Around Japan in 47 curries: Kanagawa navy curry

This is Part 1 of a 47-part series of weekly blog posts looking at curries from each of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

Kanagawa Prefecture (map by Lincun for Wikimedia Commons)

Yokosuka, in Kanagawa Prefecture, is the perfect spot for a naval base. It occupies most of the Miura Peninsula, which forms a natural breakwater protecting the mouth of Tokyo Bay. The establishment of an Imperial Japanese Navy base there in the late 19th century gave Yokosuka an unexpected connection to the nation’s culinary history.

In its early days, the navy was plagued by the painful and often fatal disease beriberi. Food historian Katarzyna J. Cwiertka writes in her excellent book “Modern Japanese Cuisine” that 12 percent of all Japanese sailors were found to be suffering from the condition in 1883. A high-ranking navy doctor named Kanehiro Takagi was aware that beriberi was rare in Western navies, whose sailors more often ate meat. He theorized that a high-protein diet might improve sailors’ health. Efforts were begun to Westernize navy meals by including more meat, and curry was one of the dishes used for that purpose. It became a staple of Japanese navy cooking.

Yokosuka shipyard underconstruction ca. 1870 (public domain photo via Wikimedia commons)

Today, we know that beriberi is caused by a lack of vitamin B, which is associated with the heavy use of nutrient-poor white rice. But Takagi’s theory was a good one for its time, Cwiertka writes, because the concept of vitamins was not scientifically understood until the 1920s.

Meanwhile, curry’s prominence in military cooking in an era of large-scale conscription, and the influence of military cuisine on other forms of institutional food – most notably school lunches – helped make curry a de facto national dish.

The varieties of curry now available in Japan are beyond counting. For a series of weekly blog posts beginning today, I plan to eat one type of curry from each of Japan’s 47 prefectures. From within each prefecture, I will have many to choose from. (I’m open to recommendations.)

Not surprisingly, a number of curries are marketed with naval themes. One of these is Yokosuka Navy Curry, which I have chosen to represent Kanagawa Prefecture in my “Around Japan in 47 Curries” project. According to the label, this particular curry is based on the dish served at the city’s popular Wood Island restaurant. I purchased a single-serving package of it for 580 yen at Japan Food Market, a temporary-looking shop in the Koshigaya Laketown Mall in Saitama Prefecture.

Unfortunately, I found it rather bland. The chunks of beef it included seemed to be mostly fat. As a snooty 21st-century gourmet, I was not too impressed. But if I were a malnourished 19th-century draftee, I’m sure I would have gobbled it with gusto.

And with 46 curries to go, I’m sure there are some good ones out there.

Self-Portrait with Akebia Fruit

When I was in Kyoto for the Japan Writers Conference last month, a cephalopod surprise was not the only unusual treat I picked up in the city’s famous Nishiki Market. I also bought an akebia fruit.

These fruits grow on wild vines in Japanese forests, and my trip to Kyoto in November was the first time I had ever seen them. It struck me as quite a coincidence because October was first time I ever heard of them, even after living in Japan for many years. Chalk it up to the darake effect.

The English word “akebia” – which is just a Latinized version of the Japanese word “akebi” – became part of my vocabulary when I read about the fruit in Kevin Short’s nature column. It probably would have been a fleeting part of my vocabulary if I had not encountered the real thing so soon after.

The fruit is a fleshy pod that splits itself open when ripe, revealing a mass of glistening, gelatinous pulp inside. You can eat it with a spoon, or just dive in face-first. I chose a spoon.

According to Kevin Short, the “sweet pulp” is “downright delicious.” To my disappointment, the akebia I ate was almost completely flavorless. It was like eating paper.

The texture, however, was a little more interesting. The pulp was firm enough to hold its shape when I spread the rind open to get at it, and it continued to hold together as I dug in with my spoon. Once it was in my mouth, though, it felt softer than custard pudding – aside from the 30 or 40 hard black seeds in each bite. It turns out that, below the surface, there were more seeds than there was pulp. Fortunately, the pulp quickly turned into a near-liquid, and I was able to separate it from the seeds simply by straining it through my teeth. I spat the seeds out.

