7-11 - ice cream as a cultural experience
My grrl friends out there know that I love ice cream. I’m pretty positive I inherited this trait from my mother, who has the same weakness. My favourite ice cream back in Canada was Haagen Dasz Triple Brownie Overload: chocolate ice cream with shards of dark chocolate, bitter roasted almond pieces, and chewy brownie bits. mmmmmm.
(note to self: do NOT write about chocolate while experiencing PMS - excuse me while I go get a small piece of Venezuela Bitter {the best dark chocolate I’ve found easily accessible and affordable in Japan})
I also enjoyed green tea ice cream when I could find it, and rich vanilla ice cream with either chocolate or dark cherries in it. One of the things I was looking forward to in Japan was easy access to green tea ice cream. Little did I know…
There is a 7-11 within view of our apartment. Ed has blogged a little of the wonders that are Japanese convenience stores (called combini here). In Canada I would never have thought of buying my lunch at a 7-11. never. shudder. But here it is a common occurrence. Just the other day I bought 2 onigiri (triangle shaped sushi rice wrapped in seaweed with a filling - one salmon and one kombu seaweed one) and a set of inari (deep-fried tofu pockets soaked in a sweet syrup and stuffed with rice that’s been mixed with ginger and mushrooms). I also bought an aloe yogurt drink and ICE CREAM.
The decision is often difficult. There are the “Coolish” squeezy tubes with vanilla (mmmm) green tea (mmmm) and cappuccino (not so mmm) ice cream. There are the 7-11 brand cheap ice cream bars. There are the waffle-covered ice cream sandwiches with some wrestling guy on them. But I usually linger over and then grab one of the Haagen Dasz ice creams. These are not the 500mL tubs you see in the freezer in Canada, these are small fit-in-your-palm sized containers for ¥300 a pop. (After you pay ¥150 for an apple, ¥300 seems reasonable for a small tub of ice cream. ¥300=about $3.75CAN) Flavours include adzuki bean, matcha (ceremonial green tea), mango, chai, strawberry, and cherry vanilla. (At least those are the flavours I remember. They change with the season, as many snack foods do in Japan - that’s fodder for another post)
I remember the first time I bought the adzuki bean flavour. I had been here for a few weeks and the 7-11 ladies had started to recognize me. I came up to the counter with my small tub of ice cream and my change purse and the women at till asked me if I knew what I was buying. Did I like adzuki beans? Had I tried them before? Didn’t I think it was strange to have beans in ice cream? Did they have adzuki bean ice cream in Canada?
I assured her I had eaten adzuki beans before (though not in ice cream) and bought the tub of creamy goodness. And it was good. And yes, there are whole adzuki beans soaked in sugar in the ice cream. mmmmmmm.
The green tea ice cream varies in quality depending on brand. Haagen Dasz is by far the best. I think they have the highest concentration of matcha in their ice cream. The Coolish brand is good in a pinch, and is great when you know you’ll be walking somewhere as it is in this bag thing with a straw with lid attached. Ed told me (i.e. I’m not convinced it’s true) that ice cream makers use matcha ice cream to clean out the tubes in the machines. hmmmmm. It is a little grainy. I only seem to think about this when I’m partaking of the Coolish brand though. Could be the straw…
There are also many ice cream bars. There is a type that is very hard ice-like ice cream on the outside and then liquid cream on the inside. Messy. A little {ahem} sexual, shall we say? But tasty nonetheless. All sorts of flavours: melon, green tea, adzuki bean, mikan (what we know as christmas oranges), strawberry. Yum.
But the piece de resistance, the Haagen Dasz parfait. There is a Caramel Mochaccino flavour - but not being a coffee drinker, I went straight to the “Japanese Classic” parfait. Kuromitsu sauce, green tea ice cream, adzuki beans, rich cream ice cream, and adzuki bean paste.
Stay tuned for the “Virtual Haagen Dasz Japanese Classic Parfait” coming soon to these pages :)
June 13th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
Apologies in advance, but I’m in nitpicking mode since I’ve just spent the last twelve hours fiddling with some really fussy code on my blog.
First nit: I don’t think I ever declared the “matcha as ice cream machine cleaner” as a fact. It was purely conjecture, based on my anecdotal knowledge that they use chocolate powder to scrape out the pipes in Canadian milk factories.
The second nit has to do with your favourite ice cream manufacturer, and how the name is spelled. It’s Häagen-Dazs, with a ZS, not the other way around, plus the words are hyphenated. The heavy metal umlaut on the first A in Häagen may or may not be optional. Their site is here.
June 13th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
One more thing. You can see all of the Japanese flavours here. Though you’ll need to be able to read a bit of Japanese.
