Indigo Days

Christmas Eve in Japan

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy: The Kitchn                                                                 Photos by Kenji Miura                                                                                                                                                                        

I spent my first Christmas Eve in Japan eating hand-rolled sushi and sipping sweet sparkling wine. Oh, and I had a slice of the obligatory Christmas Cake…a cloyingly sweet concoction of generic sponge cake smeared with whipped “cream” and adorned with winter strawberries. At least we didn’t have the bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken that many Japanese eat on Christmas Eve (instead of turkey?). The family I was visiting knew me better.

They knew that my love of sushi had inspired me to want to learn Japanese, thus propelling me to Japan the summer of 1988. My friend prepared a large platter of freshly cut sashimi, along with some other garnishes that I have forgotten (shiso leaves, daikon sprouts, green onion?). She had flavored some hot white rice with vinegar, a little sugar and a touch of salt and had snipped nori sheets into quarters. Each person grabbed a quarter piece of nori, slapped on some rice (with a dab of wasabi), laid a slice or so of sashimi across the rice, maybe some green onion, rolled it and munched it down (after dipping a corner in soy sauce). This is called temaki-zushi and is the most cost-efficient way to enjoy good quality sushi. It was the first time that I could eat as much sushi as I wanted without worrying about the bill. I was captivated.

But it still seemed a tad odd to eat sushi on Christmas Eve. The next day was Christmas, yet not one person uttered the words, “Merry Christmas.” I ate breakfast with my friend and her two children (the husband had already left for work), and made my way back to my train feeling deflated. Was that all there was to Christmas in Japan? Walking through the train station building, the department stores were still madly hawking Christmas wares, eking out the last bit of revenue they could. It was December 25, business as usual—people walking busily through the station, no feeling of Christmas to be had. The desolation that overwhelmed me was palpable and it was that day that I stumbled into the realization that I was culturally a Christian, despite being brought up as an atheist. This realization took a few weeks to set in, but the trigger was that empty Christmas Day twenty-three years ago.

The next year, Tadaaki and I got married right before Christmas. We went to midnight mass at Saints Peter and Paul Church on Washington Square in San Francisco, and spent Christmas Day at my sister Pam’s house in Gilroy with family. Then left for Puerto Vallarta.

I always looked at Christmas Eve as the dress rehearsal for Christmas. Despite my newly found spiritual leanings, for me Christmas and Christmas Eve are all about the food and the gathering of friends and family. Some years have been harder than others (deaths or births coinciding), but I’ve managed to keep both traditions alive here in the Japanese countryside. No Kentucky Fried, no Christmas Cake, no sweet sparkling wine.

For the last 21 years I have invited Tadaaki’s closest high school friends and their families for a late afternoon Christmas Eve dinner. We have skipped a few (because of deaths or births), but not many. Though now our family celebrates on December 23, not December 24. I thought it heresy when one of the friends suggested changing the date because he had to work on the 24^th (the 23^rd is a national holiday). “You can’t change the date of Christmas Eve…then it won’t be Christmas Eve!” I shot at my husband (a long-suffering cultural buffer between me and some of the more crazy-making Japanese customs).

Then I stopped a beat and considered. Christmas Eve on December 23…hmmm…what a great concept! Moving the date would give me an extra day in between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to clean up the previous dinner and cook the next. Hah. Moving the date removed a huge weight from my being and an incredible feeling of relief washed over me. I could move the date because I lived in Japan, because I was the one making the holiday happen. What once sometimes seemed like an overwhelming responsibility (to be solely in charge of creating a holiday feeling in a non-Christian country whose idea of Christmas is comprised of made up “traditions” like eating fried chicken and mass-produced, gooey cake on Christmas Eve), no longer binded me. Many people think of Japan as a restrictive society. I’ll go along with that, but if you pop out of the circle and walk your own path, you may get a little flak at first, yet pretty quickly people give up and let you be.

We usually eat duck on Christmas because we have ducks on our farm. And we always have gougères and small producer champagne from France or the U.S. Gougères and champagne are the one constants in our holiday meals, for I do not like feeling constrained into a boring repetition of obligatory holiday dishes. But then, I don’t like feeling constrained into anything, and that is why I feel so free here on the farm in Japan. Nobody thinks I’m an oddball for only eating what we or our friends produce, because nobody notices. I am already an oddball because of my blond hair, and most people don’t look much further than that. And so I go about my life quietly, making my own choices, no recriminations, no comments. It’s an odd kind of life, but one that suits me. I no longer crave the battles that we Americans so love to wage. And now it is my husband who gets energy from a good knock-down-drag-out. Funny, how life goes in a circle. For in some (small) ways, I have become more Japanese than he.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gougères

Makes 20

This recipe is from one of my favorite cookbooks, Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking. My copy of the book (an early one) has thick deckle-edged pages and a convenient flap-style cover for marking your place. The recipes include such gems as pan bagnat and salade frisée as well as overlooked classics like blanquette d’agneau and pot-au-feu.