It was a lot of effort to obtain a small volume of edible matter from a fairly good-sized fruit. Considering that I had paid 500 yen for it, the cost-benefit ratio was rather unfavorable.

After the fact, I did some Internet research on akebia. According to Wikipedia, “Sweet but rather ‘insipid’ taste is probably an apt description.” I’d put more emphasis on the second of the two adjectives they used.

On the other hand, the gardening website Paghat.com had this to say: “When the pod first cracks open, it reveals what resembles a sack of insect or amphibian eggs. The sticky pulp is at that time at its sweetest, & very pleasant on the pallate [sic], reminiscent of a mild melon-flavored or guava-flavored tapioca.” It seems that Short and Paghat had better luck with their akebia than I had with mine. Even so, I’m not tempted to spend 500 yen for another shot at it.

However, Short’s column also contained this intriguing statement: “In most parts of Japan, the thick rinds are simply discarded, but in some parts of the Tohoku region, it is these rinds that are greatly prized. Here the pulp is discarded, as the rinds are packed with miso-flavored ground meat and various vegetables and fried to make sumptuous snacks that are eaten during the winter months.”

Hmm. If I ever see that on a menu, I may try akebia again after all.

Hybrid technology applied to ice cream

Toyota’s Prius automobile is world-famous for its efficient combination of a gasoline engine and an electric motor.

I recently learned that the efficiency of an ice cream bar can be improved through a similar hybrid technique.

A major advantage of an ice cream bar is that it can be coated in sweet substances such as chocolate. But you can’t pick up a chocolate-coated ice cream bar with your fingers. Up until now, the state-of-the art solution to this problem was to use a wooden stick as a handle.

However, ice cream bars have to be individually wrapped for shipment and sale. Approximately one-third of the space inside the wrapper goes to waste. It contains nothing but stick and air.

A product from Japan’s Lotte confectionery company solves this problem by combining an ice cream bar with a treat that you can handle with your fingers – namely, an ice cream sandwich.

Some readers commenting on this post have alerted me to the fact that this isn’t necessarily a Japanese invention. Scroll down to read what they have to say about products already using the same concept elsewhere in the world.

Anyway, the construction of  this frozen treat allows you to nibble your way down a vanilla ice cream bar coated in bitter chocolate that is studded with crunchy cookie crumbs – and when you get to the end, you’re left holding not a stick, but a petite ice cream sandwich between two little chocolate cookies.

Genius!

Lotte sells this under its Ghana brand, using the slogan “ikko de nido oishii” (delicious two ways in one piece). I recently purchased a box of four for 298 yen at a grocery store. They are sold individually at convenience stores for a somewhat higher price.

As ice cream novelties go, this is probably a fairly green one. No trees are killed to make sticks, there’s less post-consumer waste, and their carbon footprint is likely reduced by the fact that they pack (and therefore ship) more efficiently.

But here’s a note of caution to greedy ice-cream lovers: This treat is narrower than a conventional ice cream bar, which means that you aren’t getting more ice cream. Instead, you’re getting the same amount of ice cream delivered in a technologically sleek way.

In other words, ice cream engineers were not the only ones involved in developing this product. A supporting role was played by ice cream accountants.

The plot thickens: A third lover appears

In a previous post (here), I wrote about a trademark dispute between the makers of “White Lover” cookies and “Funny Lover” cookies. Now there’s a “Black Lover” on the scene:

White Lovers (Shiroi Koibito) are cookies made by Hokkaido-based Ishiya Co. Funny Lovers (Omoshiroi Koibito) are cookies made by Osaka-based Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. And Black Lovers (Kuroi Koibito) are little bars of chocolate-covered corn made by Hokkaido-based Sapporo Gourmet Foods.

The design on the Black Lover box features the silhouettes of a man and a woman beneath and old-fashioned streetlamp with a block of text hovering above them. I hoped the text would describe some classic old love story, but here’s how I’d translate what it really says: “Grains of love. These are the jewels of a vast land — sweet and crispy snacks of corn and Asahikawa-grown black beans coated in chocolate to fascinate lovers.”

