Office Glico

I keep a drawer of my desk at worked stocked with after-lunch desserts and snacks - a ziploc bag of California almonds and walnuts, the sack of pastel-hued jelly beans my mom sent me last spring, a lollipop or two, the individually wrapped, teeny tiny cookies that are so ubiquitous here. But lately my drawer has started to run dry, and after a whole week of nothing but nuts, I decided it was time to pay a visit to the pantry for some Office Glico.

The pantry is what we all call the corner room on my floor of the office; it's where the free drink machines, the hot water and coffee, and the paper towels, plastic utensils, and extra chopsticks are kept. On a clear fall day like the one we had earlier this week, when I snapped the picture above, the pantry is also a great place to see Mount Fuji rising above the skyscrapers of the Kanto plain. And, of course, the pantry is home to Office Glico.

Office Glico is a snack-vending service. Several times a week, a representative wheels a big pushcart filled with rice crackers, cookies, gum, candy, pretzels, meal-replacement bars, and so forth, through the office to restock three plastic bins that stand on our pantry counter. If you catch the Glico lady, you can have your choice of all her wares. Otherwise, you're limited to what she decides to bestow upon the limited number of little plastic drawers. Any Glico treat costs 100 yen, which is deposited into a frog-shaped bank on top of the Glico bins, on the honor system. Of course, if you manage to catch the Glico lady in person, you can just give her your coin, no frog intermediaries required.

Since I was feeling like chocolate today, and my options were limited (no Glico lady in sight), I chose something I've never had before - this "Prime Gateau." It consisted of a pastille of dark chocolate, imprinted with a fleur de lis on one side, and melded to a crisp green tea cookie on the other. As usual, each tiny little cookie-chocolate was individually wrapped in its own plastic wrapper. This turned out to be a good thing, for once - after eating one, I decided it was so delicious that I should save the other three for next week and have a few jelly beans for the rest of my dessert. After all, who knows when next the Glico lady will choose to leave us with Prime Gateau again?

Ladurée Macarons

I've mentioned the Japanese love affair with French culture and cuisine before. Among the venerable French pastry shops to have established an outpost in Tokyo is Laduree. This old-Paris bastion of beautiful sweets claims to have invented the modern macaron, the sandwich cookie that's taken Paris by storm in the same way the cupcake overtook New York a few years ago. There's an ongoing debate among macaron aficionados as to whether Laduree or Pierre Herme makes the penultimate incarnation of this little sweet. While Pierre Herme's macarons are fatter, chewier, and more exotic (they come in flavors like olive oil, elderberry, and mango coconut), I have to come down on the side of Laduree. Their macarons are shatteringly crisp and light, the ganache filling is thick and smooth, and the flavors, while restricted to about 18 classics, are pure and strong. Every time I'm in Ginza, I have to go into the Mitsukoshi department store and at least walk past the Laduree shop-cum-tea salon on the second floor. If I'm feeling self-indulgent, I'll treat myself to macarons or a pastry as well.

The whole shop looks like the box - everything is pink on robin's egg or robin's egg on pink, or gold on green, with lots of swags and loopy writing. It's the most gorgeously over-the-top place I know, definitely a close cousin to Versailles. In fact, if you saw the Sofia Coppola movie about Marie Antoinette, you might remember her being surrounded by fabulous cakes and pastries. Laduree designed those for the film.

Unlike Pierre Herme, who often fills his macarons with a contrasting flavor, Laduree makes each flavor homogenous, with the textural contrast between the crackly, light-as-air cookie and the smooth, buttery filling providing interest in a staid but classic fashion. From left to right, the flavors in the lineup above are Dark Chocolate, Rose, Bergamot, Yuzu, Cafe, Pistachio, Salted Caramel, and Raspberry. Most are filled with ganache, but the Salted Caramel (also shown below) has a delicious, chewy caramel inside, and Raspberry contains raspberry jam. If absolutely forced to pick a favorite, I'd probably go with Rose. Its sweet fragrance (not at all soapy) and its delicate taste are simply heavenly, as well as unusual. And - yes, I'm a girly girl - it's pink! But Bergamot (the flavor of Earl Grey tea) is also amazing, floral and citrusy at the same time. I've always loved coffee and pistachio flavors in anything. And who could argue against caramel? Luckily no one is making me choose just one.

