Sweet potatoes and chestnuts, a sure sign fall is here. Well, by the calendar anyway, not according to the weather which is still in the mid-80s many days. Most nights are cooler though. Anyway, Japan is still a country of seasonal foods and flavors, although these days not always through natural foods. There has always been a huge variety of snack foods - senbei (rice crackers, my favorite), interesting candies, western style sweets and Japanese sweets, drinks and frozen treats. But lately the snack companies have gotten on the seasonal bandwagon and there are so many 'limited time' snacks available. The ever present convenience stores are masters at these. For example, there will be pickled plum (umeboshi) flavored potato chips and senbei in the summer along with watermelon flavored ice pops and soda, in the late summer/early fall aisan pear flavor kicks in and now in mid-fall it is sweet potatoes, Japanese pumpkin (but not with our usual pumpkin pie type spice) and chestnuts. Even McDonalds has limited time (usually one or two months I think) special items and shake flavors. It's interesting and people definitely look forward to and buy them eagerly. I usually miss things because I always say, not now, but I will try it - and then it's gone!
Another fall tradition seems to be for kids to go sweet potato digging, usually with school but families also enjoy it. Sort of like our apple picking. We took the 2 older classes last week and had a picnic lunch together and some playground time afterwards. It was a beautiful day and lots of fun.
Once again the moms did a good job with the cute lunches.
On Friday night I finally got to try motsu nabe which is a hot pot made with innards, maybe intestines but we're having a hard time figuring out exactly what innards they are... I went with Maki and Shioli and Maki's children. It was good and I think it will be easy enough to make at home.
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| The black stuff on the left is a kind of fungus, I think it is called cloud ear mushroom and is seen in Chinese food often. |
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| This was a delicious fried chicken wing with the bone removed. |
The Character Festival
They held this festival in Hikone last year too but I didn't go thinking there would be a lot of strange teenagers obsessed with animation and characters. But this year I didn't have anything else to do and it was a beautiful day so I thought I'd go and take some pictures and then leave. It turned out to have very little to do with animation, most of the characters were from the different prefectures and there were tons of families with young children and babies. There were also lots of festival food booths - yeah! Many of the booths had tourist info so I have a bag full of stuff to read and and decide if I'd like to visit those places in the next couple of years.
My pal Sudachi kun from Tokushima was there!
Snack time.
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| This is anmitsu. Some rice dumplings with sweet syrup and sweet beans and dried fruit (unusual) . |
Saturday night Emily had a scary movie night - although happily we ended up watching Beetlejuice since Shioli and I don't like scary movies. Fun snacks too.
Sunday was a beautiful day too.
Out for a ride.
And a stop at the small fair at the community center. Displays of artwork,
some entertainment, and food booths.
Still didn't want to go home so I rode over to the lake and then stopped to see the hospital sheep.
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