Sea salt and citrus soft-serve ice cream.

You can find soft-serve ice cream everywhere in Japan. It is based on this simple equation: where you find tourists, you find vendors selling soft-serve. Where you find anything at all worth seeing, you find tourists. Every place in Japan boasts something worth seeing. Therefore, soft-serve is everywhere. This is a good thing.

Vanilla, strawberry and matcha are the standards, but the best part about soft-serve in Japan is its use as a vehicle for all manner of seasonal, regional and barely-edible ingredients, meaning that any decent tourist attraction will have its own special flavor. I like to try them all. I look it less as gluttony and more as a hobby, like collecting stamps. Except with nothing to show for it but some torn cone wrappers and a small ice cream belly.

Squid ink soft-serve ice cream.

Many soft-serve flavors I've tried have been both strange and delicious, like houji-cha (roasted green tea), shionami (sea salt), umeboshi, and tomato. Others have been less weird but just as good, like kuri (chestnut), iyokan (a kind of citrus fruit) and sakura (cherry blossom). Only one flavor was bad enough to force me to abandon the cone: ikasumi (squid ink), purchased at a stall near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. I remember it tasted almost like chocolate, but there was something wrong beneath the almost-chocolate, a shadowy squid taste lurking below the surface which drove me to abandon ship.

What makes all these flavors so easy to eat is the fact that it is soft-serve (sofuto kuriimu in Japanese) rather than regular ice cream. If I had to maneuver around chunks of frozen tomato, I don't think I'd be as happy as I am eating a cone of something smooth and yielding that tastes faintly of tomatoes. (If you are wondering, this particular soft-serve reminds me of a fresh mozzarella and tomato salad, but sweet, of course.) The cutting-edge of food is all about changing the textures of familiar foods into something more unexpected, but foams and flavored papers are nothing next to Japan's national program of soft-serving everything under the Rising Sun. I'll toast my cone of kinako to that.

So in my continued quest to flavor every possible dessert in my life with kinako, I came up with a kinako frosting this weekend to top these banana cupcakes. The kinako seems to temper the tanginess of the cream cheese a bit, which makes for a more mellow, not-overly sweet frosting. I'm thinking of using it to top some kabocha cupcakes in the near future.

Kinako-Cream Cheese Frosting

Makes enough for approximately 1 dozen cupcakes

3 oz/85 g cream cheese, at room temperature
3 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
2 tablespoons whipping cream
1/3 cup confectioners sugar
1/4 cup kinako, plus 1 tablespoon for sprinkling
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat together the cream cheese, butter and whipping cream until smooth. Add the confectioners sugar, kinako and vanilla and beat on low speed until combined, then beat on high speed until fluffy.

After spreading or piping the frosting, put 1 tablespoon kinako in a sieve and sprinkle over your cake or cupcakes.

You're looking at two membrane sacks stuffed with salted, chili-seasoned eggs from a fish called suketōdara, or Alaska pollack, or mentai. Hungry yet?

This is what mentaiko ("mentai babies") looks like when you buy it in the supermarket. It's a common onigiri (rice ball) filling in Japan and occasionally pops up in things like bi bim bap or pizza, but one of the most popular and, in my opinion, most delicious ways to eat mentaiko is on pasta, typically in a butter- or cream-based sauce.

This may seem strange. When I told a friend in the U.S. about the "fish egg pasta" popular in Japan, she thought I meant some kind of fish-flavored egg noodles, maybe a variation of squid ink noodles. When I told her I actually meant pasta topped with fish eggs, I think she may have briefly considered never emailing me again. But mentaiko, and especially mentaiko pasta, deserve a try. The salting and chili-seasoning process produces something a little spicy and not very fishy, with a flavor all its own. Heck, I'll even go so far as to say mentaiko is my favorite of all the fish roes! You heard it here first, people.

I've eaten mentaiko pasta in restaurants and at the home of a mentaiko-obsessed friend, and it seemed time for me to try making it myself. I used the recipe in Harumi's Japanese Cooking, a good book to have if you are interested in trying out some of the modern-style dishes Japanese people like to eat.

It took less than ten minutes to put the sauce together -- squeezing the mentaiko out of the membranes was strangely gratifying -- and the finished dish was nearly as good as and several pounds lighter than the incredible cream-based version served at one of the cafes in my town. Next time I'll look for darker red mentaiko, as the usually-shocking-pink sauce is part of the allure for me. And I might throw in some mushrooms as well. Perhaps there's a mentaiko pizza in my future?

Some notes on ingredients: If you can't get mentaiko, make a nice eggplant parmesan or something; there are no substitutes. See the notes about shiso here. Kombu cha powder is a hard one. Harumi recommends using a strong fish stock as a substitution, but maybe you could mix kelp powder (available at health food stores) with some matcha powder. Or just throw in some parmesan cheese. The kombu cha is just there to add umami anyway.

Mentaiko Pasta

Adapted from Harumi's Japanese Cooking

Serves 2

6 oz/170 g uncooked thin pasta (such as spaghettini)
3 oz/85 g mentaiko
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon kombu cha (kelp tea) powder
2 small sheets of nori, cut into matchstick-sized pieces (about 2 tablespoons)
3 shiso leaves, finely shredded
chopped green onion or chives, to garnish
soy sauce, if needed

Boil the pasta in salted water according to package directions. While it is cooking, soften the butter for 10-20 seconds in the microwave, then beat until creamy. Remove the roe from the membrane and mix into the butter. Add the kombu cha powder and stir until smooth. It will resemble buttercream frosting at this point, but resist the urge to eat it straight from a spoon.

When the pasta is al dente, drain and immediately mix with the butter mixture, tossing to coat the pasta evenly. Taste for seasoning and, if necessary, add a little soy sauce. Divide onto two plates and top with the shiso, nori and a sprinkling of green onions or chives.

In 1863, a Japanese man who had been working at a Dutch-owned, Westerner-supported dairy in Yokohama opened his own shop in the area and began selling milk to Japanese patrons.

Thus, the dairy industry in Japan was born.

Soon after, he was asked by Gyūba Kaisha, the government's newly-established milk and meat monopoly, to train its workers in Western milking techniques. (Unfortunately, Gyūba Kaisha lasted only a year because, in an attempt to help the legions of restless, out-of-work samurai, the government had filled the company's ranks with only ronin. The samurai, finding the milking of cattle less glamorous than sword fights and seppuku, conducted business in a haughty, disinterested manner, which damaged the company's reputation beyond repair.)

To encourage the normally meatless and dairyless people of Japan to get on the cow, the company distributed propaganda which linked meat-eating and milk-drinking with national pride, propaganda which included statements like, "By utilizing milk to live a long life, maintain a healthy body and invigorate the mind, the Japanese shall save their name from dishonor." (Had it been a century later, they could have just imported a whole lot of Strawberry Quik and had no problem getting people to finish their milk.)

Before the 1950s, milk was mainly sold in drinkable form, not processed into cheese or butter, and usually consumed by only the young, the ill and the weak. Even today, with many people in Japan consuming milk and yogurt on a daily basis, natural cheeses and butter are less popular than their processed counterparts (nearly-plastic cheese and margarine, respectively). The aversion to butter may be due to butter's disastrous Japanese debut in the 1930s when, because there were no production facilities in Japan, butter had to be imported from far-off countries and often went rancid on the long boat ride over. During the late Edo and early Meiji periods, an insulting way to describe someone who ate Western food or adopted Western manners was "stinking of butter" (bataa-kusai). Butter has never really recovered from the blow.