Ladurée

Ginza Mitsukoshi 2F

Ginza 4-6-16

http://www.laduree.fr/index_en.htm

Naniwaya Taiyaki

Taiyaki, one of Japan's most beloved street foods, is a sort of pancake shaped like a fish that's filled with sweet red bean paste. Other versions of the same theme are shaped like dolls or are simply circle-shaped, and the fillings can range from the traditional lumpy red bean paste to smooth red bean paste, white bean paste, or even western-style custard, chocolate, or ice cream. The most common, however, remains the classic, and whenever there's a festival or street fair, there is almost certain to be a vendor stall grilling taiyaki in bulk, using long connected fish-shaped molds that can be filled with lightning speed and flipped all at one time. The pancake part, when perfectly cooked and fresh off the grill, gets crispy around the edges (the crisp, spilled-over batter is called the "ears" and especially coveted by certain aficionados) but remains pillowy-soft in the middle where it hugs the filling. If it's not so fresh (and at the street stalls they do tend to pile up before being sold), it may be soggy and lukewarm, and while still sweet and tasty, doesn't have that crunchy-smooth contrast that makes taiyaki so irresistable when they're piping hot.

Although they're frequently sold from temporary stalls, there are also a few permanent places that make selling taiyaki a full-time business. Some of these are in the food basement areas of department stores, and while I'm sure they're good, there's just something a bit too sanitary about them - taiyaki ought to be sold and eaten outdoors, not carried home in a fancy paper box like a French pastry. However, there are some shops that have managed to create a permanent home with old-fashioned atmosphere. In my neighborhood, Naniwaya is the most famous. It's been around for about 100 years, they stir up only a limited amount of batter and homemade bean paste a day, and all the taiyaki are made fresh on the spot by two or three cooks. There's often a line stretching down the street outside (which can be quite an annoyance when I'm riding my bike past the shop on my way home from work). Though there are a few simple tables indoors, the whole storefront is open to the air, and has the feel of a picnic shelter where people might eat on the sidelines of a festival. The taiyaki are sweet, hot, and crisp - perfect for the colder months ahead.

Naniwaya
1-8-14 Azabu-juban
http://jin3.jp/kameiten2-2/naniwaya.htm (Japanese)

Japanese Wedding Favors

Another Japanese wedding tradition is that you can't send the guests home empty-handed. Every weekend, if you ride the subway or even go outside and walk down the street, you'll see large numbers of people dressed up in their finest, teetering on high heels and lugging giant bags emblazoned with the name of the hotel where the wedding took place. I joined their number after my friends' recent wedding. Here's what was inside the bag.

The picture at the top is in interesting east-meets-west combination: Japanese tea cakes made of bean paste and rice paste on the left, German baumkuchen on the right. Baumkuchen is another of those incredibly delicious confections that's taken on an iconic status in Japan (you can even get them in flavors like green tea, or coated with green tea flavored chocolate). It's made by adding layer after layer of batter to a spit that slowly turns and bakes the cake as the batter is added - I'm not sure exactly how it works, but there's a baumkuchen shop in Ginza that has the long cakes twirling on their spits in the window, and it's quite fascinating.

The picture just above is a box of cookies from the hotel where the reception was held. They are each individually wrapped. Why, Japan? Why?

The bag also contained some non-edible presents, like a beautiful lacquer tray and the square cedar sake cup we drank the first toast out of. But the final foodie treat was this package of big, crunchy senbei (rice crackers). They're unusually shaped, and are supposed to look like the little Shinto statues you see around shrines wearing red aprons. From left to right, they're nori, sugar, and soy sauce flavored. I love a good hard senbei that takes a little effort to bite, and these were perfect.

