigeon".

To understand just how tiny this is, you have to bear in mind that a "large" pizza in Japan is no bigger than and sometimes slightly smaller than a "medium" in the U.S. That is, it was about 12" (25 cm.) in diameter. You can get a Christmas dinner set including this half Cornish game hen with a salad, Coke, and a tiny cake for 4,900 ($47) or 5,900 yen ($57).

Pizza Hut is not to be left our. If you reserve the day before you want the order received, and between Dec. 21 and Dec. 25, and you spend at least 3,000 yen ($29) on your pizza, potatoes, and whatever else is in your fast food meal, you can get the above cake as a "present". The cake is 12 cm. (4.8 in.), so you've getting an itty bitty little thing, but at least it's free!

I checked out the last, and most popular, of the triumvarate of pizza chains in Japan. That would be Pizza-la, and, apparently, they want nothing to do with this Christmas nonsense and don't appear to be making any special offers. I guess they do well enough with their regular Japan-style offerings as well as things like their New Zealand pizza (cheddar cheese, cheddar sauce, chicken, mayonnaise, thick-cut bacon, onion, tomato, and parsley).

Of course, the "grandaddy" Christmas deal in Japan is KFC. They are offering their standard Christmas deal for 3,980 yen/$38 (pictured above) and it includes a medium-size commemorative plate. Note that this plate design, is very similar to the 2010 design on the one my husband and I got during our one and only KFC holiday celebration. It's a little different (people around a tree instead of around a merry-go-round), but similar enough that I confused them on first glance.

Happy Christmas Eve to my readers. This is actually my favorite day as the moment of anticipation is always better than the moment of any sort of reveal. I hope you all have a good one!

Indofood CBP Chiki Snack Balls

Have you ever thought about the shapes of the food you eat? I thought of it while pondering these round salted snacks. I've noticed that there are fewer balls than sticks. This makes sense considering that "sticks" can be made merely by cutting up a larger mass. Balls have to be formed through some other process like using a mold. In fact, I have no idea how salted snack foods that are round are created, but my fevered imagination makes me think it must involve tiny little snack food fairies with sodium chloride dandruff who roll each morsel by hand and salt them with shakes of their disgusting heads. This is, I'm sure, part of what lead to the demise of the much loved Planter's Cheese balls.

The advantage of balls over puffs is not only that the sphere is a perfect shape in nature and organically appealing to us mammals whereas sticks and doodles remind us of tree branches, but also that they provide more light and airy inner snack for an appealing texture.

These are produced by an affiliated company of Frito Lay in Indonesia. Their web site says that they have chicken, cheese, and chocolate versions and they are produced under the strictest of quality control situations. If that is so, and I'm sure it is, I'm not sure why they smelled like diseased feet smothered in chemicals meant to cure them when I opened the bag. The smell didn't leap out and offend me, but I purposely try to get a sense of a food from the scent before I take a taste. Smelling these made me not want to taste them, but, this is my slave-wage-pay job, after all.

I asked my husband to take a whiff of them as well and he found the smell as vile as I did. As I prepared to place a puff in my mouth, he said that I was very brave. With all of that build-up, one might expect that I just ate something incredibly vile, but the truth is that these were okay. They weren't great, but they were not the least bit offensive.

The balls themselves are exceptionally light and airy. The corn and rice base makes them taste a little like Cap'n Crunch without the sugar or hardness. They are also akin to "Kix" cereal without the crispy texture. The flavor other than the basic cereal one is very, very subdued. I expected to be blasted with some intense chemical powder, but the flavor is incredibly mild. It's has a whisper of salt and chicken boullion flavor.

Clearly, these are designed for kids and I think that has a lot to do with how mild they are. Children have much more sensitive palates than adults and can't tolerate super strong flavors, at least not on the savory end of the scale. I think they can eat sugar straight out of the bag with little difficulty, but they hate vegetables (like onions) for a reason - at least sometimes.

These are okay, but far too bland for me. I got them courtesy of KS Snacks so I can hardly complain about what I paid for them. They are interesting as a one-off experience, but I wouldn't try them again and, if I saw their other snacks at a store, I'd be inclined to give them a miss because they're not that impressive.