½ teaspoon salt

¼ pound (120 g) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 cup minus 1½ tablespoons (130 g) unbleached all-purpose flour

4 large eggs

¾ cup (60 g) grated Gruyère cheese

 

Preheat the oven to 425˚F (220˚C) and rub butter on 2 large cookie sheets.

Measure the flour into a medium-sized bowl and whisk to break up any lumps and lighten.

Bring 1 cup (250 cc) of cold water to a boil over medium-high heat with the salt and butter in a medium-sized heavy saucepan (preferably enameled cast iron). Remove the pan from the heat and add all of the flour, stirring quickly and strongly to form a smooth ball without flour lumps.

Replace the pan on the heat and cook the dough over medium-high heat, again stirring quickly and strongly. Try to smash the dough across the bottom of the pan to help cook the flour and dry out the dough a little. This should only take a few minutes depending on how much dough you are working with. You should see some whitening in places indicating that the flour is cooking.

Remove from the heat and add two of the eggs and half of the grated Gruyère. Beat on medium speed until the eggs are emulsified then add the other two eggs. Beat until all of the eggs are completely incorporated into the smooth dough.

Spoon heaping soupspoons of dough onto the buttered cookie sheets—leaving enough space to puff up (maximum about 12 to 15 per tray if you are making multiple batches). Sprinkle with the remaining half of the Gruyère cheese.

Bake in the middle of the oven for about 25 minutes, until golden brown. Remove from the oven and serve immediately on a pretty plate lined with a piece of attractive cooking paper artfully folded in half (to absorb the steam).

 

Radiation in Japan

Above photo: Hiroshi Furukawa photos                                                        Below Map: Just World Map

The first thing that people asked me when in the States in early June was, “How bad is it in Japan?”

I gave the only possible answer, “Bad. Very, very bad.”

Radiation is here to stay and it won’t abate anytime soon.

But what exactly does that mean?

Tepco is nowhere close to getting the situation under control and in their efforts to keep cooling the melted down reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, they are creating massive amounts of highly radioactive water with no place to store it. Efforts to filter, then recycle the water have not been highly successful. So far.

Radiation is slowly seeping into the air and leaching into the ground supply. The dismal prognosis is that we could be living with these low-grade radioactive releases for perhaps a decade or more.

For us, 215 kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi, it’s hard to gauge the long-term effects. Now four and a half months after the Tohoku Earthquake, life in outer Saitama meanders along as if it all never happened. No one really talks about the radiation or the fact that tens of thousands of people from Miyagi prefecture are still living in shelters all over Japan. We continue to eat local produce, and as it stands now, there is no immediate threat. I love how we are told there is no “immediate” danger from the radiation.

But then, what else can we do? Where could we possibly go? And do we really need to? Recently, my 16-year-old son Andrew somehow convinced me that riding a scooter to work would be safer than riding a bike. Having just read an article on the high risk of cyclists being hit by passing motorists, he caught me at a good moment. I weighed the risks, and gave in to letting him buy a scooter. Does he have a better chance of getting killed on the scooter than getting cancer at 46? Definitely.

Risk is all around us. And if any of you are parents, you will know the agony of letting our child go out on the street on his or her bike for the first time alone. Or of letting our teenagers drive, or even go out with friends. What are they doing? Are they drinking…smoking…or, god forbid, drugging?

So perhaps we are all playing Russian roulette with the future health of our children, but one thing I am certain, every other part of our life is pristinely “clean.” We live in an 80-year-old traditional sod and wood farmhouse that breathes real air (and dust) from the outdoors. We do not use air conditioning (even in the sweltering summer), or forced air heat. We eat simple foods with no additives or chemicals. We do not buy prepared foods.

In the last 23 years, I have seen Japan embrace convenience stores and readymade foods with a vengeance. While this food certainly (on the surface) appears more healthy than the typical fast food available in the United States, make no mistake that the so-called well-balanced bento box meals available at convenience stores on almost every corner in Japan are laden with chemicals and preservatives. It’s cheap food made cheaply. 

Maybe now is the time to take back the heart of Japan. Maybe now is the time to go back to a simple farm diet. Miso, soy sauce, salt, and vinegar. Those are the true preserving agents of Japan. People can’t do much about the increase of radiation in their lives, but they can do something about what they put in their bodies or in the bodies of their children. Now is the time to embrace clean food.

So where can people find this clean food? Farmers.

Sadly, farming in the Kanto region (eastern Japan) has taken a huge hit because many Tokyoites are boycotting food from the whole region. Kind of mind-boggling when you think about the fact that parts of Kanto are certainly further away from Tokyo than parts of Kansai. You can’t just boycott a whole region. It makes no logical sense. Also it is effectively destroying lives of farmers who have no problem with radiation on their crops. But Tokyoites as urban dwellers have little connection to, or understanding of, the land or of the people who have been growing the food that has been consumed in their city for generations.

