snack away! #11 - my life as a rice cracker.

there is a specter haunting my life and its name is arare--a japanese rice cracker i’m sure you’ve all come in contact with without ever knowing its proper name.

arare are a little crispy snack made from glutinous rice and seasoned with soy sauce. often you see them wrapped in seaweed. they sell them at corner stores as “oriental mix” and they give them away like pretzels at some bars in chinatown.

my early life, as is the case with most people, is remembered in much the same way i remember dreams. little images stick around and others vanish with no real sense of rhyme or reason. much of modern psychology is based around what exactly it is we remember and what we forget. i wonder what a psychiatrist would make of how much of my memory is filled with rice crackers.

one of my first memories was the bulk isle in the local supermarket of my childhood home, boulder creek, CA. my mother would pacify me during grocery store trips by letting me get arare from the bins. the store called them “bar mix” for some reason. i called them chinese snacks--a mistake i wouldn’t really correct until i’d actually been to japan.

years later I’m in 5th grade at a hippie public school in santa cruz. my mother’s boyfriend brings me a big bag of chinese snacks. even at that age i wonder if there’s something wrong with their relationship. is he trying to win me to his side?

a little bit farther down the line and i’m in the tokyo airport with my dad, my stepmother, and my grandmother. the woman behind us is very happy to see a little white boy eating such a japanese snack. "much better than potato chips" she says. the ones i was eating were made in kyoto at the world’s best arare shop. when i get back home, i don’t call them chinese snacks anymore.

snack away! #11 - my life as a rice cracker.
guest blogger: damian lanahan-kalish, san francisco, ca

snack: arare japanese rice crackers
drink: nama sake

 
arare image from cansimage france / photo from shugtastic (via flickr) / nama image from ratebeer.com

next thing i know i’m in junior high. i spend my weekends in santa cruz, just looking for reasons to not be in boulder creek. every time i go to santa cruz, i make a special trip to a very specific longs drugs to buy my favorite brand of rice cracker--one that comes in a red and orange bag with a boat on it. later, i would find out it’s the best because it has the most MSG.

fast forward to the end of high school. i’d moved up to mill valley to live with my dad. everyday after the school i’d hang out downtown at the depot. i’d hang out with friends, drink coffee, try to get people to buy me cigarettes and i’d eat rice crackers. my friends teasingly called them "happy snacks" because the only brand mill valley market carried were called hapi. i never called them this. it was an inferior brand.

five years later, i’m living in new york city, in astoria, queens. i’m very exited about the variety of rice crackers at sunrise mart on 9th st., but even better, they have my favorite brand at the korean market just four blocks away. astoria truly is the happiest place on earth.

now i’ve been back in the bay area for about five years. two years ago i found out, after a long period of bad digestion, that i couldn’t eat wheat. no more bread, pasta or beer. but I could eat arare...they're rice crackers after all. i live just a mile or so from berkeley bowl, where you can buy my favorite rice crackers in large family size bags.

i think everything is going to be okay.

postscript
i got so carried away there writing about rice crackers that i forgot to mention a beverage in my post.

first off, i’ll start by telling you what i can’t drink. a wheat intolerance means that you can’t eat bread, pasta or burritos but it also means you can’t drink beer. this was a huge adjustment for me because i used to drink a lot of beer.

i can still drink wine and hard liquor but as any fan of beer knows, on a hot day or when you're tired that’s just not the same. sometimes i drink cider but all the sugar in that shit makes me almost as sick as the wheat.

a few months ago i made a surprising discovery. i was at the sake tasting room at the takara sake factory in berkeley. the sake expert there (who gives you all your tastes) pulled out a little green bottle of sake called nama, an unpasteurized draft style* sake he said was very much like drinking beer. i was skeptical. sake may be brewed in similar ways to beer but it tastes nothing like beer.

to my delight and surprise, my skepticism was quickly proven ill founded. there was something about this little sake in a green bottle that made it truly refreshing in the way only beer could be. the quality proved nearly impossible to pinpoint. it tasted nothing like beer. the alcohol content was nearly twice that of beer. still, it had something about it that just felt relaxing in the way only beer can.

*nama sake is an unpasteurized sake, so you need to drink it pretty soon after opening. that’s why it comes in little bottles.

20 years ago, high on a hilltop, a stray bolt of lightning from an unexplained source - there was not a cloud in the sky - struck a lone female physics professor and her boyfriend, a bongo playing weed merchant, and when the smoke cleared, one figure remained: cloaked in black, the master of all he purveys, damian lanahan-kalish, owner of over 100 thoroughbred ponies and pervert extraordinaire. he's also a founding member of sleepwalkers theatre, mishap productions & brandywinecooking and the writer of gotprojects.blogspot.com.