Silent Auction of Japanese "Sweetness"

**We have a winner!** Thanks to carliches for a winning bid of $45! Carliches, please e-mail me at carolie (at) wordmagix (dot) com and attach a copy of your paypal donation receipt. We can discuss what kind of bento you'd like, and then I'll send out your Japanese goodies. Thank you all for participating! (And anyone interested in Japanese candy or bento, please feel free to e-mail, and I'd be happy to work something out for you -- no profit to me, of course!) Please check out other auctions, still going on, by visiting Design Mom's blog.

Every day, wonderful things happen on this planet. And every day, tragedies happen. We can't stop either one. But we often have the opportunity to make a difference, even if it's a small one. Here's a chance for me -- and by extension, a chance for you -- to make one small difference.

A small private plane crashed in Utah on August 16, 2008, seriously injuring a young married couple. They're both in the hospital (and will be for quite some time). Their four small children are with relatives for the moment. Their medical bills will be HUGE. You can read more about the Nie family here. Click on the "about Nie" link on the banner to read what happened.

Here's the helping part. Across the Internet, auctions are being held to benefit the Nie family. For my silent auction contribution, I'm offering a Japanese "Sweetness" (and more!) package, shipped directly to you from Sasebo, Japan (click on each photo for a larger image.) Included in the package will be:

• A small Hello Kitty plushie for a keychain or for hanging from a schoolbag or handbag -- she's dressed in a panda bear costume and holds a pink heart
• Two boxes of Pocky (chocolate and strawberry-dipped cookie/pretzel sticks)
• One box of Toppo (thin cookie sticks filled with green tea cheesecake cream)
• Panda bear cookies with white and milk chocolate
• A smll bottle of shoyu, aka soy sauce, especially for sashimi/sushi (this ain't Kikkoman's!)
• A packe of toasted white sesame seeds, great for baking, or for grinding over noodles
• A packet of toasted black sesame seeds, ditto
• Spicy rice crackers with peanuts
• Lychee hard candies (with a magic "cool" center!)
• Green tea hard candies
• Peach hard candies
• A box of "do it yourself fondant", with four colored soft candies and a little wooden tool so you (or your kids) can make adorable shapes and squeal at all the cuteness before eating it all up (this is not a cake decorating kit, it's an interactive candy)
• An oshibori (handcloth) to pack with any bento or lunchbox (moisten the cloth, tuck it in the little carrying case, use it to wipe hands before lunchtime -- much better for the environment than paper napkins or wet-wipes!)
• The most darling little bear heads, used to protect and decorate cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, whatever you want to cute-i-fy in your lunch!
• SPECIAL BONUS! I will select and include a small, two-tiered bento box, perfect for lunch for you or your child! The winning bidder will be able to choose from plain (green, pink, blue, silver, black, faux wood), decorated (bunnies, flowers, bees, etc.) or character (Dragonball-Z, Hello Kitty, Cinnamaroll, etc.)
• Retail value of the package: approximately $40-60, depending on the bento box selected -- bidding to begin at $20

To quote DesignMom, who is heading up all this auction wonderfulness:

I'm hoping people are in a public radio mindset. Like when you hear the NPR commentators say: "pledge your membership of only $75.00 and we'll send you this canvas tote bag with our logo on it." You know the tote bag is worth maybe $5. But it's not about that. You're looking for a way to be generous and supportive. And the tote bag is just a bonus.

Please visit DesignMom's site for more auctions!

How this silent auction works:

1. Please place your bid by leaving a comment with your bid amount in the comments section. Check the comments to see the most recent high bid.
2. Following the close of the auction,
• I will contact the winner (make sure your comment bid includes an e-mail address or link to your blog or some way to contact you).
• The winner will pay the amount of their winning bid to the Stephanie and Christian PayPal account.
• The winner will then forward the PayPal receipt to me at carolie@wordmagix.com.
• I will send your package (I'll pay the postage!)
3. Please bid in increments of whole dollars. The auction will end at midnight EST on Friday, September 5, 2008.
4. Thank you for participating!

Dragonfruit Season

Edited with a new image, below!

It's been far, far too long since I've managed to post here, and I apologize. Our unexpected trip to the US, my mother-in-law's passing, pneumonia, and simply having a husband at home again have all taken their toll. But...it's time to get back to adventures, and I'm still so very behind! Here's another grocery store story, to tide us all over until I can post more this weekend about my adventures with MM.

