Burger King Garlic Meat Beast and Garlic Double Cheese (product information)

"Garlic Meat Beast" sounds like a good name for a lot of things. It would be a great name for a rock band. It certainly would make a nice euphemism for a part of the male anatomy, especially if its owner is an aficionado of garlic. Incidentally, the Japanese does not say "beast", but says "garlic meat monster". That would be an even better name for a rock band.

These burgers became available on July 26, these became available, though for some reason they are not being sold at the Burger King near where I used to live (Shin-Koenji). I guess that meat monsters simply are not welcome there.

The word "stamina" in Japan is a code word for "high in calories and fat" and it is applied to the meat monster pictured at the top. As you can see, it has three kinds of meat as well as garlic chips, though one is a grilled piece of chicken so that shouldn't lend too much of a load to the calorie total. Unfortunately, I could not get stats on this as it was't included in the nutrition information on Burger King's site. I'd wager, however, that it'd be best to skip dinner if you have the beast for lunch.

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.

Nippon Ham Chilled Bakery Meat Pie

Since I started working part-time, my eating schedule has been forcibly changed two days a week. Usually, I have the luxury of eating dinner at 7:00 or 8:00 pm, but on the two days on which I work, I get home at 10:30 or so after eating lunch around 5:00. I don't want to eat a lot late at night, so I've been pursuing some different options. As a result, my readers will be "enjoying" some different food reviews than before. In fact, chances are that there will be more convenience foods which resemble "real food". Honestly, this is all the better for the continued life of this blog as I really am starting to see fewer and fewer attractive options in the snack aisles. That's not to say there aren't things I haven't sampled, but that variations on a theme get pretty boring after awhile.

This is more pie than "meat", but that's okay with me. I'm not a great fan of meat anyway and chose this for a light meal prospect. The pie is flaky and slightly buttery. It has a light crispiness which is very pleasing and a tender interior. The meat filling is more of a "paste" which has a touch of tomato paste flavor, but nothing really too strong. It reminds me of the sloppy joe mix we used to get in elementary school.

This is actually pretty good as long as you have exceptionally low expectations of the meat filling and reasonable hopes for a nice flaky pie. I enjoyed this quite a lot, much as I enjoyed its companion piece, the cheese pie. I'd pick up either as a filling snack or breakfast if the spirit moved me. Both have better than average bakery qualities for something you pick up in the refrigerator case at Seiyu. At 298 yen ($3.72) for 4 pies, they're cheaper than the local bakery's offerings as well. I kept this around in the fridge for about a week with no degradation in quality, which was a bonus. If you get home late, like a more filling snack, or just want a little breakfast variety, I'd recommend giving this a try.