I find it ironic that Fukushima Daiichi was built to supply energy to Tokyo, and not used by the local inhabitants. Ironic that some people in Tokyo can turn away from the people and area that kept them supplied with food and energy. Ironic and sad.

But I suppose it’s all about ignorance and lack of transparency. The truth is, there have been many lies told about the situation at Fukushima Daiichi. A source in the Chinese embassy reports that the Japanese foreign office gathered heads of foreign embassies together a few days after the earthquake and advised them to evacuate their citizens. This news comes as no surprise to me as on March 17, I had reported via Facebook,

“The American government took a sharp right turn on its stance early today, deviating from the Japanese party line, by urging American citizens in a 80 km radius of the nuclear reactor to evacuate or stay inside (as opposed to the 20 km-30 km advised by the Japanese government). But realistically, there is nowhere for the Japanese to go, even if they did start advising more drastic evacuation.

Late this afternoon, the American government took an even stronger position and has initiated "authorized evacuations" for American citizens who want to leave Japan.

More rumors circulate that Tepco families at Fukushima Daiichi left right after the earthquake. And the head of Tepco was MIA for a couple weeks post-earthquake. The Japanese press (which relies heavily on ad revenue from nuclear power related sources) was mild in it’s reporting of the nuclear disaster. The foreign press was vilified for being sensationalist, and foreigners despised for “escaping,” were called “flyjins” (a take off on “gaijin” or “foreigner” in Japanese).

But most unconscionable is that the Japanese government did not tell its citizens about the huge release of radiation following a hydrogen blast on March 12 in Reactor No. 1, until two months after the release. So in the end, were those foreigners so wrong to leave? No. In fact, they should have left sooner. WE should have left sooner. On Tuesday, March 15, I got an email from my older sister Pam telling me to send the boys to the U.S. When I mentioned it to my husband Tadaaki, he looked at me and walked away without a word, having given no credence to Pam’s (apparent) over reaction. Thursday night, he started to think otherwise, and by Friday, Tadaaki’s position was that I should leave with the boys and he’d “hold down the fort” with his 83-year-old mom, and our cat and dog. Oh, and the 3000 chickens.

Tadaaki tried to pack Baachan (granny) off onto the bullet train to Kansai to stay with his brother, as he had some wild idea of grabbing the cat and dog and jumping into his van to outrun the imminent nuclear blast. Once his gas ran out, he was prepared to run. Oh yes, another point was that, mysteriously, gasoline was hard to come by, so no one could get very far even if they wanted to. Mysterious.

But, all that doesn’t matter any more, because obsessing about what happened in the past is pointless. Life is now and we should not let the presence of radiation consume us. Who really knows, or who can really understand, how much radiation is around us, or what that means in the long run. I certainly don’t.

 

 

 

I check in periodically to NHK World: Society & Others and I get updates from the New York Times on the nuclear disaster. Otherwise, I read the Japan Times twitter feed and sometimes click to the links. If I’m feeling like it.

Right now I have the field calling my name as the weeds are already starting to engulf. The hot, hot unusually dry spell that lasted for most of June and July segued into a cool typhoon. Bringing what I hear was “black rain.” Oh dear.

No time to worry about the black rain since there’s nothing I can do about it, so I carry on with our lives. My Japanese Farm Food manuscript and photos are due September 1^st, and I’m thinking in a more positive vein. I’m thinking about how simply (and naturally) we live and about how clean the air is in our house and this little agricultural area in which we live. And I’d not trade this way of life (radiation and all) for life in the Bay Area where I grew up, because even there I feel far removed from the farm and this “real” way of life.

And as for the Tokyo people who are shunning Kanto produce…well Tokyo can be a fickle town. But then the sense of community has been long lost in urban areas. And that sense of community is really what created the collective energy that enabled Japan to rise up from the ashes of World War II. I wonder if now there will be a renewed interest in recapturing the rural customs of cooperation and mutual support.

I hope so.

Tokanya

All Photos this Post by Toshiji Tomori

I skirted the gray block wall along our driveway and rounded the corner onto the street in front of our house. I could barely make out the figures in the dim light of the lone streetlight, and only the flash of Tomori-san’s camera illuminated the ropes pounding on the pavement. “Tokanya, waradepo yomochi kutte, buttatake!” (Tokanya, straw gun, eat mochi in the nighttime, shoot!)

