We’ve sadly run out of our favorite seven-spice shichimi, and can’t seem to find any here, or a reasonable way to ship more from Japan given the recent postal restrictions. (If anyone knows of a way, LMK?) But otherwise, goodbye till the rona is over #八幡屋礒五郎 #七味唐辛子

In case folks are curious: some info on the Nagano spices company Yawataya Isogoro https://www.yawataya.co.jp/en/about/history/

And yes Yawataya’s cans and bottles are beautiful!

We usually use shichimi on udon or soba, but it’s good with a lot of other dishes too. It’s a mixture of chili peppers, sansho (Sichuan peppers), ginger, hemp seed, black sesame, dried orange peel and perilla — for a lovely fragrant kick

My husband also recently made some hearty tonjiru — miso soup with pork, konyaku, and veggies like gobo root, carrot, daikon, satoimo, etc — and a sprinkling of shichimi spice made it just heavenly. (Thankful for the fresh veggies from Suzuki Farm in MD )

Amazing — a kind Brooklyn contact and I may have set up a barter — where he sends me some of his Yawataya shichimi, and I send him Kayanoya dashi broth! What times we live in..

Btw Kayanoya does amazing dashi, and I think they ship from California https://usa.kayanoya.com/ 

Some kind folks asked about other things in our pantry and we are flattered.. so here is another spicy favorite which we likely won’t be able to reup until corona is over. Yakuzen Shima Ra-yu (chilli oil) from Ogasawara island, seriously the most flavorful we’ve ever had.

But in case we come across as pantry snobs, we recently picked this unopened bottle of maple syrup up *from our building’s trash pile* — someone had just thrown it away!? No expiry date. We’ve not yet had the courage to try it, but looks fancy, no?

And back to shichimi seven-spice: I had no idea it was "taking over" America! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-19/shichimi-togarashi-spice-takes-over-america-what-is-it-recipes?sref=nuJRLV8a

A shichimi update! The intrepid @el_belson reports that he has tracked some Yawataya shichimi at Mitsuwa in NJ. An appropriately blurry pic from the risky world beyond our doors..