I was browsing through my favorite neighborhood grocery recently, examining the produce, which never fails to surprise me. There were the plump and lovely summer tomatoes (remember how that one turned out?) and deeply-pigmented bell peppers, shinier and smaller than the broad-shouldered monsters I'm used to. I edged along the aisle lined with careful rows of hideously expensive canteloupes and spherical watermelons, jewel-faceted plastic bowls of tiny tangerines and heaps of slender, purply-black eggplant. Ginger, cleaner and less wrinkly than the knobs in the commissary, sits beside something that looks like ginger, but isn't, with reddish bud shapes growing out of it like the buds of a waterlily. There are delicate stacks of toothy shiso leaves and several versions of scallions of varying thickness and straightness (the long onion I've read about in cookbooks?), beside obscenely thick and pale logs of daikon radish.

The boxes of perfect white button mushrooms are quite expensive, and each box contains perhaps ten small mushrooms...but as if to make up for it, there are so many other varieties of fungus. There are bunches of tiny, willowy enoki, like bleached dandelion stems after the fuzz has been blown away, and fresh, flat-capped shiitake piled like skipping stones. There are fat mushrooms, all thick stem with a little flare of cap at one end, and bouquets of brown-capped mushrooms that seem to be separate until one picks up a package and finds all the stems are fused at the bottom into one big clump, and one ruffly kind of mushroom that looks as if it's trying to pretend to be a head of lettuce.

One largeish refrigerated section of this tiny market is entirely filled with small plastic bags of pickles -- a huge variety of land and sea vegetables in brine or vinegar, with garlic, with sandy miso paste, with tiny red rings of chiles.

One of the things I like the most about Japanese markets is the seasonal availability of the produce. Sure, some things are available year-round, and that is the case more and more. But much more than in American markets, certain things are only available when they're in season...which means they're still being bred for taste and sweetness and succulence and aroma, not how well they'll travel or how long they'll last on the shelf. There's also a great reverence for produce from certain areas....mushrooms and potatoes from Hokkaido, gigantic, frosted-black-skinned clusters of grapes from Kyoto, peaches from this area and apples from that.

Yes, quite often the produce is insanely expensive by American standards, but to be honest, I think I'd rather have a single basket of strawberries so fragrant and sweet I'll remember them for months, than a basket every month of hard, green-tasting berries with no scent. Suddenly I can imagine spending two or three dollars on a single peach, when I'll only need the one, and it will be an experience of really savouring a single exquisite fruit. I finally truly, viscerally understand the concept of quality over quantity. Can you really remember the last bunch of grapes you ate? The last apple? The last time you closed your eyes and sighed with pleasure from the experience of eating one perfect tangerine? The memory of the peach I chose is going to stay with me for a long, long time...and I'd rather wait with anticipation for the next season than have a tasteless imitation out of season.

I chose an inexpensive (relatively -- less than $6) globe of a watermelon, and an intensely fragrant, Roald Dahl-style peach, almost half as big as the watermelon, and a clear plastic bowl of tiny tangerines. And then, I saw the oddest fruit I've ever seen. It was an oval fruit, larger than an apple, like something that ought to grow out of a cactus. The thick, smooth skin was bright fucshia studded with green-tipped...spines? Flippers? Protruding leaves? One was almost $3 (which I later discovered was insanely cheap...I found less attractive specimens for almost three times that price in another store!) and carefully nestled in a nest of styrofoam netting. I picked one up gingerly, afraid the spiny parts might stick or sting me, and found the sticking-out parts to be relatively soft and leathery, and the fruit itself to be heavy for its size.

Of course I bought one.

The cashier tried to tell me what it was, but it took several tries before I understood that she was trying to tell me in English -- it was a dragonfruit, which made total sense. Take a look. What else would you call it?

I took it home (took photos, of course), and looked it over. How to go about this? Well, there's sort of a hole at one end, where it was attached to its parent, I assume. I took hold of one edge of the hole and pulled. The skin peeled back easily, revealing a white oval of flesh the shape and size of a large goose egg. A knife blade slipped easily into the egg, and a wedge pulled out showed that the flesh was studded throughout with a galaxy of tiny black seeds. No pit, no core. Everything encased by the skin was edible. The taste and texture was much like a kiwi fruit, but without the kiwi's tartness, and the seeds were almost indiscernable, just adding a nice hint of crunch, again like a kiwi. It was pleasantly sweet and very moist, and I enjoyed it very much.

