Saturday, October 3--Presents from the dairy fairy

A few days ago, when Jim was home sick and napping on the couch, the doorbell rang.  By the time he dragged himself to the front door, no one was waiting there, but he saw the “dairy fairy” flitting from house to house, dropping off product samples.  I’m not sure if that’s actually the name of the Meiji dairy company’s home-delivery service (I thought I heard a solicitor say “dairy fairy” when she rang my doorbell last year, but it could have been a trick of my ears straining for something familiar in the rapid-fire Japanese she hurled at me), but it sounds cute and comes to mind every time I see their truck in the neighborhood.

Anyway, today we finally got around to investigating the samples, one in a tiny plastic container, and the rest in miniature glass bottles.  Since they were all labeled only in Japanese, we were forced to guess what they might contain.  The small plastic cup was an easy guess—looked like a kid’s yogurt container—and sure enough, when we tasted it, that’s what it was.  The bottles we lined up by color, from whitest to yellowest, thinking the first might be milk and the last could possibly be buttermilk.  A taste test confirmed our theory that the whitest liquid was milk, but the yellowest was not buttermilk.  It smelled kind of like yogurt, as did the other two mystery samples.  They all also tasted like yogurt, from very mild to quite tangy. 

I had to do some research to figure out what was in those three bottles.  The one with the blue label was Bulgarian-style yogurt (some marketing genius decided it was not very macho for men to eat yogurt from little plastic cups, so they’ve bottled it as a power drink instead).  The green-labeled sample was a probiotic yogurt drink purported to improve gastric health.  The yellowish liquid in the red-labeled bottle was a drink fortified with glucosamine, probably aimed at runners and other active types who are worried about maintaining joint health.

As convenient as it would be to have milk delivered right to the house, I don’t think my erratic schedule is very conducive to such an arrangement.  For now, I’ll continue buying the six-week shelf-life, ultra-pasteurized, “real California milk” from the commissary.