You can see by the illustration that my description of isn't inaccurate.
Imagine that you are walking down the street and you see miscellaneous blobs of food in different colors and someone offers you a sample and says, "here, eat this." The blob is brownish with things in it and coated in a milky white stuff and you ask what it is and they say, "just try it". Would you gleefully just stuff it in your mouth with zero information about what it is? When I first came to Japan, there was no internet to speak of. All of my food information came from a slim guidebook I'd brought with me which was designed to help me navigate supermarkets, not understand traditional cuisine. At that time, the whole culture presented me with a series of mystery foods that I could overlook or simply cram into my maw with hopes that it wasn't going to be disgusting.
It took me a long time to warm up to Japanese food because, up until I started
snack blogging, I pretty much tuned it out based on early ignorance and habits. However, after I started paying attention, I found a wealth of goodies to enjoy and one of those is kintsuba, a block of jellied sweetened beans coated in a paste made from glutinous rice flour. You can buy it pre-made in shops, but it's really extraordinary when you can eat warm, freshly made kintsuba.
I'll miss the sweet, textural delights of kintsuba.
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