I will give my benefactor a bit of a plug here though because they've changed their web site and are offering more snacks, a discount code for 10% off your order (KS 1), and are now listing prices in U.S. currency rather than Indonesia. There are more Japanese items on the front page (being sold in volume) as well as some interesting items like "red tea" and peach Pocky.

Yaokin Ebi Mayo and Chicken Curry Umai Bo

You can probably tell that the one on the left is the chicken curry since there's a picture of a chicken on the package, but I'm going to tell you anyway because I'm pedantic like that.

Today's items come to you (and me) courtesy of Skoshbox. These were part of the monthly goodie box that they sent me a free sample of and reviewed last week. 

When I was a kid, growing up in a run-down rural area of Western Pennsylvania, my parents used to "go out" in the only manner in which someone could in the area in which we lived. The only type of social experience that one could have there was at one of several little watering holes. There weren't any restaurants in the town, at least not at that time. You could go out and eat frozen, deep-fried food out of a plastic basket lined with paper and have a beer, you could stay home, or you could drive about a half hour to an hour away and look for something marginally better. 

My sister and I were too young to go out with our parents, and I imagine it would have been a colossal bore if we had; no kid wants to sit around a dark, dank, smoky room while a bunch of men and a handful of women get either quietly or noisily drunk. The highlight of my parents going out was that they'd often placate us for sitting at home with a babysitter who we hated (and we hated all of them) by bringing back tiny bags of Wise potato chips. I remember being happy when my mother would hand over 1 oz. bags of barbecue chips, and annoyed when she'd pony up plain ones.

For me, Wise brand potato chips are indelibly linked to my childhood. It's not only because they were something that I only ate as a kid, but also that they are associated with the region I grew up in. You can't get them in California. I'm guessing that, similarly, Japanese kids might connect their youth with Yaokin's umai bo. It's a salty snack "stick" which is made of puffed corn, comes in a variety of flavors and costs about 10-20 yen a stick, depending on whether you buy them individually or as part of multi-packs.

The fact that these are designed for kids is clear based on the colorful cartoon designs on the outside as well as the fact that no calorie or nutrition data is included. Kids, after all, do not have to worry about calories, right? That doesn't mean they aren't good for adults, though. It's not like there aren't people of all ages out there who are still eating Cap'n Crunch. 

Sorry for the blue cast. My photo taking situation is a bit odd at present.

The ebi mayo (shrimp mayonnaise) stick was the one I started with because I am not a fan of shrimp and I wanted to get the one I was least likely to enjoy out of the way first. I gave it a sniff, twice, and my suspicion that this was going to be very "fishy", or perhaps more accurately, "seafoody" was confirmed. I was encouraged, however, by the large amount of red powder on the outside. I associate that with "hot" and "spicy", but, on second thought, I figured that it is also a color that may be associated with, well, shrimp.

Though this smelled incredibly strongly of shrimp, the actual flavor was more balanced than I expected. The mayonnaise aspect was much more present than the shrimp. It had a nice savory undertone and was ever so slightly sweet as well as salty. Even though I hate shrimp, I really didn't have a problem with this. While I wouldn't seek it out, I wouldn't turn my nose up at it either.

The chicken curry was something I was actually looking forward to as I love both flavors. Just as was the case with the shrimp mayo version, the animal product portion of this was muted next to the other flavoring. Curry is definitely the dominant flavor. In fact, this tasted very much like Japanese curry roux. That is not to be confused in any way with Indian curry, but it is a nice flavor. This has curry flavor on top with a savory undertone and a little sweetness. 

The "umai bo" series of snacks is not meant for adults, but is marketed toward children. To that end, these are not snacks with serious flavor depth or intense or strong flavors. They are still very, very tasty and have a nice, almost fresh, corn flavor with good crunch. I like how airy these types of snacks are. They're giving you texture and the illusion of volume, but are not especially filling. 

I like these, even the shrimp one, and I hate shrimp. This is the sort of thing which I will always associate with life in Japan and a childhood there which I didn't actually experience. They're light, tasty, crispy, and portion-controlled. They're pure junk, of course, but a little junk now and then is unlikely to send anyone to an early grave.