A Japanese Wedding Banquet

Some friends of mine got married recently, and their wedding reception was a traditional Japanese banquet, course after course of beautiful little dishes arranged in beautiful plates and bowls, set one after another on the black lacquer fan-shaped tray placed in front of each guest. The whole time, people were making speeches and toasts, there was a slide show, the bride and groom left to change from Japanese wedding kimono into Western-style white dress and tuxedo, and everyone was taking photos. It was a wonderful evening and lots of fun, but with so many distractions, no one at my table actually ate every course. However, I did manage to take photos of each dish as it arrived, and since they were helpfully described in both Japanese and English on a menu card, I can even tell you what each of them was.
To start, on the crane-shaped plate (cranes are lucky, which is why there were also paper origami cranes scattered on the tablecloth), we have a selection of bite-sized appetizers. Clockwise from the top left are: salmon with cheese, fried bread with shrimp paste, sushi with salmon and squid, kelp roll with boiled herring, boiled kelp with fish roe, and boiled shrimp with egg yolk. In the goblet was boiled top shell with herring roe. I only ate the salmon with cheese and the kelp ones. These are the types of very strongly flavored (sweet and salty) foods prepared for the traditional Japanese New Year trays, and I've had them before. A little goes a long way.
Next: Clear soup with shrimp cake. I didn't eat it so I can't tell you how it tasted, but it was certainly pretty.

Next was sashimi: sea bream, bluefin tuna, and squid. I love the carrot curl - I have to learn how to make those.

One of the tenets of Japanese cooking is that a meal must include multiple cooking techniques. After the soup and the raw dish, it was time for a boiled dish, in this case vegetables. From the bottom right, that's a taro, a shiitake mushroom, green peas, and a carrot on top of a chunk of (yay!) pumpkin. They were slightly sweetened, boiled no doubt in the Japanese standard broth of kelp, fish flakes, mirin, sake, and soy sauce.
A grilled dish followed: the wonderfully named fish Kinki (according to the English menu, it's called Thornhead in English, which sounds like a character out of Tolkien). The citrus next to it is yuzu, the fragrant Japanese citron. It had been cooked as well. The pink stick is pickled ginger. The fish was glazed with sweet miso and it was unctuous and delicious.

This was followed by a refreshing vinegar dish, pickled cucumbers and radish sliced paper-thin and rolled around crab meat. Since I don't have much to say about this one, let me comment here that for me, loving china as I do, the succession of dishes was even more exciting for the variety of plates and bowls than for the food itself. Look at this gorgeous bowl - shaped like a flower, red and white stripes, gold decorations - swoon. And they just kept on coming ...

This is a mysterious steamed egg custard. Usually these have vegetables or shrimp in them, but according to the menu, this one contained a turnip cake. The person next to me told me it might have meat in it, but she wasn't sure. I didn't eat it, but it was very pretty.

The last course is always rice and miso soup. The rice was filled with minced vegetables and shrimp and wrapped in a thin omelet, tied with a green onion. The soup was red miso (red and white are lucky colors).

The first dessert course was fruit and Champagne. The melon, which may or may not have cost $100, was actually amazingly sweet and moist and might even have been worth an exorbitant price. Rather than being firm-fleshed like a normal honeydew, the texture was closer to that of a perfectly ripe peach, and it tasted like nectar. The grapes had been de-seeded by hand - there was a little hole in one end. The white fruit was Japanese pear.

And of course, you can't have a wedding without wedding cake. Rather than a towering wedding cake, which the bride and groom cut together as their first action as a married couple (which has become the tradition for modern Japanese weddings), this couple performed the much older tradition of breaking open a cask of sake with a mallet as their first act together. The cake was served in a very civilized manner, already cut, and was the favorite Japanese cake of all time, white sponge cake with barely sweetened whipped cream and large pieces of strawberry.

All in all, it was a marvelous feast and a wonderful wedding. Omedetou gozaimasu!

