Mr. Wong, Mrs. Cheng, and two other key staff members of Bamboo Gardenhave arrived safely. I trust they are now getting some sleep. We had countless errands to run this afternoon, including nailing down the final schedule, routing the new candy shipment, and sending some media to the 99 Ranch promotions folks. Afterward, we made some attempt to find large quantities of cornstarch, which Mr. Wong was loath to bring on the airplane and risk misinterpretation by Homeland Security folks.

Before turning on full-productivity mode, we stopped at Cafe Besalu for a little breakfast and caffeine, with a little bit of chatter. After that, I was either on the phone or driving somewhere or writing up a shipping order for the next 5 or 6 hours. We mellowed out around 5:30 pm, although it took me a good 30 minutes to make it from Queen Anne back to Fremont due to heavy traffic. I did some prep work in the kitchen and came back after they had time to take a shower.

I did manage to make them a little dinner, but I think we didn't eat until about 8:30.... I made a potato pizza with sage pesto, chanterelles, and thin slices of eggplant, a mixed green salad with yuzu vinaigrette, a little squash-potato soup, some grilled mushrooms with basil and garlic, and some green beans with lion’s mane mushrooms and ginger. We finished off the pear sorbet which I think I mentioned here a few weeks ago, and it still tasted pretty decent.

The schedule for Bay Area is now settled, though I think the actual time of day might still need clarification.

• December 15: 99 Ranch Daly City, 250 Skyline Plaza, Daly City, CA 94015
• December 16: 99 Ranch Cupertino, 10983 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, CA 95014
• December 17: 99 Ranch Richmond, 3288 Pierce Street, Richmond, CA 94804
• December 18: 99 Ranch Foster City, 1070 Foster City Blvd., Foster City, CA 94404
• December 19: 99 Ranch Milpitas, 338 Barbar Lane, Milpitas, CA 95035

Today I entered the ranks of a real company and signed a commercial insurance policy. I didn't have a choice, really, as it was driven by a customer requirement. The last thing I want right now is additional expenses. But it was something I would have needed to do eventually.

I am exhausted, but I still have a lot of work to do still before my candy-makers arrive tomorrow.

We'll be doing live demos of dragon beard candy at Bellevue Uwajimaya on Friday, noon to 6 pm; on Saturday at Seattle Uwajimaya, noon to 6 pm, and Sunday and Beaverton Uwajimaya, also noon to 6 pm.

My plan for the Bay Area should be ready to go by tomorrow, but I'm still waiting for the customer there to arrange the details. It looks like everything will be good, and there is some promotion being done on their end too.

A new shipment came in yesterday and I have to prepare the routing details somehow by tomorrow, so maybe I'll take a few hours of leave from my guests who are arriving to do some logistics work. Tonight I have to do some housecleaning, too.

I was doing the usual sampling at Beaverton and Bellevue this weekend... Beaverton went reasonably well, with a high sampling-to-buying ratio; Bellevue was a little slower but sales picked up as I was about to give up for the day. One guy who bought several boxes last time I saw him picked up another big box today. I'm happy to have that kind of customer.

Hiromi discovered a unique "pillow" when acting as a tour guide for one of our mutual colleagues.

This is probably not something for my import company, since I tend, to my detriment, to focus on slightly more high-brow items, but someone would probably appreciate it if I did bring it in... Called "hiza-makura" (hiza means falling asleep in someone's lap, makura means pillow), I guess it's designed for a special kind of man. If nothing else, this pillow seems to have the "dirty old man" or ojisan market locked up. Cost: about $90 (retail). 

http://portal.nifty.com/koneta04/11/12/02/

I'm likely to be incommunicado on the web journal for an extended period, as I prepare for Mr. Wong's visit and try to solve some irritating issues I'm facing. But I'll do my best to report what's going on during the tour.

The guy who makes my dragon beard candy is coming to Seattle next Thursday. I'm trying to get my publicity act together; I've got a few little mentions lined up but I'm hoping to get a little more visibility still.

His wife, his son, and one of his assistants will be coming also, so I'm trying to get publicity hotel, transportation, appliances and similar things lined up in time for their visit. I'm not sure I'll get much sleep in the next few days.

