Japanese Ice Cream

Well lately I have been thinking to myself that I wanted to post more to the blog but I did not want to just post “crap.” So the other day I was talking to my younger brother and he asked me about some rice covered ice cream here in Japan.

Tonight I was looking at what I think he was talking about with the rice covered ice cream and it hit me (not the ice cream[I sometimes need to correct Japanese students on English grammar {scary thought} so this is to be clear what the it refers to]). If Josh is curious about rice covered ice cream everyone will be so that would make a good post for the blog (and it gives me an excuse to buy some more ice cream[insert sound effects of Homer Simpson for donuts] mmm ice cream[/effects]).

So I went to the local Seiyou (actually owned by Wal-Mart) and picked up a couple of “Japanese” style ice creams. The first is a green tea ice cream and the second was the “rice” covered ice cream, which are shown below before and after taking them out of their packaging.




I only put out a few of the the green tea variety.

For reference I have also added shots of the ice cream after cutting them in half. Sadly things begain to melt because of the time it took me walk back to the apartment.


What you can see for the green tea ice cream is that it has a kind of outer and inner shell. For the rice covered ice cream there is an outer coating around the ice cream middle.

I sampled both varieties and came to this conclusion. The green tea variety was not really an ice cream but rather more of a frozen green tea with sweeteners. The rice covered variety the ice cream in the middle was a good basic vanilla and the outer covering added a nice texture to the whole affair.

The green tea variety I sadly really did not care for. I to drink green tea either hot or cold but this does not do green tea justice. I really think the sweeteners take away from the overall taste.

For the rice covered variety, it was quite good, the vanilla was good and the covering was also nice. I am not sure if the covering is actually rice or made of rice. Maybe during the next week or two I will try to ask someone.

Finally in conclusion there were some more Japanese ice creams that I did not try for a couple of reasons. One very simply was that I was afraid of the flavors. I could not read the boxes and the pictures did not fill me with confidence. The second reason was these were not sold in individual packs so I would need to buy a big box. I do not have a freezer nor the appetite to eat that much ice cream at once (besides, mothers around the world probably frown on that). Below is a picture that I took of the display in the store.

An excuse to test out my calendar

This an excuse to test out the calendar on the side. I copied this from someone else. If anyone wants source code I would be happy to give it to you or you can copy it right out of the html code for this page. I know I probably don't have the colors right but I am not a graphic artist.

In other updates I have added a bunch of buttons all for getting in contact with me so you can take your pick.

That's all for now,

Imoni Party

Imoni means something long the lines of potato. This party is basically like a harvest festival. This party is a relatively local festival in that if you ask people from Tokyo about this they would not know what it is about. The tradition of the festival consists of going down to the river sometime in late September or October and cooking up a few different soups.

So our lab had our Imoni party on Friday. Below is a picture of one of the typical soups that were made.



One thing you will notice is that the soups are made using a big pot over a camp fire. When I was thinking about this coming up this year I wanted to do bring something somewhat American to this event. What I came up with was S'mores. For a change I will not need to explain to you guys what s'mores are which is a change from last week where I had to explain to everyone what they are.

Last weekend I went to the import store and bought the marshmallows and the graham crackers. The chocolate is sold in almost all of the stores (it was not Hersey's chocolate close enough).

After one of the soups finished cooking I got one volunteer (victim) to get started cooking their marshmallow. I realized it is difficult to tell people that you want to cook the marshmallow but be careful not to burn it because it is easy to burn. The other thing I realized is that it would have been nice to have a table to work on but oh well. Finally, I now have more respect for my mother and other people who were in charge of metering out the chocolate and graham crackers because I was trying to keep up with the influx of people with cooked marshmallows.

Below are various pictures of the roasting of the marshmallows.

The cooking


Me trying to keep up with everyone.


And the aftermath.

A story from Argyle

Well this does not have anything to do with Japan except that I am sitting at my desk in Japan to write this.

When, my parents farm began chopping (harvesting) corn this fall one of the tractors basically died. This was not one of your average dieing, this tractor went in a blaze of glory, well maybe not glory but defiantly a blaze. No one was hurt thankfully. The first picture is a picture of the same tractor as we had that I found on the web. The next two are of the tractor after the incident.






This is a shot of the hole that was made in the engine block from the tractor over reving.


More of the burnt out tractor

Basically what happened the governor on the turbo charger for the engine broke. This allowed the engine to get into a runaway condition. Once the engine was in a runaway condition it over heated and one of the pistons in the engine broke which beat the hole in the side of the engine block which you see. From there the tractor caught on fire and they ended up calling the fire department to put the fire out.

One of the surprising outcomes from this is after the fire we thought that it would be difficult to get rid of the tractor but within one week they had four offers for the tractor.

revving
reeving
raving
riving
roving
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