Yesterday, Sukie wrote the following-
>Even a person like me whose favorite peanut butter sandwich is one
>with a quarter to a half of a sliced habanero can be irritated if
>a jalapeno seed gets lodged in mouth tissues.
>::Blink:: ::Blink:: ::Blink::
A PBH? A peanut butter habenero sandwich?
I only know two individuals who would eat something like that. Sukie,
and Ping...but maybe now a mystery has been solved for me.
My Ping actually *loves* hot things, especially wasabi peas. He doesn't
just steal and stash them, he grazes inside the bag if I forget and
leave it where he can get to it. Crunch-crunch-crunch as fast as he can
get them down, knowing full well that I will stop him once I hear the
crunching, it's hard to hide.
I only learned about this when I accidentally spilled a bag when I was
online. I figured what the heck, I'll pick up the mess tomorrow. It's
not like the animals will get into them. Later, I found both Ping AND
the Noble Allis Chompers eating them off of the floor. Ping did not
seem to suffer any outward effect, but Allis's nose was dripping. She
looked up at me, licked the drip off of the underside of her nose and
went back to eating as many as she could before I made her stop.
Between the two of them, they had eaten several dozen. Neither suffered
any ill effect. I don't know why. A bag lasts me about six months. It
feels so *good* to stop eating wasabi peas.
Ping loves peppers as a cut vegetable, too. He will try to stand on my
cutting board when I slice them up, which is irritating. As many times
as I shoo him away he will come right back. My husband HATES hot stuff,
so I only cook with bell peppers but Ping would rather have a slice
of bell pepper than a bit of roast chicken. (I can hear Todd Leuthold
here..."Or a HAM WRAPPER, Alexandra? A juicy, wet HAM WRAPPER that was
thrown away a week ago?" Shut up, Todd. This is bad. I hear you in my
*head* now.)
Recently, a most peculiar thing has come into my posession. Imagine
a harmless looking little blue cardboard box about the size of a
Jello-Mix box all covered with Japanese calligraphy. Open it, and
there are three things inside. One is a paper cartoon of two children,
who appear to be dining from a table set with some sort of sushi
arrangement. The children have puckered mouths, and tiny beads of sweat
(or is it tears) are drawn on their faces. The flip side of the cartoon
seems to offer many version of what I am about to describe.
The second thing is a long strip of plastic, and heat sealed inside the
plastic are separate little compartments. This is clear plastic, so you
can look inside and see the most beautiful miniature sushi set you can
possibly imagine. One compartment contains a little pewter looking
bowl, a matching itty bitty fork (inside its own personal sleeve of
heat-sealed plastic for hygiene) and a little square of some toy food
with what looks like a swirl of whipped topping. There is a tiny fleck
of green painted on the tip of the topping. A garnish? It looks like a
desert. A mint leaf?
The second compartment and the third each contain two tiny plates,
painted and beautiful with Japanese designs on them. Flowers. Lines of
gold on one black plate that lets you know the blossoms are floating
on water. Checkerboard patterns with more flowers on another. Two in a
beautiful red meant to imitate traditional red lacquer. They are not
allowed to slide around loose and scratch each other, nope! One plate
in each of the two compartment is double wrapped in a plastic sleeve
so that this will not happen.
The fourth contains six little coin shaped slices of 'California
roll'...rice wrapped in black sushi-norri seaweed with what looks
like a bite of raw tuna in the middle of each. The six are one unit,
six slices stacked flat next to one another in a classic 'six pack'
configuration. There are also two elongated rice patties edged in norri
and draped with a strip of some sort of yellowish fish. These two are
floating loose with the fused 'six pack'.
The fifth compartment contains two circular rice rolls, rolled up with
a strip of norri *inside*, and with what looks like a bite of avocado
and crabmeat in the middle. One of the two has an amazing looking
garnish coming out of the top. A poof of some sort of green leaf like a
ruffled lettuce leaf. No idea what that is. If is demonstrably a leaf,
though, not a dab of bright green wasabi.
The sixth compartment contains two chopsticks fused side by side in a
white paper sleeve. I checked, the chopsticks do not slide out of the
sleeve, but it wouldn't have surprised me. There is calligraphy, black
and red printed on the outside of the white sleeve.Looking at it, it
matches the logo printed on the front of the cardboard box it came in.
The seventh is made to represent a light-colored ceramic cup . It is
filled with green-tea colored clear plastic, in which a teabag filled
with green tea floats/bobs half in, half out of the tea.
Now, this all just astonishes me. I have almost never seen toys (are
they toys? Do they have some other significance I am aware of? Do they
go in front of a little altar?) so carefully made and decorated. There
are no plastic "mold lines" running along the edges to let you know how
they were made. I mean, you can look down into the full tea cup *into
the tea*, and see the individual strands of tea *inside* the teabag.
It's only half an inch high....It's painted with decorated calligraphy
on the front. C'Mon! What the *ell is this?
Then, there is the last object in the box. A small cellophane package
covered with pink lettering, obviously the same 'logo' on the front of
the box, and now, something in English...Re-ment. looking at the card
board box, I can see that there are little places where 'Re-Ment' is
printed. A brand name? Inside is something that maybe Ping would like,
but I'm sure not going to try. It is a bright green 'chicklet' of
gum....just the color of wasabi.
I go back to the box to see if there are any clues. The only English is
the 'Re-Ment' thing, a website address, and, well, a sort of pictogram
that makes me double convinced to leave the 'chicklet' alone. It is a
little square, designed like the circle-with-a-slash DON'T DO THIS
logo. Only it's square, not round. It has a little Mr.Packman head with
open mouth. There is a tiny square that indicates "tiny square going
into mouth." The Mr. Packman has his one visible eye squeezed tightly
shut, and a tear is dripping out of it.
OK. This is Sukie Crandall's gumbox, complete with a tiny sushi
playset. Who else would want this gum? When she can't eat habaneros on
the road, she carries the wasabi gum? Well why do *I* have it. Maybe it
is only intended for Sukie once it has been sampled, Ping has to check
the gum but he and Puma get to keep the set. Sukie's ferret Telemna
ordered this for Sukie because *Sukie's* ferrets wanted the Sushi set,
and Telemna wanted Ping to check and see if the gum was volcanically
hot enough for Sukie, and so she asked Ping to test it for her first?
If it passes the Ping test, a little box like this will come to Sukie's
house?
AHA! Found some English. "Shinsen kaitensushi "REAMENT chewing gum.
Servings 1. 50 calories." The website eventually brought me here...
To what I guess is Meal #10 of "rotary sushi." It looks much, *much*
better in real life. Looks big in the picture, but the plates are only
a inch across. I measured. If I find Ping chewing,chewing, chewing, I
will know why. Sukie, check your credit card receipts. Has Telemna been
computer shopping for you? (And you thought the ferrets couldn't figure
out a Mac!)
http://www.re-ment.co.jp/goods/kaitenzusi/010.html
Alexandra in Ma
[Posted in FML 5606]
|