 

 

A car came up fast behind me and I yelled, “Car!” and stepped aside quickly as the driver did not show signs of slowing. “Car…Car!” The figures scattered, but took up their cries right after,“Tokanya, waradepo yomochi kutte, buttatake!” Thwak. The crack of the “straw gun” on the pavement wakes up the sleeping winter bugs and kills them (metaphorically). After the rice harvest, in the late autumn we make “straw guns” called waradepo for Tokanya, an ancient farming rite to send off the rice field god to the mountains. Our friends come over to help us pound mochi and we eat in the garden at torch light.

Normally celebrated the 10^th day in the 10^th month in the lunar year, it should have been held the day before (November 15), but Tadaaki kindly agreed to wait a day so that I could participate. My JAL flight now gets into Haneda airport too late to get home to Saitama, so I spent the night at the airport hotel and hopped the train in the morning. Feeling a bit discombobulated, I set to unpacking with uncharacteristic haste (usually my bags hang around the tatami room for a couple weeks as I slowly chip away at them). This time I was determined to wipe the traces of my third and last overseas trip this fall and reenter life in Japan without the typically bumpy transition period.

But the publisher discussions and book contract were both in limbo, so I too felt “in between.” When I got home that morning, I asked Tadaaki if there was anything I could do to help. He shook his head and told me, “It’s under control. Yoshie is coming at 4:00 and the rest of the people are coming around 5.” So I went back in the house to unpack.

 

 

My editor friend Kim Schuefftan showed up at 4, then disappeared. I went upstairs for a while only to come down and find a strange girl in the kitchen. Not Yoshie. Tadaaki has a fairly loose style to his events and gives little instruction to his helpers. I never did learn the girl’s name, but she did bumble about in our kitchen. Yoshie eventually showed up with another friend in tow, and at one point all three girls were stirring and skimming the soup together. I never have understood why it takes so many people to do one task here. I guess it is the sense of comradery and also the feeling that if one is not working, one is being lazy or warui to the group.

Warui is roughly translated as “bad.” The usage is fairly common, however, since this is a completely Japanese cultural concept. If someone does something for you, your response will often be warukatta, ne. Oh I was so bad to have received this from you…oh it was so bad of me to put you out for cooking this for me. My mother-in-law uses it a lot. Me, not so much. Bad American wife, I guess.

And I suppose as the “wife,” I should have been the one feeling badly for not helping, but already the plan was out of my control, careening along without direction. Tadaaki tends to whoosh in, give a few minimal cooking commands and then spin back off to the eggs, chickens, or deliveries. I am the opposite, completely controlling in the kitchen and not one to let people go willy-nilly. When I make the kenchinjiru, I like to slice the vegetables myself because I want them all to be the right size and thickness to cook at the same pace. Good enough is not where I look to end up. Each ingredient deserves to shine, so the finished dish should not be messed up by unwitting mistakes of well-meaning, yet untutored assistants. But if the cooks at Chez Panisse could let me blunder about in their kitchen, I suppose I should be more forgiving (and flexible). Though I do relax the “rules” when it comes to little kids—but then I’m just serving ourselves and not a crowd of thirty or forty hungry adults.

 

 

It used to be that the countrywomen all spoke the same language of food and knew how to prepare the same dishes. Today that is not true, as most young women do not learn to cook from their mothers, and there are few farming families passing along traditions. Mothers (and even grandmothers) work, so supermarket prepared foods regularly appear on the table; and convenience store foods are eaten in the car on the way home or in transit to study school. After all, there is no mess in the kitchen if one eats in the car or re-heats in the microwave. At a recent Japanese food event in Napa, there was much talk of seasonality and local foods in Japan…but the reality is much more bleak. Though I suppose those convenience store bento meals are better balanced than MacDonald’s and actually look like real meals, as long as you don’t mind inferior ingredients, MSG, and preservatives. Did I mention that I’m not a fan of convenience store or prepared foods? But then our kitchen is never pristine, so that’s the trade off.

 

 

Tokanya, manju stealing at Jugoya and even mochi making at New Year have all virtually died out in Japan. Our family never gave up on mochi pounding in the garden at New Year, but it wasn’t until recently that Tadaaki revived Tokanya and Jugoya in our house. Having home businesses, trying to grow food for the family, and bringing up three small homeschooled sons stretched both Tadaaki and me to the thinnest point where sometimes I wondered when we would break. Yet somehow when I did not have energy, Tadaaki did and visa versa. So we survived those years. Unfortunately, mushroom hunting and wild berry gathering in the mountains did not. Though somehow we managed to keep river trips and fishing expeditions alive in the summer. I guess it was the cool water in the impossibly sweltering summers that pushed me to get on board these excursions. In contrast, climbing up the mountain with little babies did not seem as appealing (or practical).