I brought my Black Lovers to the office, ate one, and shared the rest with coworkers — one of whom remarked on their similarity to a “Corn Chocolate“ product made by another Hokkaido-based confectioner called Hori. So, in the name of research, I dropped by the Hokkaido antenna shop in Yurakucho, Tokyo, to buy some of those:

They certainly look similar. But to my palate, Corn Chocolate is tastier Black Lovers. The Hori product has a more disctinct corn taste — especially the white chocolate variety, which has a milder-flavored coating.

Considering that Ishiya decided to fight Yoshimoto Kogyou over the Funny Lovers, I wonder what is going on in Hokkaido right now among Ishiya, Hori, and Sapporo Gourmet Foods over the Black Lovers.

Is it sweet love or bitter  hate?

This used to be a grungy little curry shop

Planted in the center of an underground corridor in Ginza subway station, at the bottom of a flight of stairs from the street, and one flight up from the Marunouchi Line train platform, there used to be a grungy little curry shop where the customers sat elbow to elbow on tall stools and hunched over plates of curry teetering on the edge of a very narrow counter that separated them from the nearly-as-narrow kitchen.

I always meant to eat there one day. I never actually got around to doing so, but I loved that little shop nonetheless.

The Japanese curry they served was of an especially odorous type, and the entire west end of the station was often filled with its earthy perfume. I don’t know how old the shop was, but it looked as if it had been around for decades, and whenever I got a whiff of it as I hurried to change trains, I always felt a gratifying connection to history, imagining that I was inhaling the very same aroma that millions of other people from all walks of life had smelled over the decades since back around the middle of the Showa era.

I didn’t even have to step off the train to enjoy such a moment. On at least one occasion, I was riding the Marunouchi Line with my nose in a book when the train paused at Ginza en route to somewhere else. As the doors opened and closed, an invisible cloud of curry vapor flowed into the car. Without even needing to look up, I said to myself, “Ah. Ginza.”

Becoming a person who knew that smell was a minor accomplishment. Inhaling deeply, I could puff myself up and think, “What a seasoned Tokyoite I am! I can find my way around by smell!”

That may have been silly, but it is true that accumulating the experience to recognize the tiny and unique details of a place, especially the odd bits of reliable coziness hidden away in a big concrete city, really does help turn that place into home.

One day, perhaps about two years ago, the grungy little curry shop was dark. The doors were closed. The smell had dissipated. A paper on the wall announced that the shop had reached the end of the line, and thanked its customers.

I had never been one of them.

Shortly thereafter, a floor-to-ceiling plywood barrier went up all the way around the shop, and also around a little sushi place that had been its close-quarters neighbor. I passed through Ginza Station countless times after that, but I never saw or smelled the grungy little curry shop again.

Then, yesterday afternoon I did a double take at the sight – one flight of stairs down from the street, and one up from the Marunouchi Line platform – of a brand-new, brightly lit, boutiquey gift and clothing store right in the spot where the curry shop had once stood. (It’s in the photo at the top of this entry.)

It’s part of the latest Echika underground shopping mall, following the ones that already exist in Ikebukuro and Omotesando subway stations. Not only is there a boutique where the curry shop used to be, but there are other new stores where nothing used to be, stretching up and down a long underground corridor. It’s all very shiny and new and brand-name, and nothing like the grungy little curry shop.

There are a couple of places that serve food in the new mall, including a nice-looking gourmet deli I’m sure I’ll try before long, and an outlet of the Auntie Annie’s soft pretzel chain where I already bought a snack on the way home last night.

But I wish I had eaten some of that aromatic curry.

Ginza lunch: Pizza and pasta at Vomero

I have a new favorite Italian restaurant in Ginza. It’s Vomero.

It opened just last week (April 18), but I’ve already been there twice. My first visit was for a late lunch around 3 p.m. on the first Saturday Vomero was in business. They had a 1,260 yen deal that day that included a plate of antipasti plus one choice from a variety of pizzas and pastas.