I've since learned from my more knowledgeable friend, D, that dragonfruit are native to Okinawa, there are two types of dragonfruit, and the second type has vivid fucshia flesh. I'll have to keep my eye out for the second kind! After the first one (and the squeal of delight from D when I told her about it!) I hurried back to buy more. I bought one for D, one for myself and Fearless Husband, and one for Miyuki's parents as a gift. That's all...there were no more, and I haven't found any in any store since.

I'll have to mark my calendar for next year, so I don't miss dragonfruit season!

Edited to add the photo of the dragonfruit growing from Emiri! Now I can really see why they call it dragonfruit! And I was sort of right...it looks like the fruit of a cactus/succulent. Thanks for the photo, Em!

The Tomato Sandwich

No photos, as my camera batteries are dead but...

Imagine, if you will, that you are walking through a small neighborhood market in Japan. Your basket is laden with twelve tiny, incredibly sweet local tangerines, two skinny, glossy purple eggplant, ten pale green asparagus spears with tight, fat, rounded heads (almost like a cartoon of asparagus, or pale green Sharpie markers) in two bundles of five fat spears each. You nod and smile at the other shoppers, mostly little old ladies shuffling along like hump-backed snails or young mothers moving at the speed of light with silent infants in tow. (If you're me, you're probably imagining yourself as an integral part of this community, "The Interesting American" as opposed to just another clumsy, loud Navy Wife with a beat-up car. Enjoy this dream while you can.)

After looking over the various prepared foods -- fried octopus, sushi rolls with what looks like a filling of hot dog and lettuce (!!), various rice preparations decorated with nori -- nothing seems quite right with the humid, heavy summer weather outside. Instead, you're drawn to that distinct,slightly spicy scent of summer, the display of large, dusty rose, locally grown tomatoes. How about tomato sandwiches for dinner? Thick slices of scarlet summertime on bakery bread with a little mayonnaise, a little kosher salt, a grinding of black pepper...light, yet luscious, full of childhood memories.

Carefully you select a single fat specimen, fragrant and perfectly ripe -- the kind of tomato that would be delicious tonight, possibly tomorrow, but overly sweet and mushy by the next day.

You peruse the mostly incomprehensible labels on the shelves, selecting (you hope) a small squeeze bottle of the delicious, silky, not-as-heavy-as-American mayonnaise (Kewpie brand, which makes you smile). You've heard the lowfat Japanese mayo is not as sweet as the American brands, so you take the chance on the stuff that has (you think) a quarter of the calories of the regular stuff. Into the basket it goes, and you hold your head high, proud of your health-conscious behavior.

Bread...hmm. The loaf of white bread is cut far too thick, and would be cottony and hard to swallow. There are no whole-grain options, as this is a very small Japanese bakery, running more towards little pastries and loaves of white bread with no heels. Besides, the right summertime tomato sandwich begs for soft, plain bread, not a hearty loaf. Oh, perfect! A package of flat, pale, soft little buns, each with a small sprinkling of black sesame seeds. Each one is just a tiny bit larger than the circumference of your single tomato. You imagine splitting a couple of these, filling them and making that dinner, along with perhaps a little cucumber salad. You even grab your favorite tart lemon soda as a treat, "70 lemons' worth of Vitamin C in every bottle" it proclaims in English.

You check out, proudly using your few words of Japanese with the harried cashier as she rings up your purchases. "Konnichi wa. Arigatou gosaimasu. Arigatou." Nod as if you understand when she tells you how much, sneak a peak at the register display, and hand her your money. When she offers you your trading stamps with an incomprehensible question, refuse them and gesture that she give them to the next person in line, who collects them. She smiles and bows. The cashier smiles and bows. You smile and bow. Once more, with feeling, "Arigatou gosaimasu."

You unpack your bounty at home, and begin supper preparations. You carve the perfect tomato carefully, and taste the mayonnaise (yes, it's amazingly good for lowfat!). Get out the salt and pepper. Open the package of beautiful rolls and pull out two, wrapping the rest for later. Use your serrated knife carefully, so you don't smash or tear the bread.

Wait...the roll is dragging at the knife in a really odd way. The knife emerges smeared with something thick and purply brown. What the...?

Oh.

These aren't little white bread dinner rolls. These are dessert buns filled with a paste of sweetened adzuki beans. Good? Sure...a little bland, a little heavy, but not bad. But for tomato sandwiches? Not even close.

The dream of "The Interesting American" fizzles away, as you slink to the freezer to pull out a Lean Cuisine, hoping it isn't too frostbitten.

Oh well. There's always tomorrow. And now you know the kanji for "adzuki bean paste."