Hey guys! I have some exciting things to show you.
You probably know by now how much of a picky eater I am.
And the thing I love second best about Japan (after Jun) is Japanese food!
So today I have some of my favorite foods from Japan to show you.
So I'm super excited about it; I hope you guys will like them, too.
And all of these are things that are really super easy and
quick to make because you guys know how much I hate cooking.
So these are perfect meals for me!
So the first thing I want to show you is something called furikake.
Now furikake is like seasoning, like flavored seasoning that you can put on rice.
Because if you're someone like me and you're not used to eating rice every day eventually
after a while you're just like NOOO! NO MORE RICE, PLEASE!!
So you need a little something extra to make it taste a little bit better.
And as far as furikake goes this one is fairly healthy.
It's 12 shurui no yasai, so there's 12 different types of vegetables in here.
Okay, so I'm going to show you what the furikake looks like on some rice.
Sorry if this rice doesn't look very good because I don't have my rice cooker here.
So as you can see it's just little flavoring that you
add to your rice so it tastes a little bit better.
I don't know how easily I can pick this up with chopsticks—
I probably should have used like a fork or a spoon or something.
Let's see!
It tastes so good!
It doesn't taste like vegetables at all, even though it looks like vegetables.
It's a little sweet.
I would say there's like...
there's a little bit of a salty kick, and there's also a little bit of a sweet flavor.
One of my favorite Japanese foods is karashi mentaiko for pasta sauce.
And what it is is—mentaiko are like little fish eggs
and it sounds kind of weird but they're so good!
And this is actually my favorite type.
I've probably had mentaiko in about like... at least five different restaurants in Japan.
So I've had like five different versions of restaurant mentaiko
plates anywhere between like maybe $7-13 and these little packets that you can get at the
store for like $1-2 are absolutely my favorite!
It's so much cheaper than the restaurants and it tastes so much better.
So this one, karashi mentaiko, it has a little bit of a
spice flavor to it so it makes it taste really good.
Okay, so inside here there's two packets of sauce and nori, or seaweed.
I actually don't have spaghetti but you can eat this with any type of pasta at all.
And I already tore the package but you can see there are two steps here:
boil noodles and pour the packets on the pasta.
So, so easy to make!
But I like heating the sauce up first so that the sauce is warm, too.
But all I do is I just put it under the water when I'm draining
my boiled water for pasta so you don't even have to put it in the microwave or anything.
It smells so good!
And if I zoom in you can see just how small
the little mentaiko eggs are so this isn't something that will gross you out easily—
like you can't really even see them if you're looking at it normally.
So it's really easy to eat as far as fish eggs go!
Sorry, I'm not a plating expert like Jun.
This doesn't look as good as it would if he had made it.
It's been so long!!
Hisashiburi~
Oh, it's so good!
And then we have Calorie Mate!
And what Calorie Mate is, is it's a type of Japanese nutrition bar.
And these are perfect for me because they're so small and you can take them with
you anywhere and there's a ton of different vitamins and minerals in them.
And for me, sometimes when I wake up in the morning my stomach just does NOT want food!
So I can't eat right away and if I have to go somewhere I need to
take breakfast with me or something when I can finally eat it later.
So Calorie Mate is perfect for me for that.
There's a ton of different flavors: there's chocolate, which is my absolute favorite.
There's maple, cheese... let's see, potato, and fruits!
And actually I haven't tried these before.
So sometime I'll do like a taste test comparison for you guys.
They come in little packets like this.
And they're just little sticks, and I'll show you.
They're a little... [dry]. It kind of looks like a little biscuit.
This is so good! This tastes so good.
It's not like a really super strong flavor.
It's just a little bit chocolatey.
When I first went to Japan Jun made all of
my meals for me and he brought me out this green drink one time and I was like, "What
is this?!" But it was so good!
And it was Matcha au lait.
And ever since then I ask him to make me matcha au lait all the time.
Matcha is a finely ground green tea powder—it's
one of the most expensive types of green tea.
And there are so many things that are matcha flavored in Japan.
Like there's tons of matcha desserts, there's matcha ice cream,
there's matcha mochi...
And some of them, like matcha itself is really bitter, so I
don't like matcha ice cream at all.
But this one is really sweet.
I love this drink!
All right, so here we have our blendy stick, and as you can see there are two steps:
pour it into the cup and then pour hot water into the cup and mix.
So, very easy.
And I'm a rebel—I'm doing it backwards.
I already have my hot water.
Delicious!
This is definitely something you have to try!
I got all of these off of Rakuten Global Market, which is the international version of Rakuten.
And if you don't know what Rakuten is, it's the biggest online "shopping mall" in Japan.
We don't really have a comparison for it here because not only do they have individual stores
where you can find pretty much everything in Japan
(like as far as normal products go I have yet to see
something I haven't been able to find selling on Rakuten),
they also have an auction website
(which I've bought a bunch of dresses off of before, and I was going to show you those
the last time I was in Japan but I ran out of time so look forward to that later),
and they're also a bank, with like credit cards and everything, which Jun uses.
So Jun and I have used all of the different parts of Rakuten and it's huge, it's really
great, and now they have an international website so if you're not in Japan you can
buy pretty much anything from Japan that you want to look for.
So I put all of these links
down in the description below, and if you're watching this video right now actually starting
tomorrow they have an international campaign for like free shipping and they also have
like a contest where you can win I think like plane tickets or something, so I put that
link down in the description, too.
Thanks for watching guys! I'll see you next time!