Green Burger has come at last

On March 26, I introduced MOS PLANT-BASED GREEN BURGER of Mos Burger that was released at 9 stores in the metropolitan area. From today, this vegan burger is available at all the stores in Japan, even at the one on the main street of Hamamatsu.

Like other Mos Burger menu items, it took for a while to get Green Burger ready. I took it home with another menu item Onion Potato and was full of expectation.

As in the poster, the buns of Green Burger were pale green.

When I ate it, I found the patty had a beany flavor and was very much like that of Soy Patty Hamburger (containing milk) that has been a regular menu item for some time. The tomato sauce was good. Green Burger tasted sweet as a whole because of the buns containing spinach and the sauce. I ate such buns for the first time. Though Green Burger has been released as a vegan option, it is also oriental vegetarian as it doesn’t contain five spicy foods such as garlic, Chinese chives, onion, Welsh onion, or Chinese scallion. So, it may taste the mildest of all the main menu items.

Traditional homemade dishes in vegan box lunch

Two days ago, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe requested nationwide school-closure from March 2 to protect children from being infected by the coronavirus. In Hamamatsu, all the municipal elementary schools, junior high schools and senior high school will be closed from March 3 to March 15. The students will basically stay at home.

Last weekend, I participated in a walking event held by JR Central. But after that they cancelled all their walking events planned to be held on weekends until March 15. Even local events in Hamamatsu such as concerts, sport competitions, and lectures are cancelled. Maybe I will mostly stay at home until the middle of March. Though I have still some masks, it is very difficult to find them at stores now. I think I’ll make one with a handkerchief if necessary. When you search with “handkerchief mask” in youtube, you can see several videos showing how to make a mask without cutting and sewing cloth.

Today, I bought a vegan box lunch at Entetsu Department Store. As its contents change from day to day except for the brown rice accompanying with the vegetables, they were different from those I introduced in January. Today’s box contained two traditional homemade dishes. One was simmered daikon radish with sweet miso sauce. This sauce was dark brown and had a strong taste, which is typical of this dish. The other was canola flowers dressed with mustard, vinegar and miso. It was a bit bitter and had the flavor of a citrus fruit. At first, I thought it was yuzu, which is often used for it. According to the label, it was orange vinegar that I had never heard of before.

The box also contained potato fried with spice, chickpeas and carrot fried with cumin, and shiitake mushroom grilled with basil (and bread crumbs). These were their original dishes and not traditional ones. I found the combination of shiitake mushroom and basil very interesting. I had thought a shiitake mushroom was a typical ingredient for Japanese and Chinese dishes. But it can be also combined with a western herb. The thick pieces of mushroom were filling and might be satisfactory even for those who aren’t vegetarians/vegans.

Vegan box lunches in Entetsu Department Store

On the basement of the main building of Entetsu Department Store, there is a delicatessen Kosei Iro Iro (個性色色). I wrote about it before to introduce their vegan sushi and rice balls, but if you want to have a more substantial meal, there are other options: two kinds of vegan box lunches from a vegetarian restaurant Bejita located a bit distant from the downtown. One of them is a box lunch with a veggie patty,

and the other is a colorful vegetable box lunch that changes from day to day. I bought this one home today.

According to the list, today’s lunch included a sausage of quinoa, cabbage stir-fried with curry powder, caponata, marinade of cauliflower, and fluffy boiled potatoes, which looked like this.

Below them, there was brown rice to which I added some ground sesame. I thought the amount of rice may be sufficient for average women but not for men.

As a whole, the tastes of vegetables were sweet and mild. The cabbage stir-fried with curry was spicy, but not as spicy as dishes in Indian restaurants. It had some sweetness because of cabbage. The boiled potatoes had some dried sea lettuce sprinkled on them, which I thought interesting. I didn’t know exactly what caponata was, but what I ate was vegetables cooked with tomato and was also sweet. The sausage was made of quinoa. I ate quinoa for the first time, and it was interesting to know how elastic it is.

Usually, I prefer eating hot fresh food like newly baked naan bread, but I think this box lunch is well made and very good if you want to have various vegetables at a time. It seemed to be selling very well because there was only one box left after I bought one around 12:30. Maybe it is popular among health-conscious people working in downtown.

Vegan tempura and sushi from Bio Atsumi

I went to see cherry blossoms in the morning. There weren’t many buses from there, and it took more than one hour to go back. When I arrived at the bus terminal near the train station, it was over 12:00. I didn’t feel like preparing lunch at home, so I went to Bio Atsumi to look for ready-to-eat food. This time, I bought inarizushi and kakiage.