Taste of Autumn: Persimmons

One thing I noticed very soon after moving to Japan was how certain fruits and vegetables disappeared from markets for much of the year, reappearing only once they came back into season. Though places like Berkeley and Portland may experience this phenomenon as well, it was a surprise to me, who grew up getting pretty much the same produce from the supermarket all year round. It's literally not possible to get persimmons in Japan from about December to October (unless you go to one of those weird specialty fruit shops that sell square watermelons and $100 cantaloupes - those might very well carry out of season fruit, too). Their being available only for that brief window of time makes them all the more tasty, not to mention how exciting it is to see them on display in the shops again for the first time in months.
Even more exciting than seeing them in the shops is seeing them growing on trees. The area where I used to live seems to have an unusual number of persimmon trees - they grow behind the houses where I see extremely old people outside at 6:30 am watering their bonsai trees and flower pots as I go by on my morning walkie. As the season progresses, I'll have to avoid stepping on the rotten, mushy, fallen fruit that spatters the sidewalk. But now, the persimmons are still a greenish shade of orange, and you wouldn't know they were there unless you knew to look for them.
The square, sweet, seedless persimmons (I think they're known as Fuyu among American fruit connoisseurs) are the most popular kind, while the pointy-ended type, which can be dangerously astringent when unripe, is more often hung up on strings and eaten dried. I've seen persimmons in the US, too, sometimes going by the name Sharon fruit, but I'm surprised they haven't gained greater popularity. Some people peel them, but the peel is perfectly edible. The proper Japanese way is to cut them into peeled wedges and stab them with a tiny, two-pronged dessert fork (this is actually the proper Japanese way to eat any fruit, from apples to grapes). I don't bother with the cutlery. The only drawback to eating out of hand is how much sweet, sticky juice ends up dripping down my arms.

Halloween Pie

Back when I lived in Kyoto, I spent a lot of time window shopping (and really shopping as well) in the Kawaramachi-Teramachi area. Right across the street from the Takashimaya department store, source of all things beautiful and beyond my English-teacher price range, was the Kobeya bakery, source of all things tasty and not so far beyond my budget that I couldn't go there once in a while. I don't remember if I discovered the Halloween Pie my first year in Japan or my second, but it certainly made an impression on me when I did. It was one of the things I mourned when I moved away, and one of the things I looked forward to finding again when I moved back to Japan. Since Kobe is a Kansai city, whereas Tokyo is in the Kanto, I was a little worried that Tokyo wouldn't have any Kobeya bakeries. But yay! it does, and in October they have Halloween Pie.

Given my obsession with kabocha pumpkin, it's hardly surprising that I would fall so hard for the sweet pastry version. The filling is almost straight kabocha, including little bits of the skin, doctored with just a bit of sugar, butter, and perhaps egg, as well as rum-infused raisins. The texture is much heavier and more solid than American-style pumpkin pie, which is basically pumpkin custard. But instead of the short crust used in the U.S. version, this pumpkin pie is encased in puff pastry cut into a jack o'lantern shape (the best part is the stem) and coated in a shiny glaze. They make two sizes, small (more crust) and large (more filling, and my personal preference, shown here).

It's the perfect Halloween treat - scarily good. Probably it's just as well they only sell it one month a year.

Kobeya Kitchen - Hiroo shop

Minami-azabu 5-5-16

http://www.kobeyarestaurant.co.jp/index.html

Braised Cucumbers and Mushrooms

Cucumbers are another one of those vegetables that are quite different in Japan than in America. Here, they are skinny (never more than an inch in diameter), virtually seedless, and sometimes a little spiny-skinned. Inside they're usually slightly green and have a wonderful fragrance. Like the rest of my produce, my cucumbers come from the corner discount vegetable stand, so they tend to be slightly older and uglier than the ones selling at a premium across the street at the supermarket. They also come in baskets of eight or ten cucumbers. One is plenty for a salad, and the rest would just slowly wilt in my fridge unless I did something drastic on the weekend. Earlier in the summer I made some fresh pickles by pouring salt, vinegar, and boiling water over sliced cucumbers, but while pickles are nice for a garnish, I don't like to make a whole meal out of them. On the other hand, treating cucumbers as if they were zucchini turns out to be an easy and tasty way to preserve them all week long as well as to add some variety to my daily bento lunch.