This will be cool. I think it will help sell candy, and will help us launch properly in the Bay Area.

I shipped off a small internet order to Japan today. I was excited because it was the first completed order going back to Asia. I've made one or two shipments to Canada, but that's the extent of international orders so far.

The weather is pretty cold these days, so I'm not looking forward to the depths of winter this year. Last year was intensely cold (by Seattle standards) with unusually high frequencies of snowfall... I hope it doesn't get that harsh this year.

Early this morning I drove to Beaverton, Oregon for in-store demos, and it was incredible how thick the fog was along the way. As I approached Olympia, it got progressively thicker. I thought it might be a morning thing, but on the way back home in the evening, the fog was about as dense.

The weather has been pretty cold recently. I set myself up near the front of Uwajimaya and occasionally thought it would be nice to have something even warmer than my yellow Merlino wool sweater. The opening and closing doors brought a lot of cool air whooshing past my little spot.

The last few days I tended to eat leftovers with slight modifications. I still have a little bit of my squash gratin left over, but it gets pretty soft upon reheating. I didn't eat a proper lunch on Saturday, when I was doing a demo in Seattle. I don't know if I wasn't hungry or if I just forgot to eat.

I was happy to find some yuzu-shichimi seasoned potato chips at the Bellevue Uwajimaya on Friday. I might not indulge on a regular basis, but the taste was pretty nice.

I had some dinner guests yesterday, not quite something I had planned. I was planning on making squash gnocchi for myself anyway so I added a few other dishes and had a little party... a little salad with pomegranate seeds, a frittata, a little mushroom dish with some garlic and rosemary, and of course the squash gnocchi, made using potatoes, kabocha, and flour, roughly estimated. I then served some sweet potato ice cream and pear sorbet. The pear sorbet turned out really nicely... nothing more than pureed, slightly cooked fragrant pears, sugar, and lemon juice.

Today I woke up after sleeping a rough 5 hours, and then I was up for a couple of hours before I crashed again. It was a little late to properly prepare my planned contribution to a Jennifer-hosted Thanksgiving. I made a hurried bread dough and then I prepared a butternut squash gratin, which was a good way of using up the extra pureed kabocha and heavy cream from yesterday. Today's stuff was a little rushed, so it didn't turn out as well as yesterday's food.

I got a replacement for my damaged Sony Ericsson T616 cell phone. I settled on a Motorola Mpx220, which I hunted down at a Best Buy location after abortive attempts to order it online. It seems like a decent choice so far, though I'm having some little frustrations with it.

The voice recognition works better than my last phone's "voice tag" system, though it doesn't seem to work in handsfree mode. The camera was behaving erratically yesterday but seems not so completely insane today. I had some issues setting up features like email and so on because the menu system was not initially very intuitive for setting up new accounts.

Voice quality is decent, and I can hear better than I did with my T616. The internet features are substantially better, and syncronizing my address book with Outlook is absolutely painless; it was something I dreaded when I was trying to do that with my Sony phone, because I was always wondering which contacts would suddenly be duplicated and also whether the phone would even be detected by the Sony-bundled package. ActiveSync is actually a pleasant experience, which is surprising to me, considering all the horrible things that people said about ActiveSync a few years ago.

The next few days I'll be doing in-store demos for my candy at the Uwajimaya stores, and then I have to furiously get my publicity stuff together.

It may not do much for me, but my retail web site was mentioned by a Singapore-based food industry magazine, The New Asia Cuisine and Wine Scene this month. The blurb "demystifying dragon beard candy" actually has a couple of trivial factual errors, but there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be furiously preparing for a somewhat more dramatic launch of the product in Seattle, Portland and Hong Kong. This will require me to take a slightly heavier financial risk than I have been doing so far, but I think it's probably a good thing and will help create some long-term buzz.

Tomorrow I'll head off to Portland once again, and I'll be doing sampling in Seattle on Sunday. I also need to get some work done to prepare for some other product offerings. I'm hoping I can afford to take on everything.

I had a busy weekend doing more promotions, this time at Uwajimaya Beaverton and Bellevue. I had lots of trouble setting up, because I couldn't find my product on display anywhere and nobody knew where it was. It turned out that what I had sent them a few weeks ago had almost entirely been sold, and that's why it was nowhere to be seen.