Random Picture #94

With Christmas having come along last weekend, my husband and I were on the prowl for whole chickens to bake up for a festive meal. People love to show insanely expensive fruit in Japan, but they have nothing on the price of a whole chicken. Despite the fact that it takes more effort to dismember a bird than leave it intact, they are always very pricey. This one, which was the biggest we located, which is to say about a medium-sized bird, was a good candidate based on size, but was insanely expensive. There is no weight printed on the chicken, but I'd be shocked if it were bigger than 3 kg. (6.6 lbs). The price tag was 5000 yen or $64 U.S. This chicken must have been lovingly massaged by nubile young girls everyday and fed only the finest, juiciest hand-picked worms and designer grains to deserve that sort of price tag. Needless to say, we passed. We ended up finding a kosher frozen turkey which was about the same size for about 1/2 the price. The turkey was one of two left behind, and we counted ourselves lucky to have found any sort of turkey at all.

Spicy Chicken Wings Pretz

Once a year, usually around the summer in my experience, Glico issues regional flavors of Pretz. For East Japan, the flavors are these spicy chicken wing pretzels and gyoza (pot sticker). West Japan gets yuzu koshoo (boy, do I envy that!) and a peppered fish flavor (which I envy a good deal less). This King Solomon approach, split the country in half and divide the Pretz between them, is ameliorated to some extent by the inclusion of two nation-wide varieties, one of which I will review at a later date.

You can buy these nearly anywhere right now, but I got them for a mere 50 yen (64 cents) at a discount snack shop in Koenji called Okashi no Marche. I've mentioned this place before. They are absolutely the cheapest game in town when it comes to snacks, though they also carry some pretty expensive imports (especially from the U.K. and Russia). They had four varieties of Pretz available. I'm not sure why they were so cheap, but I wasn't going to turn down the chance to sample them for that price. One box has two packages of about 1 oz. (28 grams) each and provides 137 calories. It's a good portion size for serious salty snacking.

These have a nice savory flavor which hits the hardest on the first few sticks. There's a peppery flavor and savory chicken and garlic in the mix. The saltiness level is just about right, but a little more might not have hurt. My main "issue" with these is that the flavor seems to be something one acclimates to rather rapidly. After about 6 sticks, you mainly just taste pretzel. It could be my tongue, or it could be there's something about these spices. Regardless, these are good pretzels and, if nothing else, the flavor acclimation issue may encourage lighter consumption. I'd definitely buy them again.

Kabaya Rispy Basil and Chicken Crackers (QR)

In the interest of making my "quick reviews" even quicker, I've decided to label them as "QR" rather than to write out "Quick Review" in the title. I'm also sure that it will add a layer of confusion for new readers and require me to put another FYI post on the sidebar. All of the explaining about quick reviews probably will initially take me longer than writing a full review, but that's all part of the fun of blogging.

I bought these crackers at the local Inageya supermarket because I liked the name. It reminded me of "raspy", though I know that this is just a play on the word "crispy" in English. It has also been awhile since I've seen anything resembling a new potential product line, especially in the salted snack realm, so I figured they'd make for a somewhat unique experience. Forty grams (1.4 oz.) cost me about 130 yen (~$1.50) and will set you back 200 calories. The back of the bag shows a glass of bear beer next to a plate with 5 little crackers. Since each is about the size of the tip of a particularly large thumb (though not quite as big as Sissy Hankshaw's), I imagine most people would eat more than a measly five of the approximately thirty pieces.

The flavor combination on these, basil and chicken, sounded like a winner, and I wasn't disappointed. They are very savory and have a nice blend of saltiness, chicken, onion, and garlic coupled with just enough basil to leave a faint impression on the tongue. Since basil is pretty easy to overdo, this is a very welcome turn of events.

The main selling point of these is how crunchy they are, and they live up on that front as well. Each is a slightly thick, but not in the least bit tough, pillow of crackery goodness. This is thanks to a high level of fat which manifests in ever so slight oiliness, but nice flakiness in the crackers.

These are quite a nice little treat and I'd recommend giving them a try if you come across a bag despite the goofy effete little fellow illustrating the bag. I'm not sure what someone who looks like one of the 3 musketeers has to do with crispy basil chicken crackers, but perhaps we're supposed to think that he's French and they're renowned for their crispy bread. It's a pretty tenuous connection, though the crackers are made to resemble loaves of bread.