While enoying the atmosphere of the place (the nighttime photo at the top of this entry will give you an idea), I savored the antipasti bite by tiny bite: the potato salad, the tomatoes and mozzarella, the slice of mortadella ham, the green salad, the bread, the sliver of quiche, and the slice of chicken loaf whose Italian name (which I immediately forgot) sounded a lot fancier than “chicken loaf.”

It’s a good thing I took my time eating it, because I had a very long wait for my pizza – nearly 30 minutes. Since everything else about Vomero was perfect, I’m willing to attribute the delay their still having been in the “shakedown cruise” phase of operations. They had opened only three days earlier and will presumably improve.

That was the only negative aspect of my Vomero experience, and it does not reflect the otherwise high quality of service I received overall. The waitstaff on my two visits were young, cheerful and attentive. I drink a lot more water than most people, especially during meals, but they saw to it that my glass was never empty. They kept me well-supplied with oshibori towelettes too, including one to wipe off my fingers before touching the bill at the end of my meal. And they were very apologetic that my pizza was taking so long.

But when the pizza arrived…

… it was a thing of beauty. It was covered with big chunks of zucchini, red pepper, yellow pepper, yellow carrot and onion, interspersed with snowy patches of mozzarella. The puffy edges of the crust were lightly and attractively stippled with tiny charred bits, and the interior of the crust was light and chewy. The center of the pizza was awash in juices from the vegetables, so I had to eat the beginning of each slice with a fork. (Pace, Jon Stewart.) It was delicious. And it was much bigger than a pizza for one person normally is in Tokyo. Definitely value for money.

I was so pleased that I went back for a second visit on Monday. I arrived at 2:38, not realizing that their last lunch order on weekdays was 2:30. They were kind enough to let me in anyway, which I mention as another example of their good service – but I wouldn’t advise putting them to the test on this.

Their weekday lunch deal was only 1,000 yen. Reflecting the difference in price, the antipasti plate was a bit smaller, but tea or coffee was also included. This time I went for a pasta dish – chicken ragu with white asparagus – on the theory that it could be prepared quickly.

It came to my table fairly swiftly, and while it wasn’t as startlingly large as the pizza, it was still a good-sized serving for the price. It was slightly larger than the photo above may make it look; those were some very thick chunks of asparagus. The pasta was firm but fully cooked (al dente) and the flavors were about what one might expect from the visible ingredients – not as exciting as the pizza, but pleasant enough.

There are many more pizzas and pastas to choose from. I will definitely go back.

Vomero info
Address: 3-12-8 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061
Phone/Fax: (03) 6278-8984
Website: http://vomero-ginza.com/
N.B.: At least until the autumn of 2012, Vomero will be closed on Sundays.

Japanese curry: Asteroid memorial

What was the first country to land a spacecraft on an asteroid? What was the first country to bring asteroid samples back to Earth? What was the first country to celebrate these achievements with at least four different movies … and a commemorative curry?

The answers are Japan, Japan and of course Japan.

The Japanese space probe Hayabusa was launched in 2003. Its destination, which it reached using cutting-edge ion engines, was the asteroid Itokawa. The asteroid is a peanut-shaped mass of rock and dust about 500 meters long, usually described as being 300 million kilometers from Earth. Just reaching a target of that size at that distance is an amazing feat.

Unfortunately, a lot of things went wrong on the mission. But in most cases, engineers at JAXA (Japan’s space agency) were able to improvise solutions.

The worst problem was that a device meant to collect material from the asteroid malfunctioned. When Hayabusa returned to Earth in 2010, making a fiery landing in Australia, its sample canister appeared to be empty. Microscopic inspection, however, revealed tiny particles of asteroid dust that scientists are continuing to study. Although not the hoped-for treasure trove, it was a historic achievement nonetheless. Itokawa and the moon are the only celestial bodies from which humans have ever managed to bring back any material to Earth.

