I'm feelin' snacky today, so here is my review of February's J-list Snack Subscription box! There's a couple things I am really excited about, and I go on a long ramble about food anime, so let's get started!
In case you aren't familiar, J-List is a website that sells items directly from Japan. They have a wide range of anime items, along with kitchen and household things, snacks, and more. The "more" includes a lot of "ecchi" or adult items, so if that kind of thing offends you you can always check out the J-Box site, which is a G rated version of J-List. This subscription is actually not currently available from the website. J-List recently changed over to a completely new site and they are still working to transfer things like subscriptions over. Unfortunately, this means I don't have any information about pricing for you at this time. (I prepaid a year in advance, so it doesn't get charged every month.) I will update this post as soon as the subscriptions go live again!
They finally changed up the info card! Sort of. The blurb is about Sakura season now, though it still says the box is full of "fall flavor". I give up. It still has the name of each snack on it in English though, so that is good enough for me!
Can we talk for a minute about food anime? Until about a year ago, I didn't even know that food anime was a thing, and now I absolutely can't get enough. Something you may or may not know about me is that before I switched careers I used to be a professional pastry chef, so I've kind of always had a thing for food. And of course I've always had a thing for anime. And although food has always had an important role to play in anime (just look at all the food in Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon, for example) I never realized there could truly be anime where food was the main focus.
One of these such anime is being simulcast with Japan right now and is called "Dagashikashi". "Dagashi" is usually translated as "traditional Japanese sweets" but I've learned through the show that they encompass so much more than that. They are generally inexpensive treats, both sweet and savory, that are primarily aimed at children. These treats are surrounded by a sense of nostalgia, since many of them have been produced for fifty years or more.
So, since these dagashi are discussed at length in the anime, of course I've been yearning to try them for myself... luckily, included in this month's snack subscription is a special pack of dagashi! This pack contains a variety of dagashi, including two Umaibo (who's mascot I thought was Doraemon for the longest time), a marshmallow snack, an orange tablet candy, a cola and lemon hard candy, some konpeito (sugar stars), a strawberry gum in a box, a crunchy mochi snack, and a baseball shaped jelly. I actually remember buying the strawberry gum in a box from the local Asian market when I was in high school, so it's even nostalgic for me!
The Umaibo came in two flavors, shrimp and mayonnaise - which I will pass on to my husband - and vegetable salad, which was absolutely delicious. It's hard to explain the flavor but it was tangy and slightly spicy and didn't really taste like vegetables at all. The marshmallow was also surprisingly good - it had chocolate in the center, making it like an inside out hot chocolate!
Although it's hard to follow up on the heels of a treasure chest such as that, the addictive flavor of the New York Mayonnaise Snack manages to do just that. This is a crispy corn snack that I guess is supposed to taste like mayonnaise but honestly I just get a nice tang, like a cool ranch sort of flavor. Why is this named "New York Mayonnaise Snack"? No idea. Maybe the Japanese think Americans eat a lot of mayonnaise.
Moving onto the sweets, we have a green tea and chocolate concoction this month called the "Porte Chocolate Snack". This is supposed to consist of a crisp cookie base with a green tea mousse on top, covered in chocolate. Unfortunately, mine melted somewhere along the way and now most closely resemble chocolate puddles. :(
I was a little leery to try the next snack, which is dried Umeboshi (plum). The kind of umeboshi I am used to are the super sour and salty pickled kind, and I wasn't sure that would make a good snack. And wow was I right! These are very sour. Still, kind of addictive though? I may make some rice and use these in it instead of trying to eat them right out of the bag.
The next snack is a rice cracker that almost did me in. This is a pack of a bite size rice cracker mix that the information card described as "Chilly Kaki no Tane Rice Cracker". What I think they meant is CHILI, not chilly! These were so spicy that they almost took the roof of my mouth off! So. Much. Pain. I'll be passing these on to my husband the spice fiend, but I think they may be too spicy even for him. I think my tongue is bleeding. UPDATE: My husband liked them just fine and apparently I am the world's biggest wuss.
Wanting to play it safe with the next snack, I picked out one of the "Premium Corn Snacks". These came in a pack of three, with Pepper & Bacon flavor, Kinpira Gobu flavor, and Mentaiko flavor. I chose the Pepper & Bacon flavor. This was so good! It's very similar to the Umaibo, a puffed tube shaped corn snack with flavor powder on it, only this one's texture was just a little less fluffy. The flavor tasted just like corn chowder though, so I was extremely happy.
Venturing back into the danger zone... the next snack is "Tuna and Cheese". No, not tuna and cheese flavored. Actual tuna and actual cheese. This one was.. weird. Even though it was packed with some sort of liquid, the actual texture was very dry and the flavor was fishy/cheesy/sweet. I don't think I will be finishing this bag.
Finally we got another DIY candy kit this month! This is "Oekaki Sorbet" which is apparently a snack you have to freeze. I couldn't find English instructions anywhere, but it seemed simple enough.
I just added water to the second line in the first compartment, then added the blue powder and stirred it until it dissolved. I did this on my kitchen table today, so I apologize for the lighting!
After that I poured the liquid into the provided molds.
Then I filled the three compartments with water, again to the second line, and added each of the colored powders and stirred.
Then I took the provided dropper and used it to mix about 1/2 of a dropper full of each color in the last compartments, making three new colors.
I then used the dropper to plop dots of each color into the already prepared molds.
This, then, went off into the freezer for thirty minutes. And the final result? Tasted kind of like ramune ice with gelatin balls in it. Also, the giraffe broke when I was trying to get him out. :(
Final thoughts: Even though there were some terrible, terrible misses this month, as usual I had fun exploring Japanese culture via food and that dagashi pack made me happy enough to forgive anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment