Snacks-of-the-Month for March

Both my appetite and my reading addiction disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake but after bidding a temporary farewell to many good friends I've made up for lost time by crawling into bed every night with an assortment of snacks and one or two books. Few of the books were noteworthy -- I blame that on my general mood and not the authors' shortcomings -- but the snacks were a different matter entirely.

Beard Papa's offered three cream puff fillings this month: custard, strawberry, and banana. Delicious does not begin to describe those banana cream puffs dipped in chocolate. The assortment boxes whispering "Taste test!" appealed to my inner scientist which I did not even know existed prior to the earthquake, proving the existence of that proverbial silver lining for the umpteenth time.

Fujiya introduced several fun new packages to celebrate Girls Day on March 3. The box above contained the usual mixture of hard candies and chocolates, long ago deemed not worth the calories, but the furoshiki (traditional wrapping cloth) featuring a cheerful Peko-chan Cherry Blossom print insisted I part with a few yen. Katherine Hepburn opted for turtlenecks to hide her neck wrinkles as she aged so why can't I conceal my wrinkles in Peko-chans?

The Meiji Corporation had us racing from one convenience store to the next in March. They introduced macadamia and almond bamboo shoot cookies, crunchy honey mushroom-shaped cookies, and cheesecake-flavored bamboo shoot cookies in little snack-size bags. The latter taste more like cheese than cake, meaning not so good, meaning we're glad we only had to polish off the contents of that tiny bag instead of our normal big box portion.

Not pictured and not personally sampled are waffle cookies imported from Holland. I spotted them in the fancy grocery store on the first floor of Sakaiya and picked up both the plain and caramel varieties for Kate and James because their father is three-quarters Dutch and I thought the windmills on the packages would make them smile. Kate doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, go figure, so her unsolicited rave review caught me by surprise. When I asked James which treats he favored in the March shipment, he barely hesitated before ranking the waffle cookies at the top of his list. Now Matt and I are feeling a bit left out, so I'll be marching back to Sakaiya to rectify that little problem the first chance I get.

Which won't be today because I have a date with Misa and Toyoko, two of the original Shonan ladies. By "original" I mean "they remember World War II." I'll be the only person in the car under the age of seventy-five and I'll be in the back seat. I'm a bit nervous about that.