I cut each cucumber into quarters lengthwise and into chunks about an inch and a half long. In my saucepan, I put just enough soy sauce and water to cover the bottom. Then I tossed in the cucumbers and some nameko mushrooms (a naturally slimy variety which adds a texture the Japanese seem to love but most Americans probably don't) as well as some sliced hot red peppers. It was ready in under ten minutes. The cucumbers turned darker green but retained their bite, the mushrooms were nicely soy-infused, and the peppers gave it a vaguely Korean accent. I enjoyed a serving of it warm, but it was just as good cold in my lunchbox.

Three Desserts

Back when I was an English teacher, I once tried doing a unit on occupations. The kids learned to ask "What do you want to be?" and to answer "I want to be a teacher, doctor, astronaut," etc. The unit wasn't very successful, though, partly because words like "astronaut" and "veterinarian" are hard to pronounce and remember, but mainly because the kids wanted to be a much wider range of things than was represented on the board-of-education-provided flash cards, especially the girls. If they didn't want to be beauticians or preschool teachers, they wanted to be pastry chefs. That's not too surprising, given the abundance of patisseries in Japan. I go past three on my 15-minute bicycle commute to work each day, and that's not counting the shop that only makes choux a la creme or the Paul bakery in my building.

The photo at the top is the "Litchi-Chocolat" from La Pyramide, just up a side street from the Azabu Juban station. It's an unusual combination: the top is an eggy custard mousse, the bottom is a ganache containing fresh lychee halves, and between these layers and at the very bottom are extremely thin pieces of sponge cake soaked in some kind of liquor, probably lychee. On top were a piece of chocolate, half a grape, some coconut, and a cookie, as well as a dusting of cocoa powder. Each element was interesting but a little weird, especially the lychees buried in the ganache. Lychees are very subtly flavored, and they didn't have much to say for themselves next to all that chocolate. The best part was the liquory sponge cake.

These next two are from Petit Decorer, the pastry shop up the street from my apartment which previously supplied the seasonal tarts for the dinner I made when Yuri was here. First up is their take on the Mont Blanc, a cake I had never seen before coming to Japan but which is one of the classics here. A patisserie just couldn't hold its head up high if its counter didn't contain the on-top-of-spaghetti-lookalike mountain of piped chestnut frosting on top of some combination of pastry cream and white cake. Some places will put a candied chestnut on top or inside, some substitute a tart shell for the cake, some forgo chestnut altogether and pull the whole thing off with sweet potato or pumpkin instead. But chestnut is the classic, and even though it's a fall flavor, the cake is prominent all year around. The Petit Decorer version was excellent, containing a blueberry (or perhaps mixed berry) jam spread over the cake layer, a shortbread base, and the usual vanilla pastry cream beneath the swirls of chestnut frosting.

Next, we have another seasonal tart, this time apple. This one wasn't quite as amazing as the tarts I got there before, but it was still very good. The apples were absolutely melting - they must have been sliced before cooking, and may have been roasted like tarte tatin. They had blackened scorch marks (though this didn't affect the taste at all). The tart itself was almond frangipane and toward the back there was vanilla-flecked pastry cream beneath the apples. The chocolate leaf on top was the only thing that didn't quite work. I actually picked this tart because the leaf was so beautiful, but unfortunately it tasted more like the coloring wax or gel that was used to tint it red than it tasted like chocolate. On the whole, though, it was a wonderful taste of fall. After all, who needs to eat fall leaves when there are apples around?

