MOS Rice Burgers (product information)

MOS Burger has been offering rice burgers in Japan for quite some time, but their web site talks about how hard it has been for them to substitute the burger bun for a slab of rice that doesn't fall apart when you eat it. From my limited experience, I can say that when we ordered such rice burgers, the rice did tend to crumble sooner, if not later.

Their current press claims that they have found a way to fix this problem and they're offering up some interesting burgers to boot (all images courtesy of MOS Burger):

mackeral miso burger:

colorful sauteed vegetable burger:

fried seafood burger:

curry rice burger (with pork patty and ketchup sauce):

egg burger with soy sauce:

The egg burger is part of their morning offering, and, yes, you can order the miso soup as well!

This is the sort of "esoteric" junk food in Japan that I'd like to see make its way over here, but I know it never well. 

Random Picture #186

As my readers may know, I rarely use a picture which is not my own as a "random picture", but this comes courtesy of Coca-Cola Japan. No, this is not a "funky vending machine", but rather an ingeniously modified machine placed in front of a shop in Shibamata, Tokyo. I don't know if this was inspired in any way by the fact that Shibamata is located in Katsushika, a place which hosts the home of the headquarters of toy manufacturer Tomy.

Though much of this modification is done above and beside the machine, some of it is in front and, in theory, could impede access to the machine because of the way the blocky "feet" stick out. I couldn't help but wonder if such a modification in the U.S. might cause some consternation and a demand to return it to its former state. I thought it was cool that Coca-cola Japan displayed this picture rather than became angry about the way in which their machine had been altered.

Lawson Cold Duck and Pumpkin Sandwich (product information)

I often scoff at the idea that Japan offers exotic flavors that you wouldn't be likely to find anywhere else. Now, I have to eat those words because I'm fairly certain no convenience store in America is going to offer a combination like the one in this Lawson sandwich.

This is throwing in all of the goods in order to create the illusion of an elegant sandwich. I'm sure that it sounds and looks better in the promotions than it appears when it's a plastic-wrapped sandwich in the store, but the concept is pretty high profile nonetheless.

This promises fatty, melt in your mouth duck, Kiri cream cheese, balsamic dressing, orange marmalade, walnuts, and pumpkin. The bits of walnut are artfully studded between slices of pumpkin in the pictured sandwich, but I'm guessing the reality will be a bit more haphazard.

"Konbini" elegance comes at a slightly premium price though. This sandwich costs 290 yen (about $3), which may seem cheap by American standards but you have to remember that sandwiches are a more petite affair in Japan. This will satisfy your average office lady with her diminutive appetite, but is unlikely to do for anyone on the more active or taller side. 

Yuki & Love Mango Mochi

Have you ever been in a situation in which someone tries very hard to convince you of something and the more they try to get you to believe them, the less you do? If your friend was trying to get you to go on a date with another friend, you'd probably become suspicious if they used too many superlatives. "He's a great guy, really. He works hard, has a great job, and is trustworthy. He's the best cook I've ever known. He's great, really!"

By the second "really," your suspicions are going to be aroused and you won't be shocked when you meet him and find he has an enormous horned toad tattooed on his face and is still living at home with his mother. He probably also has a collection of pet reptiles in his basement "bachelor pad," and an unabashedly displayed collection of adult diaper pron. No, I'm not speaking from real life experience, fortunately.

I think that there is an inverse relationship between how good something actually is and its claims of how good it is. This not only applies to dates, but also to food. I should have thought of that before buying this mango mochi, but Asian food so often has such claims earnestly displayed on it that I've learned to tune it out. This one says, "Tastes good, absolutely delicious products." If that weren't enough, there is a little crown on it that says, "King of the Tawiwan mochi." That was the one that should have told me that this was a potential toad-faced loser with a stack of diaper porn.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh on this, but I did have somewhat high expectations. I found this at "Ranch 99" Asian market for around $2.00 (200 yen) and was happy to find a new flavor among the more common taro, sesame, peanut, brown sugar, and green tea. I wished I'd tried the green tea instead.

The mochi itself was actually quite good. It is tiny - about the diameter of an American quarter or a little bigger than a Japanese 100-yen coin - and only 90 calories per serving, but it manages to pack a little funk into its petit package. The mochi is soft, fresh, and nicely chewy, but the thick jelly-like center which is supposed to be mango has a strange taste to it.

This starts out okay with a bland flavor that becomes sweeter as you get more of the center flavor. It is definitely mango, but the finishing flavor is polluted by something which tastes like melon, but not any melon that you'd want to eat. I'm guessing this flavor comes from the cassava starch in the ingredients list, but I've never had cassava so I don't know what it actually tastes like. All I know is that something ruins a fairly promising mochi and I'm going to say the cassava is the toad tattoo on an otherwise decent-looking face because most of the other ingredients are sugar (maltose, water, sugar, cassava starch, mango juice, gelatine, glucose, sorbic acid, natural flavor, and a bunch of artificial colors). The weird thing is that that is mochi, but there's no rice listed!

I may choke down one or two more of these, but chances are I'll spring them on unsupecting visitors or throw the rest out. Life is too short for weird-tasting fruit mochi. I'm sure you'll see that on a bumper sticker one day, just as I'm sure you'll meet someone with a toad tattooed on his face (likely sooner rather than later given how many people tattoos there are in America these days).

Nongshim Sweet Potato Snack

One of the lessons that I used to teach Japanese students had to do with symbolic hand or finger gestures. The sign for "ok" in America, creating a circle with thumb and forefinger and raising the other fingers, means "money" in Japan (or so I'm told). Humans do not naturally fall into the same sensibilities about symbols. However, due to globalization, we are coming to share more and more of the them.

I never thought too much about this point until I investigated the web site ran by the  South Korean maker of this snack. I saw that this company is a distributor for American brands that I would not have expected to see abroad. In particular, they sell products made by Welch's, V8, McCormick's, and Kellogg's, and, most strangely to me, Morton. That logo of the little girl with the big umbrella walking through the rain? I'm guessing they must recognize that in South Korea, too. It's weird to consider that they know salt the way I know salt. 

This is my first experience with a product by this company and they lured me in with the promise of a sweet potato experience. The potato on the front is the equivalent of a stick figure in potato form, but he does look pretty happy. I'd like to join him in yam happiness.

I should have looked at the ingredients list before forking over my 99 cents for this 55-gram/1.9-oz. bag of salty snackness. The first item is not sweet potato, but rather is "flour". This is supposed to be a sweet potato snack, not an alchemical abomination! You can't make sweet potato gold out of ground wheat. That is madness.

The second ingredient is sweet potato, but is listed as "white sweet potato". When it comes to sweet potato, I'll admit that I'm a bigoted woman. I like them yellow or orange and am fully prejudiced against white ones. If it's white, it ain't sweet in my opinion. So, I've already gotten off on the wrong foot with this snack and the other ingredients including one that takes up an entire line by itself - fructoooligosaccaride - is not encouraging me to go on.

Nonetheless, I tried to approach this mutant snack with an open mind, and then wished it had stayed closed. The substance within is fried, no doubt, and it is lightly salted, but it is far from being "sweet" or "potato". In fact, what it mostly tastes like is frying oil that has seen far too many re-uses. If you're really eating slow (which I don't recommend as then that frying oil taste is in your mouth all the longer), you can get a very vague somewhat sweet potato-y after taste, but your taste buds have to be flexing all of their buddy muscles to catch this. On a "lucky" bite, you may get an errant bit of sesame seed (a few pieces have one) and it'll taste better. Some are also sweeter than others (no doubt due to getting more sugar-coating), but they'd need a lot more than the occasional extra bit of sugar or sesame seed to make me decide not to throw most of it away.

This was a major disappointment and I won't be finishing the bag. It's not so much that it lacks appeal as the frying oil flavor makes it actively unpleasant. I'd rather have it tasteless than taste like French fries made in oil that had been used all day without a change. It's been awhile since a product has been bad enough to  warrant an unhappy rating, but this one easily took the "prize."