Inarizushi is sushi rice stuffed in deep-fried tofu skins. Since tofu skins are sometimes flavored with dried-bonito broth, inarizushi is not always vegan. But the one sold in Bio Atsumi is vegan as the tofu skins are flavored with soy sauce, sugar, sweet cooking rice wine, and salt.

Kakiage is a kind of tempura with mixed vegetable strips, shrimps, etc. Bio Atsumi has two kinds of vegan kakiage. One of them contains carrot, onion, and leek strips. The other contains pumpkin, sweet potato, and carrot strips, and sesame. I think the batter is also vegan because egg is not indicated as a food allergen contained in kakiage.

Though I like fried food, I don’t make tempura at home because handling of oil is too much work. Today I ate kakiage after a long time. I felt they were more substantialicious than they looked, but the combinations of vegetables, especially pumpkin and sweet potato, were good. Maybe I like kakiage better than ordinary tempura with just one kind of vegetable.

Vegan sushi and rice balls (2)

Today I went to the basement of Entetsu Department Store to buy some food for lunch. Near the entrance, there is a shop Kosei Iro Iro (個性色色) where you can find a variety of box lunch, ready-to-eat foods, bread, beverages, sweets, and so on.

Rice balls are one of the most popular foods for lunch in Japan. The shop has a wide selection of them including some vegan-friendly ones. There are also sushi rolls that are also suitable for light lunch. I chose two kinds of sushi rolls and two kinds of rice balls.

These are sushi rolls with natto (納豆) or fermented soy beans in them. They were accompanied with soy sauce and pickled ginger. In fact, I don’t like stringy natto very much because people in Hamamatsu, at least my family and relatives, didn’t have the custom of eating it when I was little. It is still unfamiliar for me. Natto in the sushi rolls was as stringy as ordinary natto that is eaten as it is. However, it seemed to be nutritious anyway.

The other sushi rolls contained kanpyo (干ぴょう, 干瓢, or かんぴょう) or dried gourd shavings cooked with sugar, soy sauce, and sweet sake. The combination of sweetened dried guard shavings and vinegared rice was very good.

 

One of the rice balls contained umeboshi (梅干し (うめぼし)) or a salted plum. This kind of rice balls may be easily recognizable because they often have a red color on the package.

After eating the top of the triangle, I remembered that I had to take a picture of the plum inside. It was a big plum and was salty and sour - exactly how it should be. Salted plums are said to have an antibacterial and antiseptic effects and have been traditionally combined with rice in rice balls or box lunch.

The other rice ball was made of red rice. This rice is glutinous rice steamed with adzuki beans and is originally eaten on celebratory occasions. Though this product contained also nonglutinous rice, it was elastic and remained me of a rice cake.

Today’s lunch was substantial. All these sushi and rice balls are made by Chikuya (知久屋). It is a food company that uses chemical- free vegetables or vegetables cultivated with a reduced amount of chemicals and avoids food additives for their products. Kosei Iro Iro in Entetsu Department Store has a corner for their ready-to-eat food other than sushi and rice balls.

In addition to products from Chikuya, Kosei Iro Iro handles products from several popular local shops. There may be some other vegan-friendly or vegetarian-friendly foods.

Vegan sushi and rice balls (1)

Since I became a vegetarian 27 years ago, I have usually cooked brown rice at home. It is more nutritious than white rice, but white rice is also good when I feel like eating something light. When I went to BIO Atsumi, a supermarket 7-miniute walk from JR Hamamatsu Station, last night, some sushi and rice balls were already sold at a discount price. So, I bought one pack of kappamaki or cucumber sushi rolls and two rice balls.

Kappamaki is one of the most recognizable vegan foods available in supermarkets. It may be the simplest kind of sushi, just consisting of rice, cucumber, and laver. Beside the sushi corner in BIO Atsumi, there were soy sauce and wasabi you could take as necessary. But I ate them only with soy sauce I had at home. Since I like sushi rolls with laver because of their flavor of sea (it is difficult to explain the flavor of laver), I thought these cucumber rolls were also good.

The rice balls contained kombu (昆布) or kelp and goma (胡麻) or sesame. Though kelp is a popular filling for rice balls, it is often flavored with dried bonito broth. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case with the kelp in these rice balls. The ingredients were just rice, kelp, laver, salt, and sesame. I couldn’t feel the taste of sesame very much, but I enjoyed the flavor of seaweed both inside and outside of the rice balls.

BIO Atsumi is an interesting supermarket with many high-quality foods from Japan and abroad. I have once introduced ganmodoki and oyaki sold there in this blog, and there are still other products to write about.

BIO Atsumi
Address: 1168 Sunayama-sho, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu-shi, Shizuoka
Tel: 053-456-5550
Open hours: 9:30 - 21:00