Weird foods part one

I've just returned from cute overload at Harajuku (photos uploading slowly onto flickr), and now it's time for a long overdue weird foods post. I've been working very hard to try weird foods, so by the time I leave Japan I should have collected quite a few.

The first weird food isn't so weird for me, as I've been consuming it with great pleasure for several years now. It has a tendency to be polarizing, though: you either love it, or you'd rather eat snot. Actually, some people find it to resemble snot.

Natto are fermented soybeans. Personally, I find the actual taste of the beans to be mild (if a bit bitter) compared to the strong fermented smell that permeates the room the moment you open the package, and of course, there's their famously off-putting texture. Before eating natto, it is best to stir the beans vigorously so as to activate all the good-for-you enzymes. Stirring natto also has the annoying side effect of producing a thick goop which I have to admit does resemble snot. I like to eat natto for breakfast when stirred into rice along with a raw quail egg and things like seaweed, sesame seeds, and mustard for seasoning. When stirred into rice, the snotty texture disappears and is replaced by a thin, stringy, spider web-like texture which stretches and persistently clings to inconvenient places like your nose, your hair, etc. It's best when leaving the table to give yourself a good once over to be sure to catch any rogue natto strings.

Too weird for you? Let's try something a little more friendly. Like peanut butter. You can't go wrong with peanut butter...right?

American peanut butter and Japanese peanut spreads are not the

same thing. There are a number of variations of spreadable peanut confections to be found in your local Japanese convenience store, and all of them would sorely disappoint a peanut butter connoisseur. Fortunately for me, I happen to be not very fond of American peanut butter, probably from having overdosed on it during the time that I didn't eat meat. Wanting it for a miso/peanut sauce I was making to go on udon, I bought what I assumed was peanut butter, but what was in fact the dreaded "peanut cream". I ended up being so delighted with the taste that I ate it with a spoon. What is peanut cream and what does it taste like? Confection is a good word to describe it. The first ingredient is malt syrup, the second ingredient is sugar, and then (and only then) do you get to the peanut butter. Try to imagine the love child between caramel and a tiny, insecure peanut and you'll have peanut cream. More candy that nutrition, but if you aren't expecting peanut butter (don't be fooled by the peanuts on the container), peanut cream is damn tasty.

Speaking of not being fooled by the carton.

Kurozu. What is it? Well, I bought it believing it to be apple juice (seemed like a pretty safe assumption at the time). There were apples all over the carton, the only kana I could read was "apple taste", and the carton was found in the refrigerator aisle, next to Kagome, which I knew to be fruit juice. So, one day when what I needed before my class only five minutes away was an apple juice pick-me-up, I poured myself a glass and...

OMG WTF this isn't apple juice.

Kurozu is black rice vinegar. Black rice is a sweet, glutinous rice (like the stuff they make mochi out of), which could begin to explain how vinegar miraculously smells and tastes like apples. Not to say that it could ever fool anyone. But having gotten over the fact that it's not apple juice, I decided to make friends with it by pouring it over avocados as I do with other vinegars, like balsamic. It was at this point in the saga that a Japanese friend of mine informed me that I was still going about this Kurozu thing all wrong. There was a reason it was shelved next to the fruit juice, and that is that Kurozu is a vinegar meant for drinking.

It turns out that some seventy percent of the population here drinks vinegar regularly. Every

day regularly. Supposedly it's amazingly good for you. I have attempted to consume it in this manner, and I can inform you that it's not at all as bad as it sounds. It tastes good, it's refreshing, and I can see it becoming addicting. That being said, I think I'll stick to the tea, myself.

Another food I eat for breakfast that most people would find odd.

Onsen eggs. Onsen are natural hot springs that can be found here in Japan. Onsen eggs.. are eggs that have been given the opportunity to enjoy these hot springs. Instead of being subjected to the harsh reality of the frying pan, they've been gently steamed in the relaxing onsen. They are then sold cheaply (but not as cheaply as 99 yen kunsei tamago) at convenience stores, for you to do with as you please. They're still very squishy, not at all hard boiled, so I like to spread them on toast. It's kind of like egg butter (yuuum).

So, that was a weird description.

