Have you ever had Umeboshi (sour pickled plum)? It’s very sour and salty. It’s good with hot rice. I don’t want anything else when I really want to eat it. 
I think it’s called as “conditional reflex” that a mere photo of umeboshi makes my mouth watery. And this adorable boy!! He made me decide to bring onigiri with umeboshi tomorrow for my lunch!
Apparently, he had it for the first time and at first, he looked a bit shocked by its odd taste (it’s freaking sour!). But he seems loves it, and can’t stop tasting!
It’s funny seeing you write about umeboshi. My Japanese wife can’t stand umeboshi, tsukemono, kimuchi, or anything like that…but I LOVE it (well, umeboshi is mama).
You said ‘mama’! haha, does it mean ‘so so’ right?
I often think about what I would eat for the final meal when Japan is hit by a nuclear weapon or something like that, I will definetly choose white rice and tsukemono!
What would you choose?
Yes, so so. I love sour, but sometimes umeboshi is a bit much.
We live in America, so if something happened here…not really sure what I would want. I always ask my wife to make salada-udon, but I think I would want something else in that situation. Maybe gyu-don katsu-don, or sukiyaki, or shabu-shabu. Well, since it’s the end of the world, how about all of the above.
Haha you right!!
My Mom used to put umeboshi inside my onigiri mmmmmm tasty!
The boy in the movie above must BE like you!!
I used to be able to eat a whole container of shiso umeboshi as a little boy. I’ve always loved umeboshi. My mother jokes that I’m more a Hokkaido country bumpkin than she is — she dislikes shiokara, I love it.
Then again, growing up in Hawaii in the 1970s, tastes were so different to what kids have today — this was a snack for us. I still crave pickled lemon (Thai-style pickled lemon, which is actually Chinese in origin). If you dislike umeboshi, you will really dislike pickled lemon. My mouth waters just thinking about it, though…
Salty, spicy, sour… we ate food from the ocean we caught ourselves, our uncles and aunties getting together for small get-togethers to eat the bounty of the sea and earth (I spearfished for Sunday night’s fried fish and tako, helped harvest takenoko and pick mangos and papayas).
What a shame this kind of upbringing is slowly dying off.
I agree. I was brought up with umeboshi and tsukemono that my mom pickled by herselves. I live near the beach, so people in my neighborhood used to catch seaweed and tiny seafoods and preserve them.
We live this age with high-tech but I wonder we don’t have much time for our private life as before. We don’t have time to make our meals from scratch even though we have kitchen tools that are supposed to save our time. Or maybe, we lost our patience?
美味しい梅干しが食べたくなった…。
この間紀州の農家から買った梅干しは、とにかくしょっぱすぎて。
最近、梅干しもブランドですからね、
紀州、とかついてて値段も高いのに、ってのありますよね～(>_<)
母が漬けた白い塩が吹いて出てるような
しょっぱい梅干しもたまに食べたくなりますけど！
美味しい梅干し、贅沢品ですよ！
Umeboshi is another of those foods I learned to eat through my wife. She gets them from Japan, both the ‘sweet’ kind and the unsweeted (sour) ones. At first I thought they were somewhat strange, but I like them more in more. In onigiri and curry-rice especially. Eaten by themselves, they’re strong, but when added to the right foods, they’re amazingly good.
It’s a nice vegetarian food too, like many pickled vegetables. It’s hard to get good quality ones in the US, so I don’t get to enjoy them too often. :-/
In curry-rice?? I’ve never heard of it!!
OK, I will try it next time!
If i lived in another country, I would miss umeboshi.
Even you live in Japan, you love your own taste of umeboshi. Each one has their own favourite combination of sourness, saltiness, and softness of umeboshi. I really take times to think about umeoshi if I love it or not in front of umeboshi corner of supermarket before I get it. I don’t want to fail!!