 

 

But all of this takes energy. And as I look around me, I realize that most (though not all) of our friends who are trying to live off the land or revive dying country customs are all transplants from the city (me included). I suppose we do not have the weight of generations past pulling us down a bit and I suppose we bring some naïve energy to the equation. But then I look at Tadaaki and Suka-san, carrying on the farming life, college degrees in hand. A new generation of farmers who choose the land, because the land chose them. They both live and breathe farming in a way that we transplants will never be able to, yet we transplants also bring a fresh wind to the area, and so our partnerships have a spirit of dynamism backed by mutual support and respect.

 

And as I stood there on the street that night of Tokanya, I thought about how the old customs clash with the new. About the cars zooming down our old neighborhood street no longer lined with old farmhouses—now razed for large prefab versions that the younger couples favor. And about Tadaaki leading the kids and friends as they banged their “straw guns” on the pavement—as if they owned the street and the cars were the intruders. And I thought about the shishimai dancers who had come to celebrate the sending off of the rice harvest gods and that we can do this because we do it together. We fight the fight to keep those traditions alive because that is the heart of Japan and without them there is no life.

 

Kenchinjiru (Country Soup with Vegetables): Traditionally, this was a vegetarian soup made with root vegetables, tofu, konnyaku, and perhaps dried shiitake for depth of flavor. But we often make a broth from our Christmas duck carcasses for the kenchinjiru we make at New Year…because we have them. In this case, add some sliced ginger and a few generous stalks of Japanese negi (substitute thick spring onions or thin leeks) to the fresh duck bones (I use the term “fresh” loosely because actually we freeze the raw carcasses whole in Ziploc bags). Alternatively, I like to make a stock from the cooked bones of roasted chickens that I stuffed with garden thyme branches and Mochizuki-san’s lemons, quartered. Our chickens are so sublime that I add nothing but water along with the thyme sprigs and drippings off the cutting board. I tried to cook the soup all night but the gas alarm company called my mother-in-law in the middle of the night and she crept upstairs to wake my husband. He has now nixed the overnight cook method. This deeply flavorful chicken soup makes an unforgettable ramen broth for homemade ramen; also I see it as a base for a mochi-less kenchinjiru. For a vegetarian broth, I would add a generous piece or two of konbu kelp to a large pot of cold water and bring it almost to a boil before removing the kelp and then proceed to make the root vegetable soup.

To prepare: scrub equal amounts of carrots, gobo (burdock root), and daikon with a rough brush (tawashi). Slice into thin rounds, half rounds or quarters depending on thickness of the roots. The vegetables should be fairly uniform in thickness and size, as you will be cooking them together and eating the soup with chopsticks. Peel and slice the same amount of taro root (satoimo) as you did for each of the other vegetables. Keep the daikon and taro each in separate bowls. Cut horizontally through a block or two of best quality soft tofu (in Japan use momendofu), then crosswise into 6 x 4 pieces (thus creating a dice). Slice usuage into ¼” strips (Tadaaki cuts them again horizontally to make pieces, I prefer them a little long and dangly). If the usuage is not fresh, pour hot water over to take off any unpleasant odors—or maybe just skip it.

Film organic canola oil in large soup pot, and sauté sliced carrots and gobo for a few minutes before adding the sliced daikon. Stir and sauté a minute or so longer, then add hot homemade broth (duck, chicken or konbu kelp). Throw in the sliced taro and bring to a boil and cook until the vegetables are getting soft, but not falling apart. Slide in the tofu, usuage and konnyaku (see below), and simmer a few minutes more until heated through. Season with organic soy sauce to taste and serve with a bowl of white rice on the side if there is no mochi in the soup. Pass shichimi togarashi (7-spice powder) for those who like a little extra kick.

Optional konnyaku: Fill a large pot half way with water, toss in a small handful of salt and bring to a boil. While the water is heating, tear the konnyaku into 1½” round misshapen blobs (a little bigger than bite-sized). If using mochi, slice konnakyu instead into thin strips (1½” x ¼”). Boil konnyaku pieces for 15 minutes in salted water, drain, and reserve.

Optional mochi: drop pieces of hot mochi into soup and eat immediately. 

 

Japanese Farm Food

                                                                                                                                                           All Photos this Post by Kenji Miura

Finding a Publisher

Almost a year ago David Lebovitz used me as an example of a blogger who had a niche: “If you are someone who, say, lives on an organic farm in Japan, then you should write a book with 100 easy Japanese country recipes.” Last week Andrews McMeel offered me a book contract for the book I am (now) writing: Japanese Farm Food: Simple Recipes and Traditional Techniques from Our Sustainable Life. It will be published Fall 2012.

Sound easy? It wasn’t.

At the time David gave me that nudge, I was attending Food Blogger Camp in Ixtapa and seriously considering two other books before the Japanese food book. I was leaning toward getting published in Japan first with a how-to book for young cooks just creating their eating and cooking customs. I envisioned a book with master recipes such as I cook everyday in the school: stews, gratins, risottos, pasta, hamburger patties, salads, and simple vegetable preparations. And I thought I would really burrow into the core of why it is so important to get fresh straight-from-the source ingredients, be it farm, field, or sea. This is an easy book for me to write because I have been teaching and cooking this food for Japanese friends and kids for two decades. But as a first book, there is a little niggling disappointment in crafting words or staying true to my “voice” only to have some part of “me” be translated out in the Japanese version.