La Pyramide

Azabu-juban 1-3-13

http://www.azabu-pyramide.co.jp/index.html

Petit Decorer

Minami-azabu 1-4-21

http://decorer.jp

Kabocha Pumpkin

It's October, the only month when most Americans think much about pumpkin beyond the ubiquitous Libby's can. But in Japan, pumpkins are available all year, imported from New Zealand or Mexico during the off season here, and they're as common as carrots in the produce section and on the table. The predominant pumpkin here is the kabocha, a sweet, firm-fleshed winter squash that's yellow to orange inside and striped in dark and light green outside, with an occasional orange spot or wart. The skin is edible, so there's no need to peel it unless there are bruises or woody bits that need to be cut away.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of pumpkin, and the jack o'lantern is probably the least tasty among them. I can remember nibbling on the triangle I had just cut out to make an eye in a pumpkin I was helping to carve back in fourth grade and spitting it out immediately - it had a horrifying vegetal flavor that made me think of compost. The acorn squash, which is pretty common in the U.S., has a similar watery smell, texture, and flavor, and I hated it the first time I had it, too. However, I've always like pumpkin pie, which is made out of an entirely different variety of winter squash.

After first encountering chunks of kabocha in a school lunch "curry stew" early in my Kyoto teaching career, I soon became a pumpkin junkie. At one point I was eating half a pumpkin a day for months on end and my skin actually started turning orange. Back then, I simmered the pumpkin in soy sauce, mirin, and sake together with sliced shiitake mushrooms, the dried kind that came in a huge bag from a Chinese grocery, and mixed everything together with yogurt and rice. After returning to the U.S. I went into pumpkin withdrawal, since the winter squash that bear any resemblance to Japanese kabocha (buttercup, red kuri, blue hubbard, and the American version of kabocha) are only sold in October and are usually too watery to taste good with yogurt. Instead, when they were in season I roasted them and sprinkled them with grated parmesan cheese, and cut them up in chunks to freeze for use in Moroccan stews or ravioli fillings the rest of the year.

Since coming back to live in Tokyo last year, I've reverted to subsisting largely on kabocha, though not quite at the extreme level of my orange Kyoto days. Now, I cook only about 1/8 of the pumpkin at a time, combining it with a mixture of fresh mushrooms (usually the shiitake and enoki shown here), and simmering it for about 15 minutes in a little soy sauce and water. I eat it with tofu instead of cheese or yogurt now. Often I have something green on the side - spinach or cucumber make a refreshing contrast, and avocado is divine. But all I really need to be happy is kabocha, and here in Japan I can have it every day of the year if I so choose. And I usually do.

Tim Tams

     One of the nice side benefits of life as an expat is that you get to experience not just the culture of your host country, but also the cultures of other expats' home countries. Since Australia is just a quick 12-hour flight south and practically in the same time zone as Japan, there are a lot more Australians here than I ever met back in the US. You'll find that a lot of the "British" products for sale in foreign-specialty grocery stores, like Walker shortbread and Cadbury chocolate, are actually made in Oz if you look at the label. And there are a few purely Australian classics available, too, of which the most noteworthy (in my sweet-toothed opinion at least) are the iconic chocolate sandwich cookies called Tim Tams.

Tim Tams are similar to fudge-enrobed Oreos in their basic concept: shatteringly crisp and light chocolate wafers sandwiching a Crisco-y filling and smothered in a waxy, cocoa-y coating. They taste absolutely perfectly fake, just as a good snack food ought to taste. The cream in the middle is oilier and less sickeningly sweet than the Oreo cream - it's much closer to the chocolate filling in Little Debbie cakes. The outside leaves little if any sticky-melty chocolate on the fingers, but experimentation has proven that it will melt eventually at sufficiently high temperature (this box, which I bought in the blazing days of August at the Don Quixote shop in Roppongi, a good 20 minutes' walk from home, actually got a bit disfigured and all the cookies ended up stuck to the package - but as you can see from the picture, the damage wasn't severe). Like all fakey cakey things, they are completely addictive. They come in several variations - Classic, Dark Chocolate and Raspberry, Caramel Chocolate - but I always get the Double Coat kind. The more waxy fudge the happier I am.