Nichirei Cantonese Shark Fin Soup

Sometimes I wonder how it comes to pass that people decide that a particular part of an animal is a good thing to eat. Back when the recipes were originally created, I guess they were just trying to scavenge anything edible from whatever carcass was at hand. If they caught a shark, they probably ate every scrap of it and convinced themselves that it was good and good for them ("shark scrotum tastes like a monkey's behind smells, but it enhances virility!").

Now that we have the luxury of leaving behind the less juicy and delicious parts of animals, it would seem that inertia drives the valuation of the less savory parts. I realize that it is also possible that people feel that it is conservation, but I've seen too many people turn up their noses at the idea of leftovers the third day after a meal (the Japanese are generally not big on leftovers) to think they want to use every scrap of the animal. Shark fin soup is supposed to increase sexual potency, but actually causes sterility if consumed in large quantities. It also is supposed to be pretty healthy, but isn't as good for you as vegetable soup.

This package of prepared shark fin soup comes to me not of my own volition, but through my New Year's fukubukuro (lucky bag). It's going to take me about half a year to get through reviewing all of the items in those bags. It means I should seriously reconsider whether I should keep buying them, especially from supermarkets which give you a lot of items. On the one hand, I like the surprise. On the other hand, It's late April and I'm far from finished with the products I got!

I prepared this soup exactly as instructed, adding in 2 cups (500 ml.) of water, squeezing in the unappetizing-looking brown goo in the foil packet, simmering it for about 7 minutes and then sending in a stream of egg and allowing it to cook. It smelled very familiar, like mixes of Chinese-style food that I've had in Japan in the distant past. My main concerns with this was that it would be too salty and too thin on flavor, especially at only 44 calories per serving (not including the egg, which one must provide for oneself).

It turned out that the soup has a deep savory flavor which includes a heavy chicken component. This isn't surprising since there is chicken bouillon and extract listed twice in the ingredients list. There are also little slices of mushroom, but they mainly lend texture rather than flavor. Soy sauce and Chinese spices round out the flavor profile. This doesn't taste overly salty, in fact, it's close to being just about right, but it has 3.2 grams of salt per serving (1/4 of the package). Considering that the average adult is recommended to consume about 6 grams total, that's a lot for a small bowl of soup.

This is one of the tastiest types of packaged soup I've had. I make my own soup several times a week, so gaining my approval isn't all that easy. Even my husband, who is a fussy eater, liked it enough to say he'd have it again if the price isn't ridiculously out of line with the volume (something we can't know since I didn't buy it as an individual item). The company that makes this, Nichirei, has now hit its second home run with me with its packaged food. The first thing I sampled from them was its imagawayaki offering, and I loved it. If you're looking for a quick and tasty soup to augment your meal, I'd definitely recommend trying this out if you have no or few concerns about salt consumption.

Cratz Chicken Arrabiata

I love Cratz, as my past reviews of their products demonstrate. The Chicken Arrabiata variety has been around for ages and I have only neglected to review it because I think that they make for boring review fodder. How much can I milk out of "mmmm, Cratz!" I love these little hard pretzels bits with almonds. To be honest, I didn't even know what chicken arrabiata was when I bought this. I looked it up after the fact and its chicken with various Italian seasonings. The biggest component seems to be tomato, but also garlic, onion, and sometimes mushrooms.

The smell of these is slightly spicy. The flavor is a melange of chicken, tomato, garlic, and black pepper. While these are all good flavors, it's very hard to pin down what is going on with these. They generally taste spicy and savory and minimally salty. These are good enough, but a little too heavy on the chicken and tomato. I think they're a bit short on the salt and heavy on the peppery aspect.

The Cratz line competes against itself rather than other snacks. If I had to choose between this and a bag of nearly any type of potato chip, I'd take these. However, if I had to choose between any other variety of Cratz and this type, I'd take another flavor. A 44-gram bag of these has 228 calories and some of those come from a nice number of almonds. I found these for 100 yen ($1.20) at Lawson 100, but you can get them anywhere. If you can get the cheese variety or bacon pepper Cratz, I'd say get one of those, but that doesn't mean these aren't good as much as the fact that the others are better in my opinion.