I recently learned, though a Yomiuri Shimbun article, that the Sunkus convience store chain was selling “Itokawa Curry” for a limited time. A block of rice in the shape of the asteroid was positioned on a plate of curry sauce that represented the darkness of space. Floating in the background were a meatball standing in for Earth and a sliced egg playing the sun. Crowning it all was a bite-sized piece of fried chicken perched on the rice to represent Hayabusa landing on the asteroid. (This is appropriate, given that Hayabusa is named after a bird – albeit a peregrine falcon, not a chicken.)

I was desperate to try this historic dish for myself, and over the past week and a half I have made a total of six visits to four different Sunkus locations, but it wasn’t until yesterday – the very last day of the promotion – that I finally found the coveted curry in stock.

Asteroid sampling tool

In case you’re disappointed at not being able to try it yourself, I can assure you that the flavors were well within the gray middle zone of convenience-store standards and thus totally forgettable. But the symbolism was delicious.

It turns out that this product was meant as a promotion for the Shochiku film company’s new 3-D movie about the Hayabusa mission. It’s called “Okaeri, Hayabusa,” which means “Welcome home, Hayabusa.” Here’s a trailer:

That movie is just the latest of several on the topic. Twentieth Century Fox also came out with a film simply called “Hayabusa,” starring Toshiyuki Nishida, an actor best known for his lead role in the movie series “Tsuri Baka Nisshi” (Diary of a fishing fool). Here’s the trailer:

The Kadokawa film company made a computer-graphic retelling of Hayabusa’s journey called “Hayabusa: Back to the Earth.” The final line of this trailer, “Saa … kairou … natsukashii chikyu ni” (Well … let’s go home … to our fondly remembered Earth) actually chokes me up for some reason. Maybe it’s the accompanying music. Maybe it’s the fact that I actually understood it. Or maybe there was a mood-altering ingredient in that curry. Watch:

The Hayabusa film with the most star power (pun unavoidable) is Toei’s “Hayabusa Harukanaru Kikan” (a title I would roughly translate as “Hayabusa’s homecoming from afar”), with Ken Watanabe as an awkwardly coiffed engineer:

I don’t think any of these movies could be described as massive hits. Does this reflect on their cinematic quality, or were there just too many of them for the market to absorb? Not having actually watched the films, I’ll leave that for others to judge.

Elizabeth Andoh’s Tohoku cookbook

When devastating earthquakes struck Japan in 1995 and 2011, Elizabeth Andoh helped the nation recover in the best way she could. By cooking.

Andoh is an American who has lived in Japan for more than 40 years. In that time, she has run a cooking school, written several cookbooks, and arguably become the world’s leading English-language authority on Japanese food.

When the Great Hanshin Earthquake destroyed much of Kobe in 1995, killing more than 6,000 people and leaving many others suddenly homeless, Andoh went to work in a takidashi soup kitchen to help feed the survivors.

After the Great East Japan Earthquake was followed by tsunami that ravaged the Pacific coast of the Tohoku region, she set about researching and writing a cookbook of traditional Tohoku recipes to raise money to help with recovery efforts. Today (Feb. 28) is the release date for the book, titled “Kibo: Brimming with Hope.” (See details on buying it here.)

Earlier in the month, she held a promotional event for the book, which I attended. I tasted the sample of Tohoku treats photographed below (and also sipped a few different types of Tohoku sake) while listening to Andoh explain her project.

Tastes of Tohoku, from left: Salmon rice topped with salmon roe, kamaboko fish sausage with a tiny bottle of soy sauce, walnut-miso shiso leaf rolls, fall fruits in pine nut tofu sauce, vinegared chrysanthemum and enoki mushroom salad

“What I remember most from [my Kobe] experience was not the first few weeks, not even the first few months,” she said. “It was five years later, it was 10 years later, and there was still so much that hadn’t come together. And for me, [considering] the enormity of what had happened in March [2011], I knew that the world would respond, Japan would respond, to emergency needs and that if I were going to do anything it was going to be more long-term.”