     And lest anyone be fooled by the Hebrew writing on the package ... let's hear it for honesty, mates!

Miruku-Pan

     Miruku means milk, and pan means bread (it comes from the Portuguese, since Portuguese sailors apparently have the distinction of introducing bread to the Japanese, and thus beginning a wonderful relationship). Miruku-pan means milk bread, but does milk bread even exist as a name for a type of bread outside Japan? It's one of those things that is so common and so much a part of food culture here that it's hard to remember whether I had heard of it before.

     In general, milk bread is a soft, squishy, slightly sweet white bread or roll. The miruku-pan from the Mont-Thabor bakery, however, is a superior creation, the epitome of all milk breads:  so moist that it leaves hardly a crumb, so sweet and rich that spreading it with anything is completely unnecessary, and coiled into a cinnamon-roll shape, so that the golden crust glazed with still more milk and sugar has seductive ripples, hills, valleys, and gorgeous variation in color. Once you start to uncoil, it's hard to stop until you've eaten the whole thing.

     I often have the problem, when I go to a Japanese bakery, that I want to buy everything there. Then I spend way too much time deciding what to get, and usually end up buying too much to eat in one day anyway. The nice thing about Mont-Thabor is that even though they have a wide array of tempting baked goods, no other bakery has anything as nice as their miruku-pan. Since I can get good an-pan, fruit-filled tarts, and almond croissants elsewhere, I know that I'm going to get miruku-pan when I go there for a treat (I also buy my regular sliced bread there, as I wrote about earlier). Miracle of miracles, I can be in and out the door in under five minutes.

      The bakery knows, too, that miruku-pan is its biggest draw. It's the poster child on the sign in the window, it's the first thing you see when you walk in the door, and it's clearly the best-selling bread they make. There's a chalkboard on the wall behind the counter that tells what time fresh-from-the-oven bread will be available, and while most types come out once or maybe twice a day, miruku-pan is guaranteed to be yaki-tate (just-baked) just about every hour. A still-warm roll of soft, sweet, pull-apart-able bread - who could ask for anything more?

Onigiri

     Eaten hot or cold, at breakfast, lunch or dinner, and stuffed with any filling the inventive mind can imagine, the ubiquitous onigiri is Japan's answer to the sandwich. It's compact, portable, and when the filling is a protein, it might even count as a balanced meal. Housewives pack home made ones wrapped in foil for their salaryman husbands. Junior high school boys eat them as an afternoon snack as they commute from school to cram school. When I was an English teacher, the other resource teachers would always set up an assembly line after lunch to turn all the leftover rice into onigiri for the classroom teachers to have for dinner if they had to work overtime (which, of course, was the norm).

     It was from those teachers, plus a few TV shows and magazines, that I learned to make onigiri myself. It's easiest to turn the rice into a triangle shape without making a sticky mess if you first wrap it in saran wrap, but simply wetting the hands works almost as well. Unless you are unusually pain-tolerant, it's best to wait until the rice has cooled a bit before attempting to scoop it up and squeeze it, but it should still be warm. The word nigiru means "to grip," but you shouldn't really grip too hard - gentle pressure is all it takes for short-grained Japanese rice to come together. Turning the ball as you press it together creates the triangle shape, as the flattened palm of one hand forms one side and the crooked palm and fingers of the other form the other two sides. The filling is added at the beginning, before the gripping begins. Some people not only wet but also salt their hands to add flavor, and of course there are all kinds of add-ins consisting of shredding seaweed, sesame seeds, dehydrated egg, dehydrated fish, and so forth, which can be mixed in to color and flavor the rice from the start. Once the rice ball has been formed, it can either be left plain or wrapped in a sheet of nori, which comes already cut into the perfect size for this purpose.

