April
05
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So, What DO Cherry Blossoms Taste Like?
Around cherry blossom season in Japan, the shelves suddenly fill with “sakura”-flavored food. But what does cherry blossom-flavored food actually taste like? I investigate.
Cherry blossoms taste like…mini-shrimp potato chips.
Cherry blossoms taste like…plum-flavored whisky & soda.
Cherry blossoms taste like…pinkish berry combo gel and vanilla ice cream.
Cherry blossoms taste like…potato chips sprinkled with ground up bits of plum blossoms.*
And of course, cherry blossoms taste like…beer.
*Edited, thanks to Little Alex, whose comment below quite rightly pointed out that I had been utterly fooled into buying these unseasonal PLUM FLOWER sprinkled chips. Thinking that because they were still on the shelf at hanami time, I misidentified them as sakura flavor (#^.^#)
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When not puzzling over weird Japanese food flavors, Jonelle Patrick writes novels set in Tokyo
“A genuinely gripping crime thriller which wrong-foots and perplexes the reader throughout, drawing us in emotionally . . . Highly recommended.” –Raven Crime Reads
For nine years, Tokyo Detective Kenji Nakamura thought his mother’s death was an accident. Then he gets a call, and his life begins to unravel. Because if it wasn’t an accident…what was it? Read more
And all this time, I thought cherry blossoms just tasted like Pink.
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I like to think of it as different SHADES of pink. heh.
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I always wanted to try the Sakura Haagen Dazs.
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It was actually better than I thought it would be. I haven’t tried the rose flavored on in my freezer yet, though. Kinda dreading that one!
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My mom always says, “cherry beer before cherry liquor, never been cherry sicker; cherry liquor before cherry beer, in the cherry clear.”
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Ahaha, I wish more people heeded that sound cherry advice during cherry season here, as the platform pizzas are especially prevalent at subway stations during o-hanami! (>_<)
And hey, are you getting excited to be here? You're shipping out before the end of the month, right? I don't know when you'll first get leave to come into Tokyo, but it's just about an hour train ride from Yokosuka, I think, and you'll be arriving at a great time of year (not much rain, so you can frant about seeing all kinds of great stuff without getting your feet wet). So envious you get to be here for four years!
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It’s a combination of excitement and terror, though a good deal of my fear comes from it being my first time living on a Navy ship. I hear weekends are pretty free, so I’ll probably spend lots of time in Tokyo… 😀
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Um, a few of the photos are things that are plum blossom flavoured? Or at least that’s what the kanji said.
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Yikes, you are totally right! They were still selling them during hanami (hoping, no doubt, to foist those unseasonal leftovers on fools such as myself) but that’s no excuse for failing to note the ume kanji and ume flowers! Thank you for pointing this out, so I can edit and credit (#^.^#)
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And hey, maybe you know the answer to this: the first one (the shrimp potato chips) says it’s “小梅” flavor, but I thought that referred to the tiny pink shrimp. I now see that they’ve got plum blossoms on the package too, so maybe I’m wrong about that too…?
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