“When the reality of the nuclear accident became real, I knew that for longer than my lifetime we were going to have huge segments of the population permanently displaced. And then what would happen to Tohoku culture? It would all disappear; it would get morphed … into something possibly unrecognizable … I was concerned about someone getting in there and preserving the food culture,” she said.

In Kibo, Andoh set out to “chronicle, if you will, and preserve, put on the record, what Tohoku food culture was.” The $3.99 e-book contains 20 recipes that she hopes will enable readers to “recreate Tohoku food outside of the region,” using ingredients that are locally available wherever they happen to live.

Andoh is receiving no money for her work, and most of the proceeds of the book will be channelled through an online charity clearinghouse called Global Giving to a project called Michinoku Shigoto, which you can read about in English here or in Japanese here.

“What they do is they sponsor fellows, young people with skills and enthusiasm and energy to go up into the Tohoku and make business. It’s less about trying to salvage something that existed prior to the disaster than it is all about start-ups and things that make sense now,” Andoh said.

But enough nuts and bolts. How is the food?

Some of it, such as the salmon rice, is stick-to-your ribs country cooking, as you’d expect from a region known mainly for farming and fishing. And some of it is more self-evidently gourmet, such as the exquisite little dabs of walnut miso wrapped in shiso leaves and pan-toasted on sesame oil. Also toward that end of the spectrum is the fall fruit in pine nut tofu sauce, which the book suggests serving in a hollowed-out persimmon.

Having test-driven two of the recipes at home so far, I can report that the instructions are clear and easy to follow, and the results have been excellent. One dish I at which I tried my hand was the pork soup with “pinched noodles” that reminded me of the dumplings that are sometimes boiled with chicken in southern U.S. cooking. The photo below shows how it came out for me:

The other dish I made seemed like a bit more of a gamble, but it paid off. This was kamaboko fish sausage, something I have often eaten in Japan but never imagined I would be able to make at home.

The main ingredient is of course fish (I used cod), and the recipe calls for only five more items: salt, sugar, sake, cornstarch (I used katakuriko) and an egg white. All you have to do is combine them in a food processor – albeit in a very particular order – and then shape the resulting substance into little patties and grill them.

Andoh said in her presentation, “The amount of salt that’s added is a little alarming, and the timing of it is bizarre. Trust me on it, it’s got to be [done] exactly as it’s written…and the reason why when you look on the labels [of commercially prepared kamaboko] you see so much sugar in the fish sausage is to counteract the amount of salt. It’s 2 percent by weight, salt that you need to get a certain kind of chemical reaction to take place [with the protein of the fish] … There’s an instant when all of a sudden it comes together and it’s suddenly kamaboko.”

And sure enough, when I was blending the fish with the salt, there suddenly came a point when – in the space of about one second – the mixture transformed from a gloopy paste spread around the sides of the container into a smooth foam gathered in the center.

This foam is grilled in the “Kibo” recipe, but it has various uses in Japanese cuisine and can also be boiled or fried. I cooked mine in two batches, one in a toaster oven and one in the fish-grilling drawer of my Japanese stove. As you can see from the photo, my results were not beautiful…

…but they did taste good, and they had what Andoh describes in the book as “a certain degree of danryoku, or springiness, a texture that remains largely unappreciated in Western food culture.” If you’re not already familiar with kamaboko, think of each piece as a chewy bite of fish meringue pie. (I mean that as a good thing.)

The recipes (many with photos, including illustrations of techniques) take up just over half of the book. The rest is filled out with extensive notes on ingredients, a chapter on Tohoku sakes by Yukari Sakamoto, a chapter on a Miyagi Prefecture family getting their restaurant up and running again by Hiroko Sasaki, and a chapter on displaced Fukushima farmers by my coworker Jane Kitagawa.

These writers did all their work for a good cause, but Andoh admitted, “In the meanwhile, very selfishly, I discovered all sorts of wonderful things to eat, and people doing interesting things.”

