Mon 26 Jun 2006
I found these hot dogs at the supermarket. Individually wrapped and in packs of five. But what the heck. I set out to cook them this weekend, after getting the kids all wound up (“How about some good old American Hot Dogs!”). I had even scored some yellow mustard. I opened the first one and realized something was wrong. There were metal clamps on the ends. And the casing seemd to be heavy duty plastic. And the color was like bubblegum. Just them a friend of Sarah’s came to the door. She is from Vancouver but speaks English and Japanese. I brought her the wrapper and asked her “Do you know what this is?”. She told me it was a sort of hot dog made from fish. I asked her (hopefully) if kids like them. She just stared at me. I was going to microwave them originally, but they seemed like they needed some color. So I though the frying pan would work better. Well, they weren’t too bad. I ate two, and Sarah at a half. Diane and Zach wouldn’t touch one.
After lunch we went downtown, where we saw the statue of Dr. Noguchi, the Nobel prize winning doctor and even ran into a couple of geishas. Then we went across the street to the amusement arcade / bowling alley. Gotta love the Hello Kitty bowling balls.
Found this info on Fish Dogs at http://www.bigchill.net/story/1505/mixmastermorrisjapandiary.html
“Mad cows spice up freaky fish sausage market”
Fish sausages, once almost a staple of the Japanese diet, fell into decline around the ’70s.
But the outbreak of mad cow disease in 2001 has seen the reemergence of the fish sausage, albeit with a variety of mad flavors that bring out the wurst in some food makers, according to Weekly Playboy (12/20).
Standard, artificial fish meat sausages of a pale pink color and wrapped in see-through orange were long an institution throughout Japan.
But production and sales peaked some three decades and, by 1999, Japan was only making 60,000 tons of fish sausage — around one-third of the heyday of the sea-sourced snag.
And the most notable part of the fishy feasts is the freaky flavors that they have spawned, like strawberry milk, which is made out of marine life, but tweaked to taste like a sweet lactose drink.
“It’s the kind of taste that makes your face screw up, but it’s pretty good to chew on,” model Sayumi Yano tells Weekly Playboy as she wraps her lips around a strawberry milk-flavored fish sausage and chomps into it.
Among the other recent additions to fish meat sausage flavors to go on the market in Japan are:
TUNA GRITS — simply sausages made out of minced raw tuna;
CHILLI PEPPER — not only are these fish bangers packed with mouth-burning chili peppers, 15 percent of the meat is pork;
COD OVUM the name hardly suggests a tasty treat, but actually these sausages are made of a delicacy better known by its Japanese name of mentaiko;
PORK — not a taste unknown to sausages, except, like in this case, where the eater pigs out on mince inside that is made out of fish;
SARDINE — not just the flavor, but the full creature that is added into the sausage; and,
FRUIT and VEGETABLE a really healthy fish banger with additional flavors including three fruits and 15 vegetables, like carrots and eggplant.
(By Ryann Connell)