by kuri | Dec 13, 2019 | Food, Household
Oranges ripening along the road near home. Not quite ready to pick yet. We can wait, because the other day we received this: A 10 kg gift of fancy mikan from Kagawa, in the citrus growing regions southwest of here. These are perfectly in season, delicious and...
by kuri | Nov 24, 2019 | Food, Japan
I don’t like persimmon very much when it is fresh, but I love dried persimmon. Today I helped Naomi and Hitomi prepare persimmons for drying. We started by picking them from the Hatanakas’ tree. Then we sat on the kitchen floor at Monaca to trim and peel...
by kuri | Oct 8, 2019 | Food
Jalapeños, habaneros and jalokia (ghost) peppers, locally grown, are a highlight of our late summer farmer’s market shopping This year, we got our chilis right before the typhoon and power outage so we couldn’t freeze them. Instead I sun-dried half of them...
by kuri | Jun 7, 2018 | Recipes
With so many plums on hand, I’ve gotten creative. There’s only so much jam you can make and give away when everyone else is also making it. It’s sort of like “zucchini season” in Pennsylvania when everyone is overwhelmed with their...
by kuri | Jun 7, 2018 | Recipes
All the ume trees in our yard are producing plums like mad this year. We made ume-shu and with the remainder of the first harvest I cooked up this jam. It’s really good. I’ll be making some more because we’re harvesting plums every other day now....
by kuri | Oct 4, 2016 | Recipes
“All About Baking”, published in 1933, is an excellent primer on baking with lots of lost wisdom about how to prepare pans, to set baking times, and to perfect mixing techniques in the days before electric mixers. Doing this with a hand mixer makes it so...