Look inside my lucky bag

At the beginning of every year, most Japanese retailers sell fukubukuro “lucky bags” filled with excess merchandise they want to unload. Customers can’t see what is inside the bags, but it is generally understood that the price of one bag will be much lower than the ordinary price of its contents. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

You could look at this as a combination of two vices: retail therapy and gambling. Or, if the price isn’t too high, you could look at is as a harmless bit of silly fun.

Over the many New Year’s seasons I have passed in Japan, I have merely looked on at this phenomenon with puzzlement. But this year I actually bought a lucky bag for the first time.

Japan is divided into 47 prefectures, and the governments of most (probably all) of them maintain “antenna shops” in Tokyo that showcase local products and promote tourism. I recently visited the Iwate Prefecture antenna shop in Ginza, hoping to buy a new soy sauce flavored dessert that I had read was being produced in that prefecture. There were none available, but I did see lucky bags on sale.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given the bags a second glance, but Iwate is one the three prefectures hardest hit by last year’s tsunami, which makes me think that buying frivolous Iwate products is a way to do an economic good deed while also being self-indulgent. Besides, the price was amusing and not too high: 2,012 yen.

Although I couldn’t see inside the bags, there was nothing to stop me from picking several of them up one after another to see how heavy they were. The Iwate antenna store sells many types of local sake and microbrew beer, and I was hoping that a heavier bag might indicate some of those goodies inside. Each bag did seem heavy enough to contain at least one can or bottle, but more than that I couldn’t tell. I picked a bag at random and hoped for the best.

In retrospect, since there was no notice prohibiting people below the age of 20 from buying the bags, I was foolish to hope for alcohol. Here’s what I did get:

Top row

A handkerchief with a poem printed on it. The poem is by Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), one of the most famous people to come from Iwate.
A bag of rusks – slices of bread baked a second time to become hard and long-lasting. Rusks are a Western invention, used long ago to provision ships, but Japan is the only country I have ever seen them in.
Jajamen – fat udon noodles with chunky, spicy sauce. This bag contains servings for two.

Middle row

“Seagull egg” petit fours – little round cakes with a white chocolate shell and yellow anko filling.
Youkan – a thick, heavy, gelatinous, bean-based confection that in this case has a sesame flavor.
Soba noodles.

Bottom row

Horohorozuke – spicy minced vegetable pickles to put on top of rice.
Pickled wakame seaweed snacks – rubbery and sour.
A mixture of a dozen types of grain, including millet, barley and amaranth, to mix into plain white rice before cooking to make it more interesting.

Was it worth it?

On the one hand, the usual retail prices of these items probably add up to about twice the amount I paid. I do intend to eat and/or share all of the food items shown above. As for the handkerchief, I have a friend may have a bit of an interest in Miyazawa, so I’ll probably give it to that person.

On the other hand, NONE of these items are things I would have chosen to buy if I could have seen them first.

Such is the nature of lucky bags.

A new way to use a yuzu

A yuzu is a fragrant Japanese citrus fruit that looks like an orange but has a mild lemon-lime flavor. The one in the photo above is a rather pretty specimen, as yuzu are often lumpy and sometimes oddly shaped.

Bits of the rind are used to flavor the ozoni soup that is traditionally eaten at New Year’s, and yuzu is also used to scent hot baths in this season.

I recently learned a new way to use a yuzu, thanks to Tamako Sakamoto’s “Taste of Home” cooking column in The Daily Yomiuri. Her latest installment includes several yuzu recipes, and the one for yuzu madeleines sounded like something I just had to try.

Here are my results:

The recipe calls for two tablespoons of yuzu juice, but the baseball-sized specimen I used yielded just a little bit less than that amount. (Yuzu are juicy, but less so than other citrus fruits, and they have very large seeds that take up space inside.) I compensated by adding extra grated rind, and the citrus flavor came through loud and clear in the finished product.

Getting the madeleines out of their pans was a little difficult, but this is probably because I didn’t butter the pans before pouring the batter in. Since the batter itself is nearly one-third butter, I thought it wouldn’t be necessary. Live and learn. They still tasted delicious.

Read Sakamoto-san’s yuzu recipes here.