     Though naturally homemade ones are best, especially when they're still warm, onigiri are sold at every supermarket and convenience store in a wide range of flavors and qualities. On the sad morning last month when I had to return Yuri to the airport, we were in too much of a hurry to have a sit-down lunch, and since he hadn't had a chance to eat onigiri yet on this trip, we decided to stop by a 7-11 and buy a last fast-food meal. Yuri got the grilled salmon above, a higher-scale option (the cheapest salmon onigiri just have flaked fish, not whole pieces), and his favorite spicy mentaiko, a type of fish eggs. I prefer my mentaiko cooked, which turns it chewy and salty without the spiciness, so I had one of those. Other common fillings include pickled plum, pickled vegetables, tuna with mayo, and even chicken or beef. The fish in onigiri is always cooked so that they can be eaten on the go without worrying about spoilage.

      It was a simple lunch, but perfectly oishii.

Rainbow Roll Sushi

     Now that almost a month has passed since Yuri's visit, I had better hurry up and get through posting about it, so that I can move on to more seasonal topics - seasonal eating being highly important to life in Japan. Fortunately, sushi is a pretty seasonless food, unless you go to the really high-end places where they only serve two or three fish which are at their current peak of deliciousness. So here's a review of Rainbow Roll Sushi, the restaurant where Yuri and I ate on his last night in Tokyo.

      

     The idea behind Rainbow Roll is re-imagining the Americanized version of a sushi restaurant in a new, uniquely Japanese way. The restaurant is thus closer to what you would experience in the U.S. than in a traditional sushi shop in that the emphasis is on flamboyant presentation, creatively named rolls, and a lounge-type atmosphere. But the quality of the fish is as high as you would expect in Japan, and that makes it worlds better than any sushi I've ever had in the U.S.

     After toasting Yuri's week in Japan with the cold sake poured to overflow the glasses and fill up the lacquer boxes as well, we ordered our dinner. The first appetizer was the Tower of Tuna, and right away Yuri appreciated that he wasn't in Nashville anymore. This little work of art, only about two and a half inches in diameter, consists of a layer of raw fatty tuna, a layer of avocado, a layer of something finely diced cucumber, and a layer of even more finely diced tomato, all floating on a clear dashi fish-broth jelly and soy sauce base, with basil pesto and fine green onions to the side. The tastes are a perfect combination, and all the ingredients are perfectly fresh, but it's the assembly into a tower that makes it so memorable.

     Our other appetizer was this inventive variation on a spring roll - translucent slices of tai (sea bream) wrapped around carrots and cucumber, set to sail on a sea of goma (sesame) dressing. Next up was the salmon roll pictured at the top - a fairly common American combination of cream cheese and cucumber inside and tiny red caviar dusting the outside. But the thick slices of smoked salmon on top, the salmon roe on top of that, and the tiny leaf garnishing all were very Japanese.

     Here's the spicy tuna roll. Unfortunately, a photo can't capture the perfection of this incarnation of the overworked standby of the genre. Under all that lettuce, the spice so perfectly balanced that while it's definitely hot, you can still taste the fish, and the vegetables provide just the right amount of crunch and freshness to contrast with the soft, spicy tuna.

     Winning the award for pure prettiness was our plate of nigiri-sushi. Each piece of fish set atop a ball of rice, in the ordinary Japanese style, was embellished with a surprising but delicious accompaniment. Clockwise from the top left, that's medium-fatty tuna with tofu sauce, kampachi with grapefruit and caviar, salmon with mango, horse-mackerel with garlic, mackerel with kelp and grated radish, and salmon roe with ... nothing else. It was supposed to come with sea urchin and salmon, but when I asked them to leave off the urchin, they left off the salmon too. Zannen.

     They call this last one the Caterpillar Roll, but unlike most American rolls of that name, this one is vegetarian, with avocado on top and tempura asparagus inside. Normally I avoid tempura-filled sushi whenever possible, since the fried coating gets soggy inside the rice and makes the whole thing taste unpleasantly heavy and greasy. But not this time. Even with the avocado, it tasted light and not at all oily. The tempura even retained its crunch. It was yet another example of how well Rainbow Roll does what it does.