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Pickle Chicken
Every time we finish a jar of pickles, I do a happy dance. Tod makes the most delicious fried chicken with the leftover brine. We call it Pickle Chicken. To be honest, it’s a riff on J Kenji Alt’s Buttermilk Brined Southern Fried Chicken recipe, but with pickle brine substituting for the milk marinade. Pickle…
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Kobayashi Mikan
Mrs. Kawasaki introduced me to the Kobayashi mikan tree on one of our early walks around 555 in spring of 2021. It’s a compact tree with low branches that sits to the west of the house. This was clearly a fruit she liked, because she lingered a while to admire it. “It’s good for jam,”…
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Black Panther Bake Sale Pie
A while back the the dreadful heat of summer, Lawrence was reminiscing about a pie he recalled from his student days. “The Black Panthers use to sell it at their bake sales. Made with beans and spices. We ate it up.” I promised him I’d make one when the weather cooled down. And so over…
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Plums 2020
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Mikan time
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 juicy.
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Hoshigaki
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 them. We tied them onto strings, dipped them…
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Spicy
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 and put the other half into vinegar. After ten days, I bottled the…
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Ume chutney
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 harvest. This is an adaptation of a British chutney recipe from Saveur. I localised…
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Ume-zing spiced plum jam
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. Ume-zing spiced plum jammakes about 2 cups 1 kg…
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Chocolate Cake, 1933 style
“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 very easy. Creaming butter by hand is a good…
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