Hagoromo (canned) Yakitori

A variety of food review bloggers, including the Onion's AV Club, have reviewed canned hamburgers. The point that this has in common with I'm about to review is that both yakitori and hamburgers are foods that should never be sold in a canned version. If you've had the real thing, you know that it can be a tasty and almost sublime experience that can only be realized in a freshly prepared presentation.

I found this abomination at Lawson 100 and bought it on impulse because I'd never seen canned yakitori on sale anywhere else. Hagoromo is more familiar to me as a maker of crappy canned tuna rather than crappy canned chicken.

 There are plenty of little bits of chicken skin, and precious little actual chicken. The can is 55 grams and offers 139 calories, but the web side says that that includes everything (sauce, skin, chicken), not just the edible chicken parts. That makes sense because I couldn't imagine such a high calorie count for what little is there. In fact, I'd guess this would be the equivalent of one stick of actual yakitori if you were to get the real deal. I think this stuff is designed mainly as earthquake survival food. You can keep it in your emergency bag for up to 3 years, or you can serve it as a side dish to people that you don't like very much.

Before I popped the top, I expected that this would smell like that usual canned food smell. You know, a sort of eau de dog food? Yeah, it smelled like that and just a bit like chicken. Inside were some chicken tidbits suspended in some sort of gelatinous substance. I figured that it might be more palatable if I warmed it up and allowed the goo to liquefy.

Despite the unappealing look and smell, I wasn't too grossed out by the idea of eating this. I've had bad canned food before, after all. The texture of the chicken was horribly dry and stringy. It needs to be chewed quite a bit unless you prefer to swallow it whole. It has that canned food taste which I always guessed was due to pressure cooking mass amounts of the food as well as whatever preservatives are used. There is also a hint of a smoky, char-cooked flavor and, of course, low quality chicken. The sauce is slightly sweet and salty. It's not bad, but it's far from good.

This was bad, but not in a way that renders it awful. It's just overcooked, processed canned food that fails entirely to be more than one expects, even when one expects very little. If you need something for your earthquake survival kit, this wouldn't be the worst possible choice if you can't find anything else. Otherwise, give it a pass.

Variety Friday: Japanese KFC Christmas

The barrel was quite huge, about the volume of a 5 gallon bucket. 

Despite living in Japan for over 20 years, my husband and I have never taken part in the traditional fried chicken and Christmas cake rituals that have somehow become a part of the Japanese Christmas tradition. I'm not certain of how this tradition began, but I would be surprised if it weren't the devil spawn of the KFC marketing department. They are the kings of this ritual, though a wide variety of other outlets, including convenience stores and other fast food places, have jumped on the fried chicken bandwagon around this time of year.

The reservation schedule posted at our local KFC. The top shows the menu options for Christmas packs/barrels. The yellow tags indicate limited availability of chicken during those hours and the orange tags are hours in which no original recipe chicken will be on offer. You can see that 3:00 pm - 9:00 pm on the 24th is the busiest. (Click this to see a bigger version.)

While it may seem that having KFC for Christmas is just a simple matter of strolling on over to the local greasy chicken outlet and picking up a bucket, it's a bit more complicated than that because of the popularity of getting chicken during "the 3 days of Christmas" in Japan. At least in Tokyo, you have to make an effort to sign up early in order to pick your grub up around dinner time on the 23rd, 24th or 25th. If you don't, you risk getting shut out entirely as they can run out of original recipe chicken. Also, there can be huge mobs of people on the 25th and it's hard to get what you want by mere luck.

My husband and I signed up a few weeks before the date, but even then we were too late to hit any of the sweet spots for dinner on Christmas Eve or Day. We had to settle for the 23rd, which happens to be a national holiday (the Emperor's birthday) in Japan. You choose a time to pick up your chicken at 10-minute intervals. Ours was between 6:30-6:40. If you're late, you still get your chicken, but it will have sat around for awhile. Since you have to pay when you make your reservation, they don't care if you show up or not.

 The bucket contents unpacked.

There are a few different options, but we opted for the "party barrel A" for 3,880 yen ($47) because you get a commemorative plate in addition to a "Christmas salad", Christmas cake, and 8 pieces of original recipe chicken. The other options include the "party barrel B" (4 pieces of chicken, 6 tenders, a salad, a cake and the plate for the same price as "A"), and "Christmas Packs" which include only various types of chicken (tenders, nuggets, and pieces), no salad, no cake, and no plate. My husband wanted to get the plate as part of the deal as a memento of our first "Japanese-style" Christmas meal, but we also figured that this would save us having to arrange for a separate cake.

