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