Hyogo, Japan
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This is baby's rocket fuel. Sarah and I drink this stuff every morning, and despite the famous Japanese commercial where a guy drinks it and says, 'Mazuii! Mo ippai!' [Disgusting! Gimme another!]--it's basically pretty good. We usually mix it with carrot juice and it tastes great.
Dad used to call it 'grinding carrots' which drove me crazy, but he was right. It's grinding carrots, basically.
Wikipedia says:
Aojiru (青汁) is a Japanese vegetable drink most commonly made from kale. The drink is also known as green drink or green juice in English, a direct translation of the Japanese meaning. (In modern Japanese, the character 青 ao means 'blue', but it is commonly still used in older contexts to refer to green vegetation.)
Aojiru was developed in October 1943 by Dr. Niro Endo (遠藤仁郎, Endō Nirō), an army doctor who experimented with juices extracted from the discarded leaves of various vegetables in an attempt to supplement his family's meager wartime diet. He credited the cure of his son from pneumonia and of his wife from nephritis to aojiru, and in 1949 concluded that kale was the best ingredient for his juice.[1]
Aojiru was popularized in 1983 by Q'SAI (キューサイ, Q'SAI?), who started marketing 100% kale aojiru in powdered form as a dietary supplement, and sales boomed after 2000 when cosmetics giant Fancl started mass retailing of the juice.[1] Today, many Japanese companies manufacture aojiru, usually using kale, young barley or komatsuna leaves as the base of the drink.
The taste of aojiru is famously unpleasant, so much so that drinking a glass of the liquid is a common punishment on Japanese TV game shows. However, new formulations of aojiru have attempted to minimize the bitter taste of the original.
Japanese Chestnut (Castanea crenata) is a species of chestnut originally native to Japan and South Korea. It is a small to medium-sized deciduous tree growing to 10-15 m tall. The leaves are similar to those of the Sweet Chestnut, though usually a little smaller, 8-19 cm long and 3-5 cm broad. The flowers of both sexes are borne in 7-20 cm long, upright catkins, the male flowers in the upper part and female flowers in the lower part. They appear in summer, and by autumn, the female flowers develop into spiny cupules containing 3-7 brownish nuts that are shed during October.