Bacon and egg mayonnaise (made by kewpie mayonnaise company) is even weirder. It's not just that this mayonnaise is flavored to taste like bacon and eggs. If I'm reading the ingredients list correctly. it actually contains both bacon and eggs. Squirt it on toast and pop it in the microwave, and the mayonnaise will poof out ever so slightly and become (in the company's words, not mine) delicious. Is it actually delicious? I was actually brave enough to buy and eat this stuff, but I'm still not entirely sure. It's good enough that I won't throw the rest of the bottle out of the window in horror. Maybe by the time I finish the bottle, I'll be able to let you know how I feel about bacon and egg mayonnaise. As well as whether or not I think bacon and egg mayonnaise should exist. But I guess if bacon and egg isn't delicious enough, I can always try tuna mayonnaise...or corn mayonnaise. Yes, corn.

I think that should conclude the weirdness for today. I need more tea.

Ganbarimasu!

Classes began at Tsuda today. There was a bit of confusion among the exchange students yesterday because several of us (myself included, naturally) assumed that we were supposed to register for classes before they started. At Tsuda, this is not the case. So, here I was running around in a hopeless attempt to find my advisor, who of course wasn't on campus, seeing as it was a national holiday. At this point, I was fortunate enough to run into a foreign relations teacher who isn't Japanese and doesn't celebrate the holiday, and he was kind enough to fill me in.

Twice afterwards that day, I received a knock on my dorm room door from fellow exchange students who wanted to know if I was as confused as they were about what exactly we were supposed to be doing. I was thankfully able to pass along to them what the teacher had told me and so we all made it to our first classes alive and on time.

It seems that although classes begin on the 24th, we are given until the 30th before we turn in our registration forms. This gives us a week to try out the classes we intend to take and make sure we like them enough to continue taking them before anything is set in stone. Not a bad system, now that I know what it is.

As for me, I intend to take all of the Japanese language courses that are offered for exchange students, from the easiest to the most difficult. This should give me a chance to review while also providing a challenge. And it will be very much a challenge, because the highest level language course is a bit above me, I think. The goal of this course is to read Japanese newspapers, hold class discussions (in Japanese) about what we've read, as well as to write full reports in Japanese. The teacher said it would be alright to write at our current level and work upwards, so until she says to me, "Jamie, your Japanese is really awful. I don't want to see you in this classroom again." I'm going to try to continue even if it's difficult.

There are two other courses I intend to take other than Japanese language courses (it is required that foreign exchange students take at least 9 courses, including 8 hours of Japanese language study). The first is a seminar on Japanese studies taught in English, which I havn't gone to yet but which seems to be a general overview of Japanese culture. The second is a bilingual Japanese studies (society) course which I went to today. The aim of this course is to foster discussion between exchange students and Japanese students about Japanese society and the ways in which Japanese society is seen abroad (stereotypes). Today one of the things we did was to watch the trailers for "The Last Samurai" and "Memoirs of a Geisha", after which in groups we wrote adjectives we would use to best describe the protagonists of the movies (who abroad represent the normative for Japanese men and Japanese women). The Japanese students (all women, seeing as this is a women's college) were asked if the adjectives describing Sayuri could be used to describe them. The answer was obviously "no".

In fact, when the movie poster for "Memoirs of a Geisha" was shown of the projector, the girl next to me responded with a startled "あー怖いよね！”（Ah! How Scary!).

Quite unrelated to classes at all, I went to the 99 yen store yesterday and bought something very interesting (as seen in the picture to the left). They are Kunsei Tamago, or smoked eggs. I didn't know the word 'kunsei' when I bought them, so in the store I was very intrigued as to what they were. They were not in the fridge with the raw eggs, and the shells were a dark brown and oddly sticky in appearance. From what I could gather of the ingredients, there were three: eggs, salt, and something I didn't know the kanji for. I bought them because I doubted very much that the third ingredient was arsenic, and even if I didn't like them, they were really only 99 yen (99 cents). Having taken them home and already consumed both of them, I have found that they are addictively tasty, that the mysterious ingredient is seaweed, and also that the eggs are local and organic. All of this for 99 cents. America....why can't you do this too?

