Tyrant Habanero "Anbiriba Rod"

The "Tyrant Habanero" brand of spicy rings (by Tohato) has been around for quite a few years and I'm a big fan of them. In fact, I like them so much that I don't buy them because I know I'll eat the whole bag. As has been remarked by more than one person who has imprudently scarfed down a whole bag, they taste great going in, but are really not so great coming out. Ahem.

The rings, which I have not reviewed previously, are pretty much the same as these "rods" except that the rods are rolled out versions. they're thinner, easier to eat, and in a smaller package. The good part about this is that, if you can't stop yourself from foolishly eating them all, it isn't nearly as painful later on. The cup contains 35 grams (1.2 oz.) of small rods and 150 calories. They also do not appear to be quite as densely coated as the rings so they're somewhat less spicy, but it is the same spice coating and mixture.


The spices on these sticks include tomato, onion, garlic, pork, mushroom, and chicken flavor powders as well as habanero puree. Because the habanero pepper is so potent, eating a lot of them (especially the ring version) continuously tends to burn out your taste buds ability to sense anything but heat. If you eat them slowly, you get a better sense of the savory nature of the other spices, particularly the tomato. These are potato-based processed snacks, but you really can't taste the potato much through the spices.

These are thin and crispy and I prefer these rods over the rings both in terms of shape and the ability to bite into them without worrying about the shape of the ring landing awkwardly (or painfully) against your teeth or gums. These are fairly hot so you have to have a slightly strong tongue to enjoy them. I've had hotter things than these, mind you, but they are not for those with a sensitivity to spicy things. I would definitely get these again, but I'm a huge fan of hot foods.

If you'd like to display the evil jack-o-lantern style pepper on your desktop, you can download desktop pictures of it from Tohato here. There's an extra freaky one which looks like a bunch of people worshiping the evil pepper. Let's hope it's not some weird new cult.

Country Ma'am 5 Flavor Cookie Assortment

Back when I first moved to Japan, there was a "Fujiya" cake shop close to the train station nearest my apartment. The shop sold elaborate freshly made cakes for a pretty hefty price as well as packaged sweets. The shop featured a "life size" (about the size of a 6 year-old child) statue of the company's lip-licking mascot, Peko-chan. Fans of Peko-chan can join a fan club on Fujiya's web site and get their hands on a variety of junk bearing her likeness.

The Fujiya cake shop closed up some time ago, but I still run across their mass-produced sweets on occasion. They make a ubiquitous milk fondant filled chocolate with Peko-chan on the cover and Country Ma'am cookies. As I mentioned in a previous review, Country Ma'am are a soft, chewy cookie with a crispy exterior which are even better when microwaved.


This box of assorted cookies includes the usual cocoa chocolate chip and vanilla as well as three new flavors: cream cheese, strawberry, and "delicious chocolate". There are two of each kind of cookie in the box, but I'm only going to review the three new flavors since I already reviewed the vanilla and cocoa in the aforementioned review. Ten small cookies are sold for about 200 yen ($2.18). Since the big bag of cocoa and vanilla cookies alone is about 400 yen ($4.36) and contains 24 cookies, you're paying a slight premium for the new flavors.

From left: strawberry, cream cheese, delicious chocolate
(Click this image for a more detailed, larger one.)

All of the cookies have the same basic texture. The outside is crispy and the inside is moist and chewy. The strawberry one seems a little strange though since it seems like pinkish dough was applied to the outside of a vanilla cookie. The interior is not pink.

• strawberry: This smells pleasantly of real strawberries. The taste is slightly tart, with a nice real strawberry flavor and it is mildly sweet. There was exactly one white chocolate chip on the edge of this.
• cream cheese: This one smelled very faintly of cream cheese and had a nice tangy cream cheese flavor. Like the strawberry, there was exactly one white chocolate chip stuck in the top.
• delicious chocolate: They smelled nicely chocolatey and the taste as compared to the regular "cocoa" flavor was of deeper chocolate. I'd say it was marginally better than the cocoa version. There also appeared to be a few tiny fragments of nuts in this, but you can't taste them because they're too small. The ingredients list for this cookie mentioned almond paste, but I couldn't detect any of it in the taste.

The packaging is rather misleading and I think that it has been digitally constructed to make you think that all of the cookies are full of chocolate chips. The cream cheese and strawberry seem like they were made by having a machine drop just one chip on the corner as that was all that was in each of them. I get the feeling that that chip is simply there to add the slightest bit of credibility to the "choco chip" claim written on the packages. That being said, I don't think the cookies suffer at all for their lack of chips. They probably would be too sweet with more of them.

These were all nice cookies with good flavor and excellent texture, but they carry the tiniest hint of an artificial flavor which I connect with the preservatives or the packaging. The texture is unique among the various cookies you can buy in Japan and is about as close to homemade that you can get from packaged cookies. That is not to say they are anywhere near as good as a home-baked chewy cookie, but they're nice in a pinch.

Lawson Value Line Tuna Mayo Pizza

There's an excellent blog called "Heat Eat Review" which features frozen and ready to eat food reviews. I've often thought that such an idea would be interesting for Japanese frozen or prepared meals, but the truth is that there isn't much of such types of food around relative to the U.S. The fact that women tend to cook most of the time and housewives are still pretty common means people tend to get full and balanced meals rather than grab something quick. Also, the types of food that are available in this area tend to be expensive and of very poor quality. It'd require one to eat an entire meal of junk instead of just the snack size things that I review.

As I mentioned in a former review of a prepared ham and cheese bagel, I rarely buy prepared food, frozen or otherwise. The only time I tend to buy it is when I'm not feeling well and feel too tired or sick to cook. The night before I bought the Lawson's Value Line frozen pizza that I only slept about 4 hours, so I was ripe for an easy meal when I hit the local convenience store for milk. I found this pizza, along with a similar one called a "mix pizza" and decided to give it a go.


The pizza cost 100 yen (about a dollar) and is 14 cm (5.5 in.) in size. The entire pizza has 249 calories, which is what puts it into the "snack" range and not a meal. It comes in a plastic shrink-wrapped package inside of it's main plastic package. I guess they feel it needs the extra wrapping for freezer burn protection. The instructions on the package recommend that you cook this in the toaster oven for 5-6 minutes at 1000 watts, but I found that was not long enough for the cheese to melt or the crust to get a bit brown.


After cooking, the pizza smells odd. It has a bit of a tomato smell, but also a strange nondescript fishy smell which I associate with Japanese food. I'm guessing that smell would be the tuna. While the crust is your standard preformed crust, it actually has a little better texture than average. The outsides is slightly crispy and the inside is nicely chewy. The sauce is inoffensive, but not very flavorful. In fact, the main problem is that aside from the crust and the tomato sauce, there's very little flavor at all. The tuna is more of an aftertaste than an actual topping. The cheese is so sparse as to be undetectable as is the corn.


I should note that I had very low expectations of this given that it's very small and cheap, and frozen pizza in Japan is abysmal on the whole. The crust exceeded my expectations, but the toppings were about usual for a Japanese frozen pizza. This makes for a pretty nice "bread" if you manage to cook it just right in the oven. It really isn't much as pizza though. If you'd like a soft, warm pizza-flavored bread to go along with a salad or as a snack at tea time, this wouldn't be a bad choice. I'd say this is fine as long as you're in the mood for that and nothing more.

Sakuranbo KitKat

When my husband brought home this KitKat, I thought, "oh no, another pink KitKat". In the past, there have been several variations on this. There was a triple berry one and strawberry Senga Sengana one. There have also been numerous cherry, berry, and strawberry ones which pre-date my writing this blog. Does Nestlé Japan really need yet another one of these? The answer appears to be, yes. Yes, they do.


The hook for the marketing on this particular KitKat is the ability to download one of three pop songs produced by Jin Nakamura for free if you buy it. The songs are "Sakura Million", "Merry-Go-Round", and "Flower of Life". The names are written in English on the inside of the box the KitKat comes in along with a serial number and a bar code which will allow you to download one MP3 per serial number.

