Comfort Foods

#5 and #6: Matsutake Mushrooms and Zenzai Mochi

Recently, we embarked on a mission to find Matsutake mushrooms. These mushrooms are usually really hard to find, making them an expensive fall food in Japan. Despite the price, many Japanese seek out these mushrooms for their wonderful aroma.


This is a Matsutake mushroom stand in Shiga. I was really surprised to learn that most Japanese think the taste of the mushrooms is just futsu, or ordinary, but that the smell is so good they're willing to pay upwards of $50.00 (or more!) for only a few. Contrarily, everyone seems to agree that Shiitake Mushrooms taste great, but the mushrooms sell for a much more reasonable, futsu price!

Yeah, I'm not joking. On the right hand side, you can see the four mushrooms available for purchase at over the equivalent of $65.00 USD.

So, are they worth the big bucks? We tried them in Matsutakegohan, or mushroom rice, and also in some soup and they were pretty delicious. Both of the dishes were prepared for us by some of our very generous friends, so we can't say we'd necessarily go out on our own and buy them. But hey, gotta' try everything once!

After we secured the mushrooms on our trip, we stopped at a traditional Japanese sweets shop to try just that--traditional Japanese sweets. The sweet we tried is called zenzai mochi, which is basically a sweet red bean soup with rice cake inside.

Yum! This sweet can be served both hot and cold, depending on the season. We had ours hot, and it was a very happy way to warm up in the fall weather.

Dreams Come True

This isn't about the famous Japanese pop band. This is about a delectable desire becoming a sweet reality. The day we discovered Club Harie in Shiga.

Club Harie is especially famous for a German sweet called baumkuchen, but the location our friends brought us to featured something much more: a cake buffet. That's right, all-you-can-eat-cake for 90 minutes (and about 2100 yen!). Hope you have several napkins to wipe your drool.

Above is what we saw when we entered the French country-style bakery. First: the cake bar, lined with staff waiting to serve beautiful slices of cake. Connected to the cake bar was a drink bar with several coffee and tea choices, juice and water. In the second and third picture above you can see some of the accompanying goodies, ranging from brownies and sweet breads to delightful petits fours.

We sat at our table, anxiously waiting for our waitress to give us the go-ahead and noticed the following warning:

But that looks WONDERFUL!

Finally, it was time for round one. We headed to the counter, and came back with this:

And this:


Heaven!

When we arrived I thought for sure we'd give the place a run for its money. However, I was surprised to find that even I, a girl with a mouth full of sweet teeth and an insatiable saccharine desire, was slowing down before finishing even the first plate of cakes.

Chad, on the other hand, fell in love.

What a striking contrast between the red strawberries and his blue eyes! Amore!

Soon the staff brought out freshly made baumkuchen, still warm. Below you can see the cake on the spit (the bakers layer cake batter on the spit while turning it) and get a glimpse at the cute style of the bakery.

The cake was served with ice cream, banana cream and whipped cream. See the rings made from the layering of the batter? They resemble the growth rings of a tree, and give the cake its name (Baumkuchen translates to "tree cake").

Everything was delightfully displayed, and the flavors matched the presentation. Subtle, sweet, and oh-so-satisfying!

Maybe a bit too satisfying? We'll definitely never forget it, that's for sure!