The whole lot served up, save the cake. That's our rice. It doesn't come with your barrel.

Except for the cake, nothing much was going to be a surprise. Everyone knows what original recipe KFC tastes like. The "Christmas salad" was nothing more than a smallish bit of salad with a Caesar salad kit on the side. What was worse was that the salad was mostly iceberg lettuce. Again, this was no great shock, but it would have been nice if they had done a little better by those buying expensive Christmas barrels. The salad kit had dressing, croutons, bacon bits, Parmesan cheese, and 4 plastic forks. The salad portion was barely adequate for 2. If you had 4 people, it would have been obscenely tiny.

The cake was very soft and I had a little trouble getting it out of the package without denting up the soft chocolate topping. When my husband smelled it, he said it was very reminiscent of something and asked me what I thought. My first thought was chocolate pudding, and that was his thought as well. The cake looks like your usual Japanese Christmas cake in that it has little flecks of real gold in the center to add a touch of elegance.

The cake was largely whipped cream based. The super soft outer layer was slightly bittersweet and where most of the flavor lay. The texture was pretty nice, but I would have liked a bit more heft both in terms of the flavor and density of the cake. The cake itself nearly vanished in a melty cloud of cream. It wasn't bad, but wasn't nearly as good as the cake I was given last year, not by a long shot. On the bright side, the cake was about 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter and provided 4 large pieces or 8 small ones. My husband and I each had 1/8, and that weighed in at a mere 90 calories per serving.

This was an interesting experience, but mainly for going through the process of reserving it, picking it up, and seeing what the surprises might be. All in all though, it wasn't a very good meal, but I'm not a fan of fast food in general and KFC in particular. I ate one piece of the chicken only and the rest my husband will have to slowly eat by himself. If you love KFC and want a plate as a souvenir to remember your time in Japan by, this may be worthwhile, but I wouldn't do this again.

I have to ponder why this is so popular in Japan despite being a decidedly so-so experience on the food front. It's certainly not cheap. In fact, you could probably buy all of the components separately and end up with more money left in your pocket. The plate isn't really even a free bonus and you could definitely get a nicer cake, even from a convenience store. I think that this ultimately is like a lot of Western traditions in that we don't do them because they are good but simply because they are familiar and following this custom puts one in the proper spirit for  the holiday. Many Japanese people eat bad fried chicken for Christmas for the same reason that we still give fruitcakes. It's just what is done by everyone and we try not to think too deeply about why we do it.

Merry Christmas to all of my readers!

Kagome "Rice Menu Set": Chicken Doria and Spicy Tomato Curry

Kagome Chicken Doria (236 calories)

As part of my attempts to review instant or frozen food on occasion, I picked up these shelf stable "heat and eat" meals at Seiyu supermarket on sale for 198 yen ($2.16). There are several of these in a line by Kagome geared toward weight-conscious women. That's why the calorie information is displayed so prominently on the front of the boxes. These boast not only low calorie counts, but some added fiber through the use of a barley and rice mixture. I chose the "chicken doria" because I have a fond experience with that dish from a local restaurant, and the tomato curry because, well, it's curry.

Both of these dishes have a bowl with a bit under a cup of grain in the bottom and foil packets that contain sauces. The Doria has separate mixtures for white sauce and red sauce. In the end, you mix it all together anyway so I don't quite understand the point of the separation. I'm guessing it's for aesthetic reasons. The tomato curry had one large foil pack only.

Going into sampling these, I knew I would try them alone once, and then I would augment them with leftover chicken breast. These sorts of meals are not well-known for their high protein content. I started with the chicken doria which had microscopic bits of tomato, the odd rare crumb of carrot, and tiny little bits of chicken mince. The red sauce with chicken smells like tomato and not much else. the white sauce has a bit of a dog-food/canned food type of smell. It was not encouraging.