June 13th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
ya ya ya. yadda yadda yadda.
“The matcha as ice cream machine cleaner” was something you said once. Like I said, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but you said it and now I think of it every time I have green tea Coolish.
Re: the spelling of Häagen-Dazs - how the heck do you do an umlaut in this program anways? (Aside from cutting & pasting like I just did now.) You must also remember that I come from that family of the most horrible of spellers. You’re lucky I remember to put in both “a”s and the “z”!
pbhtttt.
June 13th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
The heavy metal umlaut is achieved by typing option-u, immediately followed by typing the character you want the ¨ to levitate above. Not all characters are allowed, but you can do all of the vowels.
June 13th, 2005 at 9:51 pm
The above instructions are for mac users. I have no idea how to do it on a Windows machine, but I suspect it involves ALT and 4-digit numeric codes.
June 14th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
wow Lia..pretty adventurous with the bean ice cream. isn’t it amazing how much food becomes a fixation when you are out of your own culture? what are you craving the most from here….
good to hear from you. and great news about your acceptance to the program in England Bravo!
June 14th, 2005 at 7:48 pm
Hi Patricia! Trust me, the adzuki bean ice cream rocks! More on that in an upcoming post :)
Food I miss from Canada? Good heavy bread - rye, kamut, etc. Found a decent (but only decent) rye bread but it’s very heavy and an hour train ride away. Most of the bread here is white and pasty. Like eating a sponge. You can occasionally find it with actual grains in it, but the surrounding dough is still white and pasty. Jarrod loves the stuff.
June 15th, 2005 at 1:30 am
Sounds like you life in the land of Wonderbread :) Now I must go to the store and get some ice cream!
June 15th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Land of Wonderbread is right! The 1940s faux American land of Wonderbread, complete with overly made-up women in high heels and aprons at the grocery stores, and battalions of men in their suits and ties.
Though the suit and tie thing may change soon. Check out this article.
June 15th, 2005 at 9:23 am
Hi there! I’m so glad you decided to join the World of Blogs so I can catch up with you more often.
BTW, did you create your own program or are you importing something like Blogspot?
Anyways, just wanted to say hello… Jodi
June 15th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
Jodi, as the alpha geek of our household, I could probably give you a long-winded and incomprehensible answer about Lia’s blog setup but I’ll spare you. Here’s the simple explanation:
Lia’s blog is an independent installation of a blogging program called Wordpress, on my web server. The visual design was taken from a site for sharing such. I’ve also installed a few customizations, and will probably add some more goodies once I’ve finished tweaking my own blog, which runs the same software but looks completely different.
June 16th, 2005 at 5:21 am
Ed - Thanks for the info. One of these days I’d love to be able to do something like that but my Geekatude isn’t up to snuff yet… yet. I’ll go check out your blog as well.
March 14th, 2007 at 5:26 am
アイスクリームを食べ過ぎるとデブになってしまうんだ！！！
March 14th, 2007 at 5:27 am
でも、美味しいだから、遠慮しにくいなんだ。
March 15th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Baskin-Robbins in Japan makes a very nice adzuki bean ripple ice cream, but their maccha is a little on the “generic vanilla with some maccha powder added” side.
There’s a green tea shop on the main street in Koriyama — just down from the train station — that has a maccha soft-serve window at the corner. Talk about a treat: A large American-style cone (think Dairy Queen) of rich, green soft-serve! YUMMMMM!
Many of the snacks available at 7-11 have unfortunate English names. There was one particularly tasty item - a sweet biscuit tube filled with chocolate paste - called “Choco Colon”…
March 16th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
俺はかぼちゃ味大好きだ
March 16th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
もんさい: you’ve posted in Japanese here a number of times as well as on my site (I’m Lia’s husband, my site is at edpas.net). Who are you? We can understand a little of your comments, and can get a bit more of an understanding using online translation pages. But neither is very good at reading kanji.
I—and some members of Lia’s family—would have to agree that sometimes it is hard to resist the temptation of good ice cream. As for kabocha, are you talking about kabocha in general or kabocha-flavoured ice cream? I’ve never had the latter.
March 25th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
ごめんよ。英語できないな。
日本語しか喋られない。でも、オンラインの通訳サイトで、テキスト入力したら、翻訳が表示するぞ。かぼちゃは英語でPumpkinっていうんだろ？そうだ、味のことについて喋っています。
俺も賛成！！アイスクリームは最高！！！
俺は日本に住んでる少年だけだ。
じゃな
March 25th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
ところでよ、日本語できないかエッドくん？日本に住んでたくせに。