Sweet Seasons/June 2006 - Hydrangea -

I know. It’s the last day of the month, AGAIN. And you know what? This time the photos were already ready in the middle of June. But for some reason, I kept posting about other foods and had this one wait… and now, it’s the end of the month. Anyway, here’s the wagashi for this month. Hydrangea This wagashi is categorized as kinton, which is typically made by coating a ball of an (sweet bean paste) with colorful flakes also made with an. The flakes of an are called soboro and they are made by passing koshian (sieved sweet bean paste) through a coarse sieve. Often yam or kanten gelatin is added to give the soboro a little different texture. To see the photos showing the kinton-making procedures, click here. Instead of being molded in certain shapes, kinton represents seasonal themes, even including shapeless things or sceneries, with the gradation of differently-colored soboro. These are some examples of kinton and seasonal themes. (Click on the themes to see how they are expressed with kinton.) autumn leaves scattered showers in deep mountains in late autumn cold winter wind treading wheat nanohana flowers spring haze * This is my favorite. wisteria first frost snow