Bu Bu Bu!

On the street today I passed a little girl, about two or three years old. She caught sight of my purse (on which is printed pictures of Blythe dolls), pointed at it, and screamed, "BU BU BU BU BU BU!" And then her mother's bike, with her in the passenger seat, shot out of my range of hearing. "Bu", I guess, is short for burai-su, the Japanese pronunciation of Blythe. That, or she was trying to insult my fashion sense by saying "busu", which means ugly. Either way, she was seriously adorable.

I also caught a juro-gumo eating a dragonfly. Creepy sad beautiful.

宇宙、そこは最後のフロンテイア。

So, forget Lipton and the Lipton rant (for now) because I'm in tea land (like Disneyland except the only ride is the tea cup ride and tea cups are full of tea). Here, there's tea in the vending machines, tea in the convenience stores, drink bars aka TEA BUFFETS in the restaurants..like I said. Tea land.

I really knew I had a ticket for tea land when the airline served hot green tea in little white tea cups. And that tea was better than the tea served in many Japanese restaurants in the states.

However, there is only one drawback to delicious tea served on a plane, and I had misfortunately stated a preference for a window seat when buying a ticket. I'm sure you can imagine my predicament. This was made worse by the fact that the two seats next to me were filled with two lumps of sleeping Japanese business men, both of whom had annoyingly long legs. Next time, of course, I will be wiser and state a preference for the aisle, but really, who could have expected delicious hot airline tea?

Aside from this single setback, it was a very nice flight. Sipping my tea, I watched the new Star Trek movie dubbed in Japanese. And then I watched it four times more, so as to be able to quote Spock in Japanese.

The plane arrived at Narita airport, where I was welcomed by my two "big sisters", Misaki and Moeka. Since then, Misa and Moeka have showed me around and done their best to make sure I don't make too much of a dummy of myself in public.

Classes don't begin until the 24th, thanks to a fortuitous string of national holidays that fall between then and orientation (which ended on the 16th). That gives us exchange students a large block of time to get used to our surroundings and to play around. Because of this free time, and my shiny new digital camera, I have many pictures to post! You can see them here at my flickr account.

I should probably apologize for all of the spiders. Um.

I WAS on track and taking pictures of the school like I was supposed to be doing, but then there were these awesome spiders, well, you'll see them. I lovingly (and obsessively) took some fifty or sixty macro shots of them. I only saved the better of them, though, and having already exceeded my flickr bandlimit for this month, I won't be uploading any more for a while.

Sorry if they freak you out, but if they weren't possibly poisonous and undoubtedly bite-y, I would give them a hug.

Oh and one last thing. The subways in Tokyo are completely and utterly clean. There is no garbage, and there are no little mice scurrying about to scare AK. It doesn't even smell. You can practically eat off of the floor.

People wear face masks anyway, though.

Prelude to Lipton Rant

So, I was poking around the internet for ammunition against Lipton for my upcoming rant (I want to have more than my own life-long hatred) when I came across this. 

As often as I rant about Teavana and their seductive but only vaguely tea-like hot fruit juice products, one would think that I am an unbending tea purist. One would think that I want only tea leaves in my cup, but this is actually not the case. I am fully behind tea mixed with fruit juice (which is different from "tea" with chunks of dried fruit thrown in to cover up the fact that there's no tea). I am even a fan of matcha comfort (matcha, sake, milk, whipped cream, and sugar). I just want to be able to taste the tea in there...

NOT the tasteless tea dust they've swept off the floor after the manufacturing process and thrown into the mix with so much other shit that no one can taste anything anyway. But the bottle says "green tea" on the label because it has a certain healthy ring to it, something to do with antioxidants that makes customers buy the product. That's not respectful to the tea.

When I learned of the existence of sparkling green tea, the first thing I thought was: Green tea and sparkling water? That would be delicious! The next thing I thought was: But, Lipton..Ew. How could I hate Lipton so much? Some people might wonder. Let's take a look at the ingredients for Lipton's sparkling green tea, taken from their website.

