Crackers!



One of my students recently returned from her brother's wedding in Kyoto and brought me a box of Japanese sembei (a.k.a rice crackers). These particular sembei are called "The Seven Gods of Good Fortune," a name that works out to be a tad ungainly in English, but who cares! Each of the teeny, half-dollar size crackers is encased in its own special package, which gives them an unexpected distinction (kind of like carrying each of your pennies in its own separate coin purse). It also drastically slows down the feeding process for those of us used to opening boxes of loose crackers and scooping them to our mouths steamboat paddle-style.

And, surprise! This being a Japanese snackfood, the packaging also allow for an explosion of cute characters. Each package depicts one of the seven happy gods--both front view and rear view (if you flip over the cracker).

Corresponding to the little characters are seven flavors: butter, cheese, shrimp, seaweed, shiso, curry, and hot pepper. I had fun tasting and guessing. Some, like the butter and curry, were obvious from the first whiff. A few others, like the shiso and shrimp, were less recognizable to my Western palate, dulled by years of imbibing Lousiana Hot Sauce.

If ever the NYPD needs a butter-sniffing cat, Bunn will be their man. As I type this, he is nosing around at the open cracker box in search of the fragrant butter cracker, but also trying to see if he can squeeze the entire box over his head. That's his idea of heaven: a box of food blinding his vision while he stumbles around bumping into things. Sounds about right.


Hard at work with another investigation