Meiji Kaki No Tane Almond Crunch

Back home, people seem intent upon sullying the awesome power of chocolate by mixing in all sorts of weirdness with it including chili powder and bacon. As a former fan (in my misspent youth) of hot, salty French fries dipped in cool creamy chocolate milk shakes, I can conceptualize the appeal of mixing savory or spicy elements with chocolate. However, I really don't find the idea of chili in chocolate appealing.

Despite that, I did finally give in and buy these Meiji chocolate-covered almonds. The outside chocolate coating is mixed with crushed spicy rice crackers (kaki no tane). Since chili is sometimes mixed with chocolate, the general concept behind these (heat with sweetness) isn't entirely alien, but still a little off the beaten path.

When I opened the foil packet, I was surprised at how unappetizing the chocolates looked. Meiji makes incredibly good and polished-looking chocolate-covered nuts. They're one of my favorite snacks in Japan and really help you get through a long day at the office when you need an energy boost. These look like something your dog might leave behind after a bout with a corn cob.

The almonds are encased in a thin wafer and then chocolate mixed with crushed spicy rice crackers. If you hold the chocolate on your tongue, you taste a bit of the salty rice flavor of the kaki no tane, but if you just bite into it, you mainly get the almond flavor mixed with chocolate and something odd. If you didn't know what it was, you'd probably be hard-pressed to guess. On the bright side, the almond is crunchy and fried and has a strong flavor. On the not so bright side, the kaki no tane really isn't doing much for this except adding texture and diluting the potency of the usually excellent chocolate and adding a not unpleasant but not really tasty weirdness of the experience.

I've seen these on sale everywhere for quite some time. The retail price is close to 200 yen ($2.46) but I waited for a discounted price (148 yen/$1.82). I don't think they are selling particularly well based on the sale patterns and the volume that remains in shops. This could be because they simply aren't in any way better than the plain chocolate-covered almonds or that they are unappetizing in appearance and Japanese folks are known for valuing how food looks. Either way, though these are far from bad and I'll slowly finish the box, I wouldn't buy them again.

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You know it's warming up when the "soft cream" trucks start rolling along the streets. This one was parked near Ueno park during the latter part of the cherry blossom viewing season. More Japanese people like soft serve ice cream than the real deal (hand scooped), and it's cheaper and easier to find. To be fair, I finally tried some "soft cream" in Japan for the first time and it was pretty good. The flavors on offer here are "sakura" (cherry blossom), green tea, sweet potato, melon, chocolate and vanilla mix, vanilla and mango. I wish I had bought some, but I wasn't really in the mood at the time. I'm thinking the sweet potato might have been pretty nifty.

Kanmi Oribean Custard Purin Daifuku

One of my former classmates, in response to a comment I made on FaceBook, offered to send me some wicked sugary delights in the form of a Cadbury Creme egg. Yes, my fat cells are already expanding in anticipation and my pancreas is nervous. I haven't had one of those sugar bombs for at least 15 years and I wonder if my tastes may have changed such that its poisonous center will be an assault to my taste buds after all these years. Mind you, I'm not exactly dreading the challenge.

As a way of returning the favor, I offered to send him some Japanese snacks. His response was that he's worked with Japanese companies a lot and really prefer not to be subjected to more than he's already experienced. I had to smile at this response. That used to be me some 20-odd years ago, trolling the shops for things which looked like things back home rather than adventurously sampling the weirdness of all gustatory things Japanese.

Now, even the "weird" seems mundane and appealing to me. Take these small balls of mochi (pounded rice cake) encasing a bizarre-looking center of caramel whipped cream and goo. Finding these was a delight for me, not a moment to dread. I've come to really love daifuku and all the more when it's in a flavor my husband will also enjoy.

Each little blob of soft slightly chewy mochi is slightly bigger than the diameter of a 100-yen coin or quarter. The cutaway picture on the bag shows this attractive little bit of filling pooching out, but the real thing is far less pretty. Frankly, it looks like an infected wound, but don't let the way it appears inside color your judgment. This is delicious. The texture is a great combination of chewy with soft creaminess. This is well-coupled with the combination of the bland pounded rice flavor and sweet caramel center. I thought the center was rather potent, like the caramel sauce on top of flan, but my husband said he would have liked it even stronger.

This was very tasty. It wasn't as good as a fresh daifuku or even some of the larger ones I've bought as souvenirs, but it's definitely more accessible and cheaper. I found this at Seiyu supermarket for 168 yen ($2.07). There are about 8 or 10 individually wrapped pieces (at 43 calories each) in the bag so it's good value. Unless you're really sensitive about fake caramel flavor, I'd suggest giving these a try. I really enjoyed them.

Toy Story Kaputchyo Chocolate Caramel Corn Snack

Cereal isn't very popular in Japan as a breakfast food or snack. My husband and I once had a Japanese guest in America who we offered a plethora of cereal options to for breakfast, and he turned up his nose at all of them. He said that it wasn't enough food for him and that he needed eggs, soup, and rice for breakfast. Of course, this was a young, adult male, and he wasn't prepared to actually cook any of that for himself. He expected that it'd just magically appear in front of him, much as it did when he was at home and his mother just served up a fortifying meal for him.

However, cereal is popular in Japan as part of snacks, however. Mugi-choco, which resembles chocolate-covered puffed wheat cereal is available in a variety of sizes, price ranges, and quality variations. There is also the rice puff and corn puff snacks with a sugary coating that are especially popular during the doll's festival. Though they wouldn't recognize this fact, Japanese people would be very comfortable eating dry, sweet cereal out of the box like some Americans do if they realized that it is little different than what they're already doing.

This Toy Story chocolate-covered, caramel corn snack is little more than a corn puff cereal. In fact, with it's relatively light sweetness and somewhat strong caramel flavor, it'd probably be right at home in a bowl in front of a hyperactive child enjoying Saturday morning cartoons. That's not to say I'm encouraging anyone to buy it and douse it in milk. I'm guessing it hasn't been engineered not to go soggy in milk like real cereal is. The whole cup has 163 calories.

I got this as part of my New Year's fukubukuro, but this is part of Lotte's line of "kaputchyo" line which uses popular cartoon characters to market these types of sweets to children. They're all sold in 30-some gram (about 1 oz.) plastic cups with colorful designs and a "toy prize" (a sticker) inside. That brings the kid's cereal analogy closer to full circle. There are also chocolate and strawberry versions with Doraemon and Rilakkuma on their labels respectively.

If you're the type of person who likes to eat sugar cereal dry out of the box, this might float your boat, but I wasn't exactly doing cartwheels. I'm not a fan of cereal in particular anymore. This tasted decent enough, but it is a kid's snack and therefore lacking in depth of taste. It's sweet, rather strongly caramel with a hint of cheap chocolate, but that makes it inoffensive, not good.

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.