 

 

I live in Japan and I have contacts in Japan, so a little Slow Lunch cookbook made sense, but the Indigo Days stories kept building up inside of me and wanting to get out. I still have scads of them ready to be written. I’ve been writing about our life here in Japan since right after Christopher was born 19 years ago. And as the years wore on, my almost annual New Year Letter grew to 20 pages and about 100 recipients, until I finally turned it into this blog. But I still write a short personal note to a few hundred friends and family members, reminiscent of that New Year letter. There are some private reflections I don’t particularly want to air over the Internet…though perhaps not many. After all these years in Japan, I’ve learned to keep a certain part of me inside, that’s called self-preservation. But don’t we all do that to an extent?

 

 

 

 

 

Along with the letters, I often sent color photocopies of Christopher’s art, and imbedded color photos of the family in the letters. With the exception of my misguided attempt to detail my fix-up-the-house project and gushing that the “house looks fabulous” in the New Year 1995 letter (cringe), I usually wrote about bilingual education, bicultural kids, food, and Japanese life. And always in the back of my mind, I was thinking that someday perhaps these letters could be made into a book. I’m not so sure anymore. They aren’t as compelling as I originally thought—especially the callow early ones that would need a total rework from the “wise narrator.”

In the 1998 letter I announced my intention to write a cookbook with Tadaaki. In the 1999 one I added two more book ideas, this time in Japanese: kids cooking and international cooking. And in 2007 I put one more project on the list: a cooking show at our house that Tadaaki affectionately named and created a jingle for: “Panic, panic…Panic Cooking Show!” There is something about writing down intentions to keep you honest. So, cooking show aside, I have made some discernibly concrete progress toward shifting these food-related plans from fantasy to reality.

 

 

In the year 2000, Tadaaki and I started a house-renovation that changed all of our lives. I had been teaching about 80 students in my house during the afternoons and evenings and had reached the point where I no longer wanted to continue sharing our living space with the students. I proposed building a classroom on our property and Tadaaki countered with the wildly unexpected suggestion of moving in with his parents. My jaw dropped.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After my initial (viscerally) negative reaction, I agreed to a walk through of the farm house and was able to see beyond the dusty corners, piles and piles of stuff, and shoddy plastic “improvements” effected by my father-in-law fifteen years before. So I agreed to renovate Tadaaki’s parents’ house and devise a way to live “separately” under the same roof. It took nine months to finish and three years to recover. But that’s a different story.

In 2001, I started a Slow Food Convivium and Sunny-Side Up! Immersion Preschool/Kindergarten. And I also started reading books on writing a book proposal and query letters. And whenever I had a block of time—which was seldom since we were home schooling as well—I brainstormed on Table of Contents, title, and intro pages.

But the catalyst for launching myself whole hog into writing came with the Soba Dinner I helped Sylvan Brackett organize at Chez Panisse in 2008. I invited the editor of our Slow Food Japan magazine to come along with us; then he asked me to write a series of articles about the Soba Dinner, Chez Panisse, and the Edible Schoolyard. And that is how it started.

I poured my heart and soul into the Soba Dinner “article”—all 15 pages of it (yikes, what was I thinking?). The Alice Waters interview and Edible Schoolyard pieces were considerably shorter, but in the end it was easier for Slow Food to just paraphrase what I wrote into Japanese. Ah, the first lesson in the hollow letdown of merely being “translated,” my English words left to float without home, never to see print. A definite low point.

But those couple months that I spent writing every spare minute of the day that I could jealously snatch, left me zinging with desire to write more and more and more. And better.

So where did I turn? To Stanford, the place where my brain had expanded (once), a world where I was intellectually and personally comfortable. Home.

 

 

A year and a half of magazine writing and memoir classes later, I was deep into writing my book proposal for Japanese Farm Food. I had met a supportive, talented mentor at Stanford, a skillful and extremely helpful writing coach at Food Blogger Camp, a Japanese cookbook editor/mentor I adore and admire, an accomplished (and published) Japanese food photographer, and my wonderfully smart and creative agent at the IACP Annual Conference. And thanks to all of their guidance and all of your encouragement, I now have a publisher that I respect enormously, whose vision of my book is exactly as mine (with old cloth in the design, a collage of old and new photos and a memoir story each chapter of recipes similar to My Nepenthe); and an editor with whom I can talk easily, who also coincidentally lived for several years not too far from me here in Japan, in a similarly small town. It was that easy and that hard.

