Onigiri - omusubi - rice balls - jelly donuts

Food for the mountains

Thank you all for reading! Today, some thoughts on portable foods.

Skiing is life, which makes New York an odd choice of residence. East Coast mountains are small and icy (r/icecoast: East Coast Snowsports: sharpen your edges!) and any slopes with relatively easy access (2.5 hour drive) to New York¹ are mobbed with winding lines. Thanks to parents who determinedly herded two kids onto the slopes who would rather be on the couch watching Pokemon for many years, I am now a skier who must be the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Pocket Food

All this to say that I pack my pockets with Kind bars and cookies to get me through the day, with breaks in the lodge to thaw. This approach has worked well for me,² but I learned this weekend that some people require a little more sustenance and pack actual coolers with food? Carrying anything that cannot be pocketed takes away from ski time. Hoping to come up with a middle approach for future trips that does not require so much additional luggage I consulted Reddit for ideas, and while most of the responses touch on bars and nuts eaten on lifts, there were some standouts:

• A pouch of tuna fish. Can keep it in my jacket all day, and when lunch comes use the mayo and relish from the hamburger bar to make it tasty.

• Couple slices of leftover pizza in each chest pocket. Perfect for eating on the lift.

• I ski from first chair to noon, then get tacos at Taco Bell.

My initial thought is that I don’t want to stop skiing at noon and that I am not personally into tinned fish. I can see the appeal of leftover pizza, were I ever in the position of having any pizza left over. A classic PB&J would be an excellent accompaniment, as well as any other sandwich that isn’t too tall, but something tells me that a PB&J alone would not be enough to persuade a move away from cooler lunches.

Onigiri - おにぎり

How about then an elaborate onigiri³ (also called omusubi), a hand-pressed rice ball⁴. Japanese food is so popular stateside that I imagine they don’t need much introduction, does anyone remember the time that Brock described the onigiri (filled with umeboshi plum from the looks of it) as a “jelly donut” in the English translation. Plopping rice in saran wrap before compressing solves the problem of sticky hands, but there is something to be said for molding the onigiri directly. For starters, a shio onigiri (salt flavored) is seasoned simply with the salt that you dab onto your hands before pressing the balls (start at 7:15 for video). From this austere version that is seasoned only with salt, onigiri have evolved into an anything goes free for all.

Onigiri can be made with any rice variety, as long as there is enough of the glutinous short grain / sweet rice to hold the ball together. The rice can be pre-seasoned (with sesame, seaweed, chopped pickles, etc) or left plain, and filled with the most elaborate of fillings. Salted salmon, umeboshi, and okaka⁵ (bonito with soy sauce) are classics (hi Jujutsu Kaisen fans), but combinis and other shops compete for ever more creative versions featuring fried chicken, shrimp tempura, and ikura⁶ (salmon caviar).

Perhaps this is too much to hope, but I am hoping that some saran wrapped onigiri might be substantial enough (and portable enough) for future ski companions who do not like to subsist on cookies and Kind bars. As we would likely be popping into a lodge at some point to warm up anyway, I could even make miso tama (instant miso soup) by mixing some miso, instant dashi, and dried wakame and wrapping spoonfuls in saran wrap. Add hot water for instant miso soup.

Miso tama - instant miso soup

NYC notes - itadakimasu!

Mont blanc at Patisserie Fouet because it actually tastes like chestnut and NYC does not have enough mont blancs.

Rugelach at S&P because they are so abundantly stuffed.

I’m having a houjicha moment: houjicha old fashioned at Bar Goto Niban; houjicha roll cake at Kettl; houjicha paired with a savory custard at Crown Shy.

Houjicha!

Other note: Love Sho Spaeth’s “ThE BeSt RaMeN iN nYc” writeup following the horrible ramen write ups by Eater. You like what you like, but the bias towards spicy, fatty, tonkotsu is disappointing. Ramen contains multitudes, many of which lean far away from fattiness.

1. Meanwhile, a former New Yorker friend told me that she drives two hours (!) from Seattle to get to Whistler.

2. One of my favorite trips was an entire week at Keystone shuttling between the hotel and the mountain and subsisted entirely on cups of Raisin Bran and hamburgers at the hotel bar, even while feeling lightheaded from the altitude change.

3. This website from Onigiri Gombei is hilarious in its pro-rice fervor. My favorite:

If you’re not a fan of brown rice, we suggest you eat our white rice that is easier to digest. so that we can expedite the consumption more.
As you see brown rice will germinate if it is soaked in water for a long time, brown rice is actually a seed. So eating brown rice would mean intaking rice as a whole live organism. We have our own special way to cook brown rice so that we can share the benefits of eating brown rice with our customers.

Also:

Our ancestors were plagued by floods and summer droughts. They built low dams across rivers, waterways and ricefields as a way to control and maintain the water supply and for food production.

4. Onigiri are so classic to Japanese culture (as explained extensively by the Onigiri Gonbei website) that it feels like every Japanese folk tale begins with “the old man brought some onigiri up the mountain.” In the most delightful folk tale of Omusubi Kororin, the old man drops his onigiri and watches it roll into a hole. As he runs over to the whole, he hears a song describing how the onigiri will be pounded into mochi. He is eventually welcomed by the mice who have been preparing the onigiri and presented with a mochi feast.

5. Shake, okaka, konbu, tsunamayo... these must be familiar to all fans of Jujutsu Kaisen.

6. Ikura is always written in katakana (used for foreign words) in Japanese, but I learned only recently that ikura (Japanese for salmon eggs) is derived from the Russian word ikra. Shocked face emoji.