Here comes the sun-- wait, scratch that, it's just more rain...

Today (at least over here), it's March 1st. After two chilly months, the snow is almost completely gone save a few slush piles up in the hills, and we're back to our regularly scheduled programming of rain, and temperatures in the low 50s. Apart from one bizarre sunny day in the upper 60s, it looks like this what we can expect for at least the next month.

The last sign of snow was only a couple of weeks ago, so I'm almost still in the mentality that I need to be prepared if I have to hole up in the apartment in case of some kind of freak blizzard. Fortunately, at the local sporting goods store, there was at least one food I knew I could count on:



This, boys and girls, is canned bread. More specifically, it's Sabaibaru Pan, or Survival Bread! I rest assured that I can tear one of these open next time there's a snowstorm and it's impossible to get out (read: most likely never, or if it does happen, in about 9 or 10 months).

Speaking of winter food, neither of us has yet to track down the elusive yakiimo man. I hear him and his damn "YAAAAAAAAAKIIIIIMOOOOOO" song every couple of days, but he only seems to drive by, headed off to places unknown. Just once, I'd like to walk down a street in our neighborhood and see him open for business, selling his delicious roasted sweet potatoes. But no, it's always at some crazy hour (seriously, I've heard it at 9 in the morning and 11 at night) in which he's just zipping by our building, leaving only an aroma and a creaky ballad about potatoes in his wake.

Flavorful fall in Kanazawa

Soymilk has sort of been the unsung staple food in my diet. I use it in just about everything; on cereal, as a creamer in tea and coffee, in cookie and cake batter, and various other recipes... but apart from one very sugary brand from Singapore called Yeo's, I've never really been that keen on drinking the stuff by itself. It's not awful, but still not good enough to drink a glass of it unless you've had a mouthful of some rich chocolate dessert thing that you need to wash down.

I'd heard several times that the soymilk in Japan is not good. Coming here, I didn't know what to expect; on the first night we came here, we took a trip to the grocery store on the bottom floor of our building. One of the things we immediately latched on to was Cocoa Krispies (pretty the only U.S. cereal widely available here) and the only soymilk brand, which had a friendly (if all-Japanese) green and white container with the now-familiar characters that read tounyuu.

This stuff tastes pretty different from your standard U.S. brands (Silk, Vitasoy, etc.) but the effect is the same: not good enough to drink on its own, but fine as an ingredient or complement to other foods. It wasn't until we took a trip to the Hyakuban-Mart, a slightly upscale supermarket inside Kanazawa Station, that I saw how much wider the Japanese soymilk world is!

They all come in single-size cartons, and by my count there were at least a dozen flavors! Banana, strawberry, black sesame, jasmine tea, azuki bean (my favorite)... so many to choose from! I've tried almost all of them, and they're fantastic. One of the best yet is a seasonal flavor that they've just recently come out with for the fall:





That, my friends, is fried roasted sweet potato-flavored soymilk. The taste is great, but I think I love the idea of it more than anything.

The only bad part is that all of these flavored soymilks only come in these small sizes. I would probably buy a gallon of the azuki bean flavor if I could...

Speaking of sweet potato, Andrea and I had the interesting experience of being woken up at 8 AM Saturday morning by a fried sweet potato (yakiimo) vendor with one of those annoying loudspeaker vans that I thought had finally gone away. He had an oddly sad, minor key melody to promote his goods, along with lyrics very loudly proclaiming the deliciousness of his yakiimo.

So I guess this is how you tell it's fall in Japan: yakiimo everywhere. Forget leaves changing and any of that other crap.

And finally, this is how you can tell it's no longer summer in Ishikawa:



Hey, I'll take it over summer!