Ingredients:
CARBONATED WATER, NATURAL FLAVOR, CITRIC ACID, GREEN TEA, SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE (TO PROTECT FLAVOR), ASCORBIC ACID (TO PROTECT FLAVOR), PHOSPHORIC ACID, POTASSIUM SORBATE (PRESERVES FRESHNESS), ASPARTAME, ACESULFAME POTASSIUM, PECTIN, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA (TO PROTECT FLAVOR), CARAMEL COLOR, YELLOW 5, BLUE 1.PHENYLKETONURICS: CONTAINS PHENYLALANINE.

Their slogan may be "Lipton 100% Natural tea", but where IS the tea? There's so little green tea in there that they had to mix yellow and blue food coloring to make it look green.

Sure, I see the words "green tea" in that list, sandwiched between Citric acid and Sodium Hexametaphosphate (to protect flavor) but the appearance of those words alone can not reassure me. What is green tea doing socializing with this crowd? Caramel Color? Aspartame? Green tea, I thought you were a good kid!

Also, can anyone tell me what KIND of green tea this is? It's not like there are just four kinds of tea in the world (white, green, oolong, and black). If that were true, there would be no puerh and I would be (in the words of Lauren love) a very sad panda.

I need more information about the Green tea than Lipton is willing to put on the ingredients list. More information to reassure me that this is not some horrible Lipton FRANKEN-TEA.

That's right. All of Lipton's teas are franken-teas. In a single Lipton tea bag, you can identify (if you dare) the mutilated, sewn together body parts of up to thirty different teas, carefully selected for consistency of flavor and "quality" by tea tasters who hate their lives. So when they say it's "green tea", they mean there are so many kinds of green tea dust in there that they couldn't give you a single name if their lives depended on it.

But let's leave some for the rant.

Sparkling water and green tea was a good idea, just implemented poorly.

I tried to make this myself and experienced super-sparkly tea success. The base tea was umegashima sencha, purposely oversteeped slightly so I would be able to TASTE THE TEA. I then sweetened the steeped sencha with blackberry honey (it's what we had in the house) and poured all of this into Zazz selzer (also what we had in the house). Probably one could achieve better success with Poland spring's sparkling water with lemon, because it's more citrusy and has less of a mineral taste, but the oversteeping compensated for the mineral taste surprisingly well. I liked this because it had all the goodness of green tea and bubbly water at the same time. It was still a bit hot when I drank it, which I liked, but I imagine it would take ice very well.

Alternate title to this post: The best thing Lipton ever did (Almost).

Ten signs that I am overly addicted to delicious TEA.

10. After I've finished drinking the steep, I chew on the tea leaves (or, if it's tisane, tea flowers) to get all the flavor out. 

9. I had a glass of wine the other night. I blew on it to cool it down before realizing what I was doing.

8. I make obscure tea jokes around my non-tea drinking friends and am still somewhat surprised when they don't get it (Guys, I just don't get this poo-ER!).

7. I think corn tea was a brilliant idea, and I often wonder how other non-tea food stuffs would taste when steeped (I don't think I would like burrito tea very much).

6. I have formulated a recipe for blood tea. Vampires need tea too.

5. I can rant for at least an hour on why lipton and teavana are tea blasphemy (Try me).

4. The phrase "I pre-game like you party" can be used to refer to my tea drinking habits.

3. When breaking apart a puerh beeng, I am no longer disturbed to discover a feather...or a hair. I hear people find stones sometimes. But you're just going to flash rinse it in boiling water anyway, right? Boiling water has magical sterilization powers.

2.  I have significantly decreased heat sensitivity in my fingertips from gaiwaning.  I could probably hold onto a stove for about a minute before feeling anything.

1. No blood runs through my veins. Only tea.

Departure preparations

I will depart on Sept. 13th to arrive on the 14th, and to be oriented and such like on the 15th. I am bringing only one small tuocha of puerh with me, because I can't imagine I will have difficulties finding tea in Japan. I'm skeptical of how easy it would be to find puerh outside of China or Chinatown, though, so the pu comes. 

The difficulty now is deciding which toys are going with me and which aren't. I want to bring all of my uglydoll oxes (They're squishy, right? I can't go a year without OX!), Babette (Momolita Blythe), and Kyoko (Volks Megu). We'll see what happens closer to leaving time, though.