April 19, 2011

Asparagus

Asparagus! I got so excited I hopped around whooping and hollering in my backyard garden! Almost as excited as Mio swinging around on the akebi vines.
Poking through the thick, leafy winter mulch they were practically camouflaged. Now two weeks later they are about a foot tall already. One year down, two to go until we can get a decent harvest.

I remember the first time I saw asparagus growing in a garden, in my Grandpa's backyard. He picked a chubby, purply white shoot, barely poking through the straw, and told me to eat it raw. Delicious!

Then a few years later my Mom borrowed a long-ignored garden bed from our neighbor Margaret (she has a knack for acquiring bits and pieces of garden from the neighbors, so she can plant extra vegetables) and plugged it full of asparagus crowns. Now, a good five years later, she and my Dad are feasting on it.

We've got a few more years before we'll get to taste it, but already it's looking much stronger and bigger than the "2nd year" seedlings they're selling at the store. So don't be afraid to start it from seed in the springtime, as long as you're planting in rich soil-- much cheaper than buying crowns. Yesterday I had the wwoofers plant four flats of it to set out this fall in our forest garden.

April 6, 2011

smoked takuan


I guess it was December when the grandma down the road for us tottered over here with a wheelbarrow full of cute little daikon. I cut off the greens and Masa made some kind of delicious pickles with them that I wish I knew the recipe for. Probably something deceptively easy along the lines of mixing them with salt and stuffing them in a bucket and leaving them alone, and then knowing when they are ready and what to do with them.

As for the roots, I set them out to dry on the table outside, intending only to leave them for a few days but I got busy with other stuff. So they sat there for a few weeks, freezing every night and thawing in the morning. The idea is to dry them out just a little bit, so that they lose maybe 15% of their moisture. Finally around New Years I got around to rigging them up in the smoker and tried smoking them with pruned maple twigs, but it didn't work, or I wasn't paying enough attention or something, and I ended up using a few sawdust blocks, cherry I think. Again, I meant to have them in and out of the smoker in 24 hours but I forgot about them and they were there for another two weeks.

When I got around to making the takuan, Masa gave me a suspiciously vague recipe: Mix nuka (rice germ) with water until it's squishy, form a layer on the bottom of a bucket, and sprinkle it generously with salt (enough so that you can really see it on the surface). Then rub salt into the daikon and place on the bed of nuka, cover with more nuka and salt, then add another layer of salted daikon, until you reach the top. And every now and then throw in a few shards of kombu and dried chile peppers. Pat down the nuka and really cover the top with salt, otherwise mold will grow on it. Apparently you're supposed to put a weight on top at some point, but I neglected to do so and it doesn't seem to have messed anything up.

Then you just wait a month or so, and do a taste test. The daikon will have become really floppy and strong smelling from the nuka. Slice and eat with rice. Mine have started tasting really good just recently, after about 2 months, tangy, salty, mildly sweet, with a little effervescence on the tongue from the lacto-fermentation. One of our wwoofers told me I eat like a Grandma. Not sure exactly what that means. I guess it has something to do with liking traditional foods that are now considered quaint and that may happen to smell funny.

sansai primer part 1: yomogi and tsukushi

 yomogi on the left, the mushroomy looking things are tsukushi, and the feathery stuff on the right is sugina.

We're finally getting warm days here, so it's been nice walking around gathering wild herbs, known as sansai in Japanese. It's common in Japan for people to stroll the fields and forests and forage, maybe since Japan has a more recent history of starvation. Coming here two years ago I was amazed to discover the variety and abundance of edible plants, and all the different ways to prepare them.

Yesterday I gathered some yomogi, or Japanese mugwort. According to Masa (our resident wwoofer-chef), the best time to pick it is after the cherries have blossomed. I'm a little early. But no matter, there is plenty of it already. I gathered about three handfuls worth, steamed it, chopped it fine, and incorporated it into hot mochi (glutinous rice paste) and then wrapped it them around balls of shiro-an (sweetened white adzuki bean paste). It's a nice spring sweet to eat with matcha tea. You see it all over Japan in this season. Yomogi can also be dried for tea, with a flavor maybe halfway between sage and mint.

I also gathered a little bit of tsukushi, or horsetail shoots, which are not really my favorite but they are so weird and funny looking I can't help but gather a bit. Also I don't care for it so much since it's such an annoying weed in the fields, especially in our potato patch, and no amount of plucking seems to slow its growth. If you're going to eat it, it's better to pick the shoots before they've gotten big enough to release spores, otherwise it will be somewhat bitter and on the dry side. I boiled it in a little water, drained it, and tossed it with a little shoyu and mirin. I can't say much for its flavor, but it does have an interesting texture and it makes for a unique side dish.

Actually, yomogi and sugina (the leaf portion of tsukushi which emerges soon after) make up half of one of my favorite tea combinations. My friend at the coffee shop in town makes her own mix-- it's equal parts roasted kuromame or black soybeans, dokudami or houttuynia, yomogi, and sugina. I bought a bag for myself, and liked it so much I bought a few more for friends and family, only to find out later from the proprietress that its main use is as a medicinal tea to cure constipation... she must think I'm pretty stopped up!