The Henibanah Experience
So Chris, Dad, Justin and I all venture on Aberdeen proper's main street and wander into this little foreign store my dad has dubbed "The Henibanah Store". It's a tiny little hole in the wall.... all the outer walls have shelves/freezer cases and in the middle of the room is a long stand-alone shelf going from the front to the back of the store.... with that there you can walk, single file, around this cute little compact store. But don't expect to fit too many more than one at a time up one side of the aisle and down the other. They don't have too many clientelle floating through at one time due to the fact that it's all foreign food, mainly from Japan and Korea. I mean anything you want from seaweed to whole frozen fish to Pocki.... they've pretty much got it.
Well, Chris has a love for daifuku, or the Red Bean Bun for those who have no clue to what I'm speaking of. As we're wandering through, we find a bag of Yaki (another of his loves) and next to it a box of what looks conspicuously like said daifuku, so we snag them both. After about $20 in purchases, we meander our way back to the house and start emptying our wares onto the table. Between the four of us we have quite the mixture of goodies.
Sweet corn puff balls, banana cheetos, coconut rounds (that remind me a lot of round animal crackers), fish flavored pork rinds, chestnuts, coconut soda, some weird foreign energy shot.... to keep the list small just know we got a lot of junk.
Anyway, we get these daifuku's home and Chris goes to make a few. Since the box is in Japanese, we can't exactly read the cooking instructions, so we make them the normal way.... a pot, some oil (and water, I think), and a lid. Well, he let's the liquid heat up and plops the daifuku in.... but they melt. I mean, completely melt. They've now turned into a gooey mush at the bottom of the pan. So we scrap the traditional cooking method and I tell him to give me a bit and I'll find how to cook this particular brand.
I don't know if any of you have ever tried to find a brand of anything that's written completely in Kanji.... but I can now say that I have. And it was interesting, to say the least. After about an hour I finally figured out the brand name, found their website, and thanks to the power of Google Translate/, I figured out that we didn't have traditional daifuku, but yukimi daifuku, which is a "brand of mochi ice cream".
To make a short story very long, we tried to fry/steam ice cream and it failed miserably. Miserably.
Just don't do it.
Well, Chris has a love for daifuku, or the Red Bean Bun for those who have no clue to what I'm speaking of. As we're wandering through, we find a bag of Yaki (another of his loves) and next to it a box of what looks conspicuously like said daifuku, so we snag them both. After about $20 in purchases, we meander our way back to the house and start emptying our wares onto the table. Between the four of us we have quite the mixture of goodies.
Sweet corn puff balls, banana cheetos, coconut rounds (that remind me a lot of round animal crackers), fish flavored pork rinds, chestnuts, coconut soda, some weird foreign energy shot.... to keep the list small just know we got a lot of junk.
Anyway, we get these daifuku's home and Chris goes to make a few. Since the box is in Japanese, we can't exactly read the cooking instructions, so we make them the normal way.... a pot, some oil (and water, I think), and a lid. Well, he let's the liquid heat up and plops the daifuku in.... but they melt. I mean, completely melt. They've now turned into a gooey mush at the bottom of the pan. So we scrap the traditional cooking method and I tell him to give me a bit and I'll find how to cook this particular brand.
I don't know if any of you have ever tried to find a brand of anything that's written completely in Kanji.... but I can now say that I have. And it was interesting, to say the least. After about an hour I finally figured out the brand name, found their website, and thanks to the power of Google Translate/, I figured out that we didn't have traditional daifuku, but yukimi daifuku, which is a "brand of mochi ice cream".
To make a short story very long, we tried to fry/steam ice cream and it failed miserably. Miserably.
Just don't do it.