My bamboo display cabinet for the candy was hiding upstairs in storage. It hadn't been unpacked, although it had been at the store for quite a while. So I spent some time unpacking and setting up the cabinet. Shipping stress damaged the cabinet slightly, and adhesive from packing tape affixed to the plexiglass door on the cabinet stuck to face of the door. I spent an hour scrubbing off the adhesive residue.

After returning from Portland, late at night, I made a little stop at a Diwali party at a friend's home in Capitol Hill. Everyone tried their hardest to lose money gambling; I didn't pass up the marketing opportunity to hand out sweets, which is a reasonable thing to do on Diwali. 

My promotion at Bellevue this Sunday was beyond all historical comparisons. Usually it's one of the toughest places to sell the candy, but it sold really well today. My memory of last week's sales might be a little inaccurate, but I think that I sold slightly more today in Bellevue than I sold last Saturday in Seattle. That never happens. I am wondering if people are feeling festive, if I'm getting better at telling the story, or if people are finally starting to see the value in something like this.

Afterward, I stopped at Patrick's home. He made a matsutake risotto and an onion soup, accommodating my vegetarian quirk with a mushroom based broth. I ate so strangely the last couple of days that I was inadequately hungry, though I kept eating... today's brunch was two really large pastries from Le Boulangerie in Wallingford, and no real food except a bit of seasoned fava bean snack I nibbled on right after finishing up at Uwajimaya today. Maybe my body was in starvation mode and confused.

Early in the week I made a satsumaimo (Japanese sweet potato) ice cream which turned out to have a pretty nice texture and flavor. My blender was quite flustered by the low proportion of liquids to solids, but it survived.

My mid-week entertainment involved a stop at Troiani for lunch, where I had a decent but unremarkable penne dish. The restaurant belongs in a mafia movie. It's huge, dramatic, expensive, and apparently well-funded. I had a nice little savory crepe at 611 Supreme on the same day, which was a refreshing contrast.

Saturday marked my first in-store promotion for the Dragon Beard Candy since returning from Japan. I did pretty well with large gift boxes, which was unexpected. This is the second piece of evidence that I may have under-ordered large gift boxes. The small boxes are selling too, but the big boxes are outpacing small box sales for the first time.

I anticipated that the percentage of big gift box sales would increase in November, so I weighed that when placing my order, but I wasn't quite expecting this.

The sample size is small, so this may just be a fluke. But I expect this will be a good month for sales.

This afternoon, I visited my grandmother's house for a bit of a family gathering; my uncle Jeffrey is visiting briefly from North Carolina. Two of my aunts made appetizers... a baked artichoke dip and some stuffed mushrooms.  and baked a bunch of pizzas using my signature pizza dough. I made one with thin slices of Japanese eggplant, one with yuzu-marinated fennel and a simple olive oil base, and one with shiitake and oyster mushrooms. There was also one with an arugula pesto and some roasted peppers with soft chevre. I don't eat meat, but I made pepperoni pizzas for the carnivorous ones, and I finished with a gorgonzola, pear and caramelized onion pizza.

It was nice to see everyone... I don't see my aunts and uncles very often these days, and I know I'll be incredibly busy until Christmas.

The first time I bought items from Minowa-san, he gave both Hiromi and me a yunomi (teacup). Hiromi's was Minowa's signature niji-yu (rainbow glaze) which is actually the typical Mashiko kaki-yu (persimmon glaze) fired in a gas kiln. (I'll put up an example later). The one I received was a more temmoku-like (iron speckled) kaki-yu.

On this trip, I didn't buy that many pieces, but Minowa-san gave me a very nice coffee cup. This one has hints of blue in it, and the yunomi shows a little bit of a red appearance. Minowa-san says he doesn't plan to make any more coffee cups, so this was a nice surprise.

The yunomi has a little bit of what Minowa-san refers to as “yuzu no hada“ or yuzu skin. This means there is a noticeable texture around the iron bumps.

I really need to get a good lighting solution so I can finally put up my ceramics for sale on the yuzumura.com website. But this shot isn't too bad.