Kids Cuisine

For a white girl of German/Irish descent, I’ve sure had a lot of Japanese in my life. My mom and step-dad worked at Toyota for years. I spent a high school summer in Japan. Been back three times. My sister-in-law is Japanese, which makes my awesome new nephew half Japanese. I took my daughter, then six, to Japan for the wedding, and now she’s hooked, too. She’s even announced that she wants to learn Japanese one day. She watches My Neighbor Totoro without the English subtitles.

So it’s no wonder then that my kids love Japanese food. Noodles. Sushi (OK, hand rolls, nothing too hard-core. But I’m working them up to it). Tempura. Miso soup. I made my daughter O-nigiri, a rice ball shaped into a triangle, which is the Japanese version of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and she requests these all the time.

But the real treat comes when I take them to Marukai, a Japanese supermarket not far from where we live. It’s a huge store, with everything from fresh produce to Japanese beauty products to furniture and fresh fish. But we’re not there for any of that. We’re there for the snacks.

We’re lucky here in Southern California. There’s a huge Asian population, which means we can get our dipping noodles and nori (seasoned, toasted seaweed you can eat like potato chips) any time we want. There’s a huge population of just about everyone here, so if you like to eat globally, SoCal’s your place.

I’m not sure how it came to pass that both my kids love snacks from another culture, but I’m not complaining. It’s not too surprising they like Poki Sticks — little cracker sticks you can dip into the accompanying chocolate or strawberry frosting, and who couldn’t love honey balls, those little melt-in-you-mouth delicacies? Especially with all the Hello Kitty packaging.

When at my monthly Marukai haul, I’m forced by my children to buy dipping noodles — thin buckwheat noodles that you cook up and serve cold with a certain kind of dipping sauce. Oishi Desu, ne? (delicious, huh?)

The also love Mochi — the ice cream kind popularized now by Trader Joe’s, those rice candies with the paper that melts in your mouth, various kinds of salty rice crackers, and last but most strangely for a couple of gaijin kids: processed fish parts. I call them “fish bits,” and the name, unfortunately, stuck. These come in small diamond shaped slabs, and I cut them up into strips and serve them to great applause. Go figure.

Sometimes I buy a daikon radish or a few other items to camoflague the fact that all I’m buying is crap for my kids. But at least I’m buying them interesting, international crap, right? Somehow it seems OK to indulge them with snack food as long as it’s from another culture.

It also gives me an excuse to buy anko bean mochi for myself. I got hooked on these red sweet bean confections when I was in Japan as a teenager. My kids haven’t tried them yet… which means I get them all to myself. For now.