One of my writing friends wrote me recently that “there are ‘can do’ and ‘can't do’ people in the world, and it seems like you don't let anything stop you.”

I guess that’s true.

 

 

Corn and Radishes

Corn and radishes go from bright and juicy to woody, in the space of a week. As soon as the first delicate little corn kernels are just raising themselves off of the cob, but are still not completely plumped out, we madly start eating the corn. By the end of the week, the kernels are turning chalky and it’s an effort to get through a whole ear of corn. From then the kernels quickly become wrinkled and inedible, and the few ears that are still mildly edible, were the slow starters, so slightly deformed.

Picking the corn a bit early was a battle I fought long and hard to win with farmer husband, Tadaaki. For him, it sounded wasteful to eat the immature corn.

Remember how I said that corn comes and goes in a week? The reality of that is that the corn from our field is at its peak for really only three days. Of course, we stagger planting, but we still plant a whole row in the field, and there are probably about 30 to 40 plants in each row. This year, Tadaaki was clever and planted a few varieties that had different maturing rates. The corn was even more clever and all seemed to mature exponentially at their peak. And one segued into the other so we had about two weeks solid of corn. Then nothing.

I love a lot of food in Japan, but the typical Japanese corn is not one of them. So unless we grow it, I don’t eat corn. For some unknown reason, Japanese love mature corn with broad dark yellow, very sweet (and starchy) kernels. And they boil the corn for a while. Until dead. They also eat the corn at room temperature. Too weird.

I had a friend who worked in an Iowa cornfield one summer when she was a teenager. She described how they prepared the corn for eating: pick the corn, husk, and run to the boiling water pot waiting on the stove. Turn off water and dump in corn. Cover and let “cook” for 3 minutes in the hot water. Remove with tongs and eat with salt and butter. I follow that method, but these days skip the butter.

Tadaaki takes it one step further and always eats a raw ear of corn while he’s still on the field. Now that’s fresh.

We planted the corn and radishes (late) in early June with the SSU! kindergarteners and elementary kids that come for After School Club. I prepared two sticks and we tied a hot pink nylon ribbon-string to one of them. A big kid walked down the field until I called, “Stop!” and we tied off the other end of the ribbon string onto the stick another kid was holding. We eyeballed a straight line and the two kids rammed their sticks into the loose dirt to mark the line. Hoeing a little trough out left me huffing and puffing, but it was a job I could not hand off. It’s harder than you’d think. Even I couldn’t quite keep the line straight and evenly dug.

I devised a system to give everyone a chance to plant, but also to avoid the massive seed dumping in one area. It worked. I lined up the kids at regularly spaced out intervals along the waiting trough and starting with the first kid, sprinkled some seeds in her hand. I then pointed to the place she should plop two or three seeds and thus moved down the line. As we planted subsequent rows, they started getting the hang of it. I’m working towards a less stressful, better-managed field experience with the kids, so am investing time in training them. The corn was slow to sprout, but the radish shoots popped up nicely the following week and valiantly raced against the fast-growing weeds over the following three weeks until their plump red bulbs underground had reached optimum maturity.

The radishes, scallions, and lettuces were drowning under the weed cover, so one day the whole school went out to the field to weed. The SSU! kids carried straw from the neighboring wheat field to lay down under the tomato plants. “Don’t step on the tomatoes!” was the refrain that day. My assistant Yumiko weeded the radishes and I asked her to pick radishes for lunch that day. She announced they were ready to crop, so we picked a big basketful. I meant to go back that evening to get more, but was distracted, and in the end missed the chance. One day of radishes was all we got this year, and that was my fault. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up and keep track. The radishes were hot and explosively flavorful, so even the kids couldn't resist them dipped in salt. I had some that night with miso as well, but am still longing for a few more. I suppose that’s what keeps me going, that desire to eat that special thing we have planted, I just wish I had more power to tend them.

Most of the heirloom corn seeds from Berkeley horticulture didn’t sprout, resulting in a scraggly looking row that also 

Most of the heirloom corn seeds from Berkeley Horticulture didn’t sprout (poor choices on my part), resulting in a scraggly looking row that also suffered from the weed explosion. It has been blazing hot during the day this summer and while cooler in the late afternoon, the mosquitos come out in droves, so weeding is a nightmare. I was working my way through my field trying to save the herbs, lettuce, Mexican corn, tomatoes, chives and scallions, but still hadn’t made it to my pathetic American corn stalks. Seeing me drowning, Tadaaki compassionately took a weed-whacker to the field, thus rendering the job finally manageable. The Mexican seeds I bought in the Ixtapa market were most likely meant for posole, and perhaps genetically modified not to propagate, as the 50 odd 10-feet tall stalks are singularly lacking in actual corn. At least the stalks are healthy. After all that work, we may get about 6 ears of Mexican corn and a perhaps two or three American. Oh well, it’s all a learning experience. Whenever I ask Tadaaki how to do something on the field his answer is always, “Just do it, then you’ll learn.” Of course when I “do it,” it’s most likely in some way wrong. But I am learning.