This didn't taste like not much of anything. There's some very mild tomato juice flavor and ever so vague hints of some sort of cheese. You have to strain to taste it though. In fact, I'd recommend invoking the power of imagination and hope that you can turn your desire for cheese taste into reality through the power of your mind. I couldn't taste chicken at all. It's also one of those prepared foods that has a lot of sodium, 350 mg., but you still need to add salt to it to taste anything.

The texture was rather gelatinous. You can tell the sauce is mainly made with cornstarch. While the rice is not bad at all and is relatively firm and decent, good pre-made rice is really not hard to come by in Japan.

This was palatable only because I added 90 grams of leftover chicken breast to it and the rice was fine with it. The sauce mainly added some moisture and texture. I was very disappointed in this and probably wouldn't have eaten it all if I hadn't already mixed the chicken in with it and had nothing else to really consume.

The Chicken Doria gets a well-deserved:

Spicy Tomato Curry (235 calories)

After my experience with the Chicken Doria, I had even lower expectations of this. I felt a bit more hopeful after I opened the sauce packet and smelled it. The aroma was about what one would expect of spicy curry and tomato. You can see how little I expect of these things when they end up smelling like they should and I'm pleasantly surprised.

The base component of this was similar to the chicken doria version. The plastic bowl has about three-quarters of a cup of rather dry rice and barley with a foil packet of sauce. After squeezing the sauce onto the rice mixture, I put it in the microwave with the lid on as instructed and the lid blew off about 1 minute and 15 seconds into the process. Curry bubbled up and splattered on the edges of the bowl before I could stop it.

I took it out and gave it a stir and noticed that it was very, very soupy. The rice seemed rather dry at first, but the texture improved after it sat for about 5 minutes. There are small blobs of soft tomato in the sauce, and no other detectable vegetables. I sampled it as is and it is not bad at all. It's nicely spicy in terms of warmth and intensity of tomato flavor. The curry flavors are rather muted, but it's really rather piquant. It's just a bit salty, but not in a too overbearing manner.

After a taste of the curry "as is", I added 85 grams (3 oz.) of leftover chopped, cooked chicken breast and stirred it in. Because there is a lot more sauce than necessary, this worked quite well. There was more than enough sauce to coat the chicken and the combination was very good. I didn't need to add salt to the bland chicken because the sauce is spicy enough to cover.

I actually liked this. If I were inclined to pick up a prepared meal to avoid preparing all of the components, I'd definitely buy this again. For this sort of food, this was pretty good and the low calorie count (235 calories alone, 372 with the added chicken) is appealing. It's not stellar, but it is tasty enough to be worthwhile, especially if you have no time to cook.

Ajinomoto Lemon Basil Chicken

One of my readers commented that he would like to see me review more frozen foods or ready-to-eat foods. In response to this, I'm going to try and fit in one of these types of reviews about once a month even though they're not snacks. Since I cook most of the food I eat, this isn't the sort of thing that I take to naturally. That being said, I think it will be interesting to investigate some of these items on an infrequent, though hopefully regular, basis. Trust me when I say that this is in no way an indication that I'm running out of snacks to review. In fact, recently I was struck by the fact that I will never run out of new snacks to try.

I chose this package of frozen nuggets because it was one of the few things which wasn't pasta or rice-based in the small frozen foods case. For the record, the majority of the frozen food in Japan is "doria" or "gratin" (cheese, rice, and some animal-based protein), with an emphasis on shrimp versions. Since shrimp makes me gag, you won't be seeing any reviews of shrimp-based dishes. A lot of the other frozen food bits are fried foods like tempura or other types of fried cutlets which are designed to be put in bento boxes.

I found this at Inageya supermarket for 198 yen ($2.13) for 6 nuggets. The nuggets are a little big. I'd say each is about one and a half times the size of a McDonald's nugget. There are 38 calories per nugget. I'm not a big eater, so three of these accompanied by a little under a cup of rice (and some carrots) was a big enough portion for me for lunch. The ingredients include chicken, soy sauce, mirin (sweet Japanese cooking sake), various meat extracts, basil, parsley, and caramel coloring.

The company that makes these, Ajinomoto, is well-known for its seasonings including MSG, frozen foods, and prepared foods. They make a lot of packaged soups, dressings, and mixes designed to allow for faster food preparation. Early on in my stay in Japan, I tried their "Cook-Do" series for "mabonasu" (a Chinese-style eggplant dish), and wasn't too impressed. Part of their marketing includes the slogan "welcome to tasty Japan." I think that the basic idea is that their foods offer people the taste of Japan through their seasonings.

