I'm Going to Eat That

Strong Zero is probably one of the best things about Japan in my opinion. Fruity cocktails with 9% alcohol? Sign me up! However, they can do a WICKED number on you and give you a ridiculous hangover. This is why I limit myself to only one. (Try to limit myself...in social situations I can sometimes make the error and drink more than one and I pay for it. I ALWAYS pay for it. Why do I do this to myself???) Anyway, I spotted this Lychee Strong Zero at my local Fuji grocery store. I absolutely had to buy it because I adore lychee! So how did I like it? It was definitely the least alcohol-tasting Strong Zero that I've had. It had a really strong fruity flavour. It was the most like juice that I've tasted. It was good, really good. But because it was so fruity I drank it too fast. It's 54 calories per 100mL, 29 carbs and 4 grams of fat. I liked it but I don't think I'll be buying it too often. I doubt it'll be around for long though.

I like light beer. I just do. I also like low calorie beer. I can't help it. I like to get some bang for my buck but I also like to balance my caloric intake. I am a food tracker and that means finding a balance of what I eat. So Japan is a bit of a haven for me in terms of low calorie beer. There's tons of selection! My favourites are Kirin's Green Label and Asahi Style free. Both have low calories (28 and 24 calories per 100 mL) but still a nice 4% alcohol percentage (pretty standard for beer). They're also light and refreshing. I enjoy having them over the weekend, especially on Friday after a long day of work. The other day I was perusing the alcohol aisle at my local grocery store and noticed there are...lots of other low calorie beers available. Now that I started this blog I told myself ' You should try some of these '. So I grabbed a few. I started with, what is possibly, one of the worst beers I have ever had! Though I tried it first because I h...

I prefer my beers on the lighter and more crisp side. Japanese beers suit me so well. It's like a match made in heaven. I don't like hoppy beers so IPAs and I aren't friends. I won't turn my nose up at one, I'll drink it, but I definitely like the fresh and clean taste of Japanese beers. Though sometimes I want something with a bit more oomph in the taste department. Kirin has me covered there too with their Strong, Low Malt beer. This beer has a stronger and deeper flavour but not as deep as your typical dark beer. It's not a dark beer at all really, it's a low malt beer. My kind of beer. The best thing about this beer is that it's 7% instead of the typical 4-5% alcohol content that beer normally sports. It's something I can drink slower and enjoy instead of the quick gulps that a normal beer accommodates. 100 mL is 51 cal, 2.4g carbohydrates, 0.5g of protein and 0g of fat. Overall it was delicious and I really enjoyed it. This is my sec...

Now for a food that I ate last night, 東洋水産 - マルちゃん正麺 味噌味 (More simply, Maru-chan's Miso Ramen). A bit of a background, there are several type of ramen but typically you'll find your ramen falls into one of four broth categories. Salt, Shoyu (soy), Miso or Tonkotsu (pork). This particular one was a miso broth base. The entire thing is 108 grams. A single package is 365 calories, 67.1g of carbohydrates, 6.4g of fat, 9.7g of protein and 2,300mg of sodium. A lot of sodium but that's honestly to be expected with instant noodles. You don't go for ramen without knowing the massive sodium content you're getting yourself into. That being said, I did not consume the entire package of ramen. As I typically do, I cut the block of noodles in half. I cooked a single half and added in lots of veggies and a hard boiled egg. I also weighed out half of the broth. The broth for this particular one is not one you add to the noodles. What you do is cook the noodles, put th...

Latte Base is a drink offered by the brand Boss. Boss specializes in canned coffee and as someone who enjoys coffee...I've had quite a few of their drinks. This particular drink is a Latte base! The bottle is 490mL but it's meant to make 9 drinks! Yes, 9 drinks. How? Well, it's a base for lattes. So you add your desired amount of water or milk to the base to make a drink! Add ice cream to make a float, add soy milk for a soy latte, hot or cold...whatever you like!! This particular flavour is Tiramisu Chocolate. It's incredibly sweet. As of right now I've just added milk to it and it closely resembled the canned coffees you can buy at convenience stores. I plan on trying to add water and making it hot over the weekend if I can. I've only used two of the servings so far! You mix one part base, 3 parts of whatever else you want to add. I'm assuming for black coffee...you just add water (my Japanese reading skills are still developing so this involves a ...

In Japan there is Valentine's Day on February 14th. However, one month later on March 14th it's White Day. On Feb. 14th it's expected that women give chocolate to the men in their lives. Not just their significant other but...all of them. Obligatory chocolate is common in the work place. Men are supposed to return the favour on March 14th but let's just say....this is typically not done. Especially in the work place. Men tend to benefit from these gifts of chocolate but conveniently forget to do anything in return. What does this mean? Well, it means a lot of special snacks went on sale after March 14th in my local grocery store. Lots of them. Buckets full of them. As you can see on the above image, I got this box on a discount! 30% off! This box contains raspberry champagne flavoured Pocky. Pocky, for those of you who live under a rock, are thin chocolate covered biscuits. They normally come in a pack with many of the tasty treats. However this one was quite di...

This is another old one that I had originally placed on my instagram story. (Hence the words on the picture) There is tons of instant ramen here, an entire aisle of it at any grocery store. There's a lot to pick from and thus I can often feel a little overwhelmed and just stick to what I'm familiar with instead of braving the unknown. Furthermore, lots of these packets are just noodles and broth (or sauce) but the images on the packaging have vegetables and meat. A bunch of goodies. Basically, you can just buy these and just eat the noodles. However, what I prefer to do is deck them out. Go to the vegetable area and grab a bunch of veggies to pad out the noodles. You end up with a much better dish overall and (depending on how many veggies you add) you might be able to stretch the noodles into two meals instead of one! Now I no longer have this wrapper so I can't properly give you a lot of information besides the image you see above. It was a tonkatsu ramen, aka, ...

Limited Edition Flavour Here we have the first snack spotlight. I bought this a couple of months ago and I've already eaten them but I took a photo for the sake of remembering. This special, limited edition flavour, is Honey Butter. Takenoko no Sato are a chocolate and biscuit snack made by meiji. Typically they look like the below image. A chocolate that's slightly darker than milk chocolate and an airy biscuit. They're very addictive to snack on. Original flavour Unfortunately I no longer have the box so I can't include any more nutritional information and how much was inside the box. So we'll move on to the special edition description. Honey butter was a very, very popular flavour of chip/crisp in South Korea while I lived there. Korea preferred more sweet chips that I was used to back in Canada. However, it had never crossed my mind to have Honey Butter as a chocolate flavour. I was very, very hesitant about these but I knew I had to give them a tr...

Katsuo tataki (Kochi regional dish) teishoku Welcome all! Part of living in Japan means being surrounded by amazing food all the time. A trip to the grocery store can be such an adventure! Part of me wants to try all of these foods and the other part wants to share them with the world (okay, just my friends and family). So, I've decided to document my food adventures here. Some things I want to include: Ramen Reviews (with a whole aisle dedicated to instant ramen...we need to figure out which ones are worth it, and which ones shouldn't be bothered with) Limited Edition Snack Spotlight (new varieties of snacks come out all the time and sometimes they're so bizarre that they must be sampled!) Adult Corner (aka...alcohol. The alcohol area is vast and full of new drinks, limited edition things and experimentation!) More to come when I think of it. I have a friend who wants to try all the different bottles of tea and maybe she can feature her things on here as we...