This summer, as we raced to eat four rows of corn in those two short weeks, I wondered if 

This summer, as we raced to eat four rows of corn in those two short weeks, I wondered if 

This summer, as we raced to eat four rows of corn in those two short weeks, I wondered if people really understood that corn takes three months to grow, but must be eaten within a week. In a blink of an eye it is gone. Fairly mind boggling when you think of the long growth process (and weeding), juxtaposed by the short window of maturity. The ephemeral nature of radishes is easier to wrap one’s head around because they only take one month to grow. One year I sent an email inviting friends to an afternoon lunch party and wrote that we had planted radishes for the party. The concept of growing something for a party blew away my Tokyo friends.

I still have a chance to harvest a couple ears of my fresh corn, (the Mexican one is meant to be dried), but that is it for the year. I can plant some radishes at the end of August, and hope I’m back from California when they’re at their peak. Another reason why Tadaaki says I shouldn’t travel—I miss the vegetables when they’re at their best. But then that’s the Japanese farmer mentality: don’t leave home. I guess I’ll never be a farmer.  

This summer, as we raced to eat four rows of corn in those two short weeks, I wondered if 

Japanese farmer mentality: don’t leave home. I guess I’ll never be a farme

 

Corn Cakes: These are adapted from a recipe in Chez Panisse Vegetables. The original method called for corn flour, but we don't produce that, so I substituted our own home grown four and some tasty organic corn meal I had. I also doubled the corn as I was looking for a big corn taste. Set corncob in a large bowl, and cut kernels off of 4 ears young corn with a sharp knife. After all the kernels are removed, go over cob with the back of the knife to get the juicy corn "meat" still adhering to the cob. Whisk 3/4 cup (75 g) organic flour, 3/4 cup (125 g) organic corn meal, and 1 teaspoon salt together in another large bowl.

Break 2 large farm eggs into a medium-sized bowl (preferably copper). Scoop the yolks out one by one into a small bowl by cupping your fingers gently under them (or use half of an empty shell). Heat 1 cup (240 cc) milk, ½ tablespoon organic sugar, and 4 tablespoons (60 grams) unsalted butter in a small saucepan over low flame until butter has melted. Let cool a few minutes and add in egg yolks. Slowly add milk and egg mixture to cornmeal mixture stirring constantly with whisk or wooden spoon to avoid lumps. When batter is smooth, stir in corn kernels.

Depending on size of your pan, heat a tablespoon or two of high-quality rapeseed, canola or peanut oil in a large nonstick frying pan over medium heat. Ladle in 3 or 4 scoops of batter with a soup ladle and cook until golden brown on bottom. Flip with a flat spatula and continue cooking until the second side is golden brown. If the cakes are thick, cook covered for a few minutes on low to conduct heat to the center. Remove to a paper-towel lined plate or cookie tray. Serve with a summer meal. Also would be good for breakfast with melted butter and homemade raspberry jam. Makes 20 3-inch cakes.

 

Corn “Kakiage” Fritters: Tadaaki hops the train every Thursday afternoon and travels an hour each way to practice the samurai arts of iaijutsu, kenjutsu and jujitsu. On one of those nights I got into a cooking frenzy and made salt broiled mackerel pike, salt-massaged cucumbers with miso and sesame, stir-fried eggplant with red pepper and miso, and served some beautiful local tofu with hand grated fresh wasabi. I also made corn “kakiage” fritters.

Baachan ("Granny") tends to fade as the hour gets late, so I was racing to get some food on the table before she conked out. Serving Tadaaki-style (one dish at a time), I called the boys and Baachan to the table to start eating without me. And in the kitchen, I munched on a crunchy-squishy corn kakiage, dipping the corner in sea salt before each subsequent burning hot bite. I ate two. They were that good.

Cut kernels off of 6 small ears of young corn as described in above recipe. Chop 2 scallions into fine rings (white and green part). Dump the corn kernels and scallions into 1 recipe tempura batter, add five ice cubes, and stir. Remove ice cubes. Follow directions for making tempura batter, heating oil and preparing workspace. Use excellent quality light oil, but only add 2” (5 cm) of oil to a a10-inch (25 cm) frying pan. Ladle in 4 scoops of batter with a soup ladle.

Cook over medium high heat until golden brown on bottom. Carefully turn over using two heat-resistant curved rubber scrapers.  Cook until the second side is golden brown and the oil bubbles have mainly subsided (indicating the water has cooked out). Remove from oil with a flat round slotted skimmer to the newspaper and paper towel lined cookie tray you have prepared. Eat immediately with fine white sea salt or organic soy sauce. Makes 8.