watashi to tokyo

Frozen beer boom

This year, we have boom of frozen beer! You can enjoy sherbet like froth on top of beer and also it keeps beer cool. This year might be hot coz we still have power shortages by stopping all of its nuclear power plants in Japan. We drink frozen beer at several shops that serve KIRIN beer or they have home sherbet froth maker. I am sure I will try frozen beer soon.

Very easy way to cook Chawanmushi.

Do you know Chawanmushi? It's a kind of pudding but not sweet, Japanese love Chawanmushi but it's a little bit troublesome to cook. But I found very easy and interesting way to cook it.

What you need it a cup noodle (seafood taste is good) and a egg. Eat cup noodle first in regular way and put a egg into soup, stir and put it in microwave. 3 minutes is fine. visual is not so great but people said taste is fine! Add to your Japanese food recipe!

Tokyo Okashi Land

I wrote about calbee antenna shop before, it's a nice place for snack lovers but there is more in Tokyo Station! Tokyo Okashi Land is the great place where you can enjoy Japanese big three snack makers Calbee, Grico(pocky), Morinaga( I looooooooove choco frake)'s special and limited snack. Freshly fried potato chips with choco or cheese sauce in Calbee, fresly coocked chocolate almond in Grico etc,. Love this, I need to rush to go.

Calbee release iced potatochips!

Japanese snack maker Calbee will release iced potato chips. Vanilla cream on chips and it will be more delicious when you put it on refrigerator.

Gurefuru ChuChu

Takara Tomy has relesed Gurefuru ChuChu as one of new cooking toy series. Put a stick part into Grapefruit and twirl a handle. Then you can drink grapefruit juice wtih straw. This is nice idea, we can make cocktail or fruitjerry easly!. Here is an AD movie, I like people's comments.

snack can be good rice buddy, we love furikake

We love furikake, when I was a kids we had a few furikake in the shop. but now I don't know how many kinds we have now. Even the price of each is really cheap, we can enjoy various taste and also it can be nutrient coz any foods like sesame, nori, dry fish, vegetable, even crashed fish bone with rich calcium can be included. If you don't like white rice, you may enjoy it with furikake, I am sure.

Marumiya's Noritama has been in the past and still remains the most popular furikake in Japan. And I wonder Kinshobai is the most expensive furikake which can be gift in gorgeous pot.

We have eat at home more than before in this bad economy. So we have a lot of furikake recipe too, here is easy one in English.

Funny one is potato chips! Some said potato chips can be a really good rice buddy. Regular salt is of course delicious, but we have wasabi potato chips or kimchi or sesamioil, they should be fit to rice. Not only add as topping, you can cook rice with potato chips too. Please try, I promise, it is delicious.

Today we have news, Toy maker Takara Tomy has released "Okashi na furikake", it means snack frikake machine, you can put snacks whichever you like and crash and make frikake with machine. The machine has three types of blade and make different size frikake on the table by hand. Love it.

New food trend in Japan is stronger taste

New food trend in Japan is "Strong taste". Morinaga released five new sweets that featured "more" or "stronger taste" like Koi Tsuya Pudding or "Koi rich pudding", they added " stronger version" to even old standard products like Mommy. Kirin has released stronger taste tea with double tea leaves or double milk and also "stronger taste "happoshu"(i don't know how it is strong though). SB has stronger stew rou and they said they are making very good sales. Moreover we have "more cheese" snack, "more miso ramen", stronger green tea, etc,.etc,. Analysts said people would feel good deal or reasonable in stronger taste in this bad economy.

Strong taste is said KOI AJI in Japanese.

TANITA health care restaurant

TANITA is a Japanese health care campany, they made health check machine like hemomanometer, heart rate monitor, weight scale etc,. As health care company, their company cafeteria has great manu that take care about employee's health. All menu are less than 500 calories and check an amount of salt and oil. The restaurant's recepi was publised as "TANITA company cafeteria" and it became a bestselling book last year.

Today TANITA has opened "TANITA restaurant" in Marunouchi building, they serve "health care menu" like TANITA company cafeteria menu and also they serve health check by proffetional advisor. I read there were long long line and people seemed to love to eat such healthy lunch.

Calbee's antenna shop in Harajuku!

Calbee is one of the most popular snack maker in Japan, their potato chips flavor variation is a kind of chaos, look at this. this is Yuzu Kosho(yuzu kosho?) this is Katsuo dashi(It's a kind of Japanese soup stock made from katsuobushi) this is Chinese dumpling this is burned butter, this is miso, this is kimchi. this is mentai and mayo(mentai?). The most popular flavor is always light sat but we love to taste new or limited version.

this is salt and rayu!

Recently Calbee opened their antenna shop in Harajuku. They sell their snacks, store limited snacks and even unreleased snacks too. And good part is thier cafe, you can try freshy-fried potato chips. Wooo looks yummy.

Michelin one star ramen!

Today's Google Japan logo, it's for the Sendai Tanabata festival. Thinking about the damage from 3/11, it is amazing to have the festival again this year.

MIST is the first ramen shop in the world to receive a star in the Michelin guidebook. Their menu contains ramen and new items like ramen sushi, etc. The shop was in Omotesando Hills until January, but now it's closed and will re-open somewhere in Tokyo this summer.

 

The shop is produced by French chef Yasuji Morizumi, who has another ramen chain called "Chabuya". Compared to MIST, Chabuya has more reasonably priced ramen and I went there in Machida last night.

I don't eat ramen so often but this time Groupon had a 50% discount ticket, so that's why I was there. Actually with the discount it ended up being just 380 yen. And of course I wondered how ramen made by a Michelin star winner tastes. :-)

Here is the ramen, I ordered half a boiled egg on top (80 yen). The soup was a fish-based sesame blend, and the noodle was really thick. Toppings included zucchini, asparagus and shiitake mushroom. It was good, but not super good to me. I prefer regular soy sauce or tonkotsu ramen.

I got a good tip. In Japan, ethnic foods are really expensive and Indian, Vietnamese, and Thai dishes cost around 1000 yen for an entree and if you want to eat Greek or Turkish food you will pay over 3,000 yen at least. As for Muslim foods, I have no idea where I can find them or how much it would cost. But I read that we can eat such foods for a reasonable price at one place. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is advancing its activities around the pillars of field-oriented approach, human security, and enhanced effectiveness, efficiency, and speed. It is located in the Yokohama Minato Mirai area (which has nice vistas, good shopping, and is in a lovely seaside area) and they have places to stay for foreigners who come to Japan to study and also provides restaurants for them. The restaurant has various types of international foods and beverages to appeal to people of many different cultures: vegetarian, Halal, African, etc. And it's not restircted to hotel customers, regular people can eat lunch and dinner there. The good thing is that beyond the reasonably priced food, there's a really nice view of the Yokohama port. A guy on Nifty Portal wrote about it and he says that this lamb is only 390yen (!?) I will try it soon.