Category: food

I love sweets. Always did. My favourite is chocolate of course, milk chocolate to be precise. My approach is more gourmand than gourmet, but being a woman I can at least point to scientific studies indicating I need it for both my health and my happiness…

Anyway, it seems that Asian people have a different approach to sweets. First of all, the idea of dessert is all but unknown. If any is offered, it is mostly assorted fruit, or you can pick up some candy when paying. Second, chocolate does not appear to be very popular here. Yes, there are a number of Japanese brands, but I haven’t seen anything beyond dark-milk-white unless imported. There are chocolate cookies, chocolate covered nuts and the like, but it appears that the Japanese are more fond of salty snacks. To be fair, eating chocolate in summer is a rather sticky experience, and I am not a big fan of eating it straight out of the fridge, although I will in times of great need. Nowadays there are many bakeries selling bread and cakes, but very often they are of a rather spongy quality which makes them all taste the same after a while.

Of course, there are traditional Japanese sweets, and many a festive occasion is celebrated by making special sweets that are to be eaten only then. For example, New Year’s Day requires eating a rather special type of sticky mochi.

Mochi are little balls of sticky rice dough, mixed with a tremendous amount of sugar and often coated in some as well. They are soft to the touch, have a somewhat chewy consistency and come essentially in three flavours: plain (white), cherry (pink), and green tea (green), where the latter is the most widely available, and I think tastes the best. From this mochi dough, other sweets are derived, and I have recently been given those daifuku, perfectly packed in a beautiful presentation box: They were maybe four centimetres in diameter and consisted of some mochi dough a few millimeters thick on the outside. They were filled with anko, red bean paste, which is very sweet – when enough sugar is added. To be honest, I don’t like the taste very much, but sometimes, when the paste is the smooth one, with the husks of the beans removed, I find it tolerable enough. The ones shown here were comparatively hard on the outside, very different from the unfilled mochi, but the reason could be that I ate them close to the expiration date and all the water that makes the mochi so soft may have been gone already. I had them for breakfast, and it always surprises me how long you are satisfied after only one or two of them.

If you have the opportunity to try daifuku, do so – but be warned of the red bean paste, it’s not to everybody’s liking…

Alcohol is a very important ingredient of Japanese society. Not only does it provide the glue that holds groups of employees together in a tight embrace after working hours, its overuse is also a welcome excuse to loosen the shackles of propriety towards your superiors and society rules in general. you are expected to be part of the group and drink together, but whatever misdemeanour happens once you’ve had enough will stay inside the group and is never mentioned the next morning. Drinking is socially accepted, even expected, and “nomi-hodai” – all you can drink – is often used as incentive to lure customers. (Note here that usually a visit to a bar or even restaurant is time bombed; you are expected to leaver say, 2 hours after you entered the establishment.)

Anyway, obviously I have limited experience with such matters – not because I’m a teetotaller, but because I have never worked in Japan and experienced enough of such events t form my own expertise. However, since coming here last month I have done some research of my own regarding alcoholic drinks and I have come across something that is called “Horoyoi Chu-Hi”, probably meaning something like “Tipsy Juice”. Essentially it is sweet lemonade with alcohol, only a tiny bit really, often at most 5 % vol. I have seen some with 8 % vol., but they are already called “strong”. It is very sweet, comes in gaudy tastes and colors and can be found right next to the beer cans in the fridge of every supermarket or convenience store. Those drinks are a relatively recent invention, apparently geared towards women who neither drink beer or sake and are generally believed to prefer sweet drinks.

I have tried quite a variety so far, and I have to say: I like it! The picture shows a few different tastes (top to bottom: lychee and grape, lemon ice-tea, pineapple, apple, peach, and lime), and the one in poison-red is sour grapes. This is the perfect stuff to drink after a long sweaty day running through temples and shrines, and even though the alcohol content is minimal and can hardly be tasted, there are non-alcoholic versions as well. No matter whether with or without, as long as you don’t forget the ice both types are seriously oishii (tasty)!

I love Japanese food. Ever since I came here I have indulged in a variety of take-home bento menues. Of course, I can’t cook any of that myself, there are much better chefs out there than me. My tandem partner Tomoko has told me that traditionally, Japanese people should eat 30 different foods every day – and once you see how many ingredients and preparation steps even the most basic Japanese dishes require, you’ll certainly believe that.

Anyway, one of the few things I can cook myself – mainly because it does not require any cooking 😉 – is this basic starter, which I first had when I stayed with a friend’s family in Nagoya two years ago.

Avocado with soy sauce
All you need is a ripe avocado (meaning the peel must be black or brown already) and some soy sauce of the type that is usually served with sushi. Cut the avocado in half, remove the pit, fill the soy sauce in the holes. Optionally you can add some wasabi here for that extra spicy touch. Use a spoon to eat the avocado right out of the peel.

As I said, usually half an avocado prepared like this is considered a starter and the main dish with rice and fish is to follow. However, I often eat a whole avocado together with some very dark rye bread and make it a full dinner this way. It’s done in less than five minutes (certainly a plus after a long day in the office) and I like it very much. The only important thing is to make sure that the avocado is really ripe. Otherwise just spooning it out of the peel is not possible (and will result in many hard to clean soy-sauce stains) and cutting it into pieces and eating it with the soy sauce poured over it is not quite the same thing – believe me, I have tried…