The nuggets are packaged in little plastic cups that are perforated so that you can break them apart and heat them individually. Though they look a little like something with a fried coating, they're actually little formed bits of white meat chicken with a thin, chicken-skin-like coating. I was ready to pop these in the toaster oven, but the directions on the package explicitly say not to use such a device. I'm guessing that this is because the seasoned skin-like covering would stick like mad to a toaster oven tray and you'd be left with just the processed chicken and no seasoned jacket.

I microwaved three nuggets at 600 W in their individual plastic cups as instructed for 1 minute, and they were still cold so I gave it another minute and that seemed about right. The package instructs you to use an oven with a turntable for even heating, but mine doesn't have one so I just rotated the plates at the half-way point.

The smell coming from them was like funky cooking oil. I'm guessing this was the lemon and basil seasoning. The exterior was quite greasy, as you can see from the shiny exterior in the above picture of the heated chicken balls. The texture was probably the worst part. The chicken is somewhat spongy with a stretchy very thin exterior which is tough to cut through with a fork. In fact, it was difficult to cut them in half and eat the meat proportionally with the rice. I'm guessing that these are meant to be snarfed down whole rather than cut into dainty bits for people like me who prefer not to go all chipmunk-cheeked when I eat.

It doesn't taste like fried chicken, despite looking like it. Mainly, you can taste lemony basil oil with a heavier emphasis on a canned lemon juice taste. It's a little salty, but not over the top. The flavor is not bad at all, but not a great one either. It doesn't taste like much on the chicken front, and the spices could be better. That being said, I think this was at least as good as a fast food nugget. That's not high praise as I think fast food nuggets are generally pretty tasteless and awful.

Though I will finish the package and have the other three nuggets, I wouldn't buy these again. One thing to keep in mind is that I'm a pretty good cook and I set the bar somewhat high on things like this. I can cook chicken very well, and these don't come close to how tasty a well-cooked piece of breast meat comes out. I think people who don't cook might find them more enjoyable than I do. Certainly they're worth a try if you can't cook or have limited options.

Yamachan's Shittori Sembei

One of the mistakes foreign folks make while living in Japan is concluding that they understand the country based on their little corner of the experience. The truth is that, like many countries, Japan is not one country with one uniform culture and one type of people. It's a small country compared to some others, but the culture is different in various regions. You can live here for decades and still never come across some aspects of the culture.

Sometimes little things remind me of this, and this snack was one of them. No matter how many foods I sample, companies I research, or packages I translate, I'll never know it all. There will always be things which are popular outside of my experience that I'll never know. I had never encountered "Yama-chan's" brand of food before coming across this packet of sembei at Peacock supermarket. It turns out that it is a chain of restaurants that sells a particular type of chicken wings. The nearest restaurant in this chain is about an hour from my apartment and many of the others are even further afield.

This sembei is supposed to mimic the distinctive seasoning of Yama-chan's chicken wings. Since I've never had their actual food, I can't speak to its verisimilitude to the real thing, but I can talk about it as a rice-based cracker snack. I found these at Peacock supermarket for 148 yen ($1.57). There were 17 largish crackers in the bag (about the size of a medium potato chip) and there were 195 calories in the whole bag (11.5 calories each).

They smelled rather peppery with some other spices mixed in. The taste was also quite peppery (as in black pepper) with some of the fried chicken taste you might expect. The pepper hits you first and the fried chicken spices second. The pepper tends to come back around at the end as it lingers on the tongue. These are "shittori" which means "moist" so the texture was rather softish compared to most sembei. They were very similar to the Sanshin curry sembei I reviewed before only with different seasoning. I didn't like the texture on those and I wasn't a great fan of the texture on these either. I guess I really need to avoid "shittori" sembei.

I ate the entire bag of these, but they really just tasted like black pepper and those packets of fried chicken seasoning powder that you can buy at supermarkets. The pepper dominated so much that I felt that I'd be better off just buying one of my favorite crispy black pepper sembei rather than this type. It wasn't bad at all, and I did enjoy the intense spiciness, but I wouldn't purchase it again.