The box says that this is on the KitKat "Through the Break" label, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean anything as it's not so much a label as a distribution network for those who promote themselves via KitKats. When you go to the site, they ask you to enter your gender and age in addition to the serial number, so I'm guessing part of this promotion is gaining demographics on who buys their candy.


With exceptionally low expectations, I opened up the package on this KitKat. It smells of cherry and sweetness. On the first bite, the cherry flavor is neither too strong nor too weak and the bar isn't as sweet or cloying as some white chocolate-based KitKats. There's a nice, tart aftertaste that reminds me of sour cherries. Unfortunately, as you eat more, the sweetness tends to build up and it approaches throat burning levels after the first finger. As seems to often be the case with KitKats, this has a pretty soft exterior at room temperature and will melt in your hand if you hold it for long. You can always tell by my pictures when a KitKat is on the soft side because it does not break cleanly when snapped in half. The wafers are nice crispy and fresh and make for a nice textural contrast with the softer coating.

If you're a fan of Japanese pop, this is probably a pretty good deal. You pay about 130 yen (about $1.30) and get the candy bar and an MP3. I downloaded "Sakura" and found it about usual for Japanese pop. It's cheaply produced bouncy pop music with a lot of synthesizer music. It has elements of ripped off rap rhythms inserted into it, random English words here and there, and pretty boy crooning. It's perfect music as a background in a commercial, unsurprisingly. It's just not my sort of thing, but it may appeal to some people. Since the download page is so simple, you could probably manage to download the songs even if you know very little Japanese. Just enter your serial number in the first box, click a radio button (for gender, but it doesn't matter which you choose), and enter your age in the third box then press any button that says "ダウンロード" (download) and you'll get there.

As for the candy bar itself, I was really on the fence with this between a "happy sumo" (might buy again) and "indifferent sumo" (will finish, but not buy again) rating. If I was in the right mood, or found this for a pretty cheap price, it's not out of the question that I'd buy it again. Mainly, I went for the more favorable rating because my husband really liked it and he's not even a fan of cherry so I figure it deserves a little boost.

Variety Friday: Leftovers

One of my fellow Japan bloggers once remarked that her husband would not eat leftovers, so cooking was difficult as it required her to cook a fresh meal every night. In a pinch, he would eat leftovers if they were rolled into a new dish. My husband happily will eat the same meal two nights in a row, sometimes three, if I make a large quantity of something he especially enjoys. One of my friends has been known to make enough of the same dish for an entire week. I can't imagine eating tuna casserole for a week, but he'd prefer this to having to cook every night.

Americans in general don't love leftovers, but they tend to prefer them to the effort of daily cooking. Because of this, I thought my fellow blogger's husband sounded very spoiled in his refusal to eat leftovers, but I've come to learn since then that this isn't specific to her case. Most Japanese people do not favor leftovers.

I've asked quite a few people about this and their resistance to leftovers is multi-faceted. One reason is that they don't like to eat the same food two nights in a row. The emphasis on variety in meals is much higher in Japan than it is in the West. While we typically have three parts to every meal (protein, starch, vegetable), they often have five or more. Another reason is that freshness and food safety concerns are much greater in Japan. Japanese housewives often shop daily for the food they prepare for their family's evening meals. When there are leftovers, they tend to get folded into the next day's lunch rather than served as the next day's dinner.

Finally, I think the size of Japanese homes and appliances have a pretty big impact on a culture that hasn't embraced cooking for leftovers. In America, we often choose to cook more than we need, sometimes far more, in order to put some aside in the freezer for future quick meals. You can't really do that in Japan because freezer space is smaller as are most pantries.

I think that the Japanese way of handling food is actually very good. In particular, I think that the variety and freshness aspects are conducive to good health. On the other hand, it is a very labor intensive way of life. I can't imagine working full-time and doing the sort of work that Japanese women put into meal preparation. The acceptance of leftovers is, in part, an acceptance of a culture which says that women don't have the time to go shopping daily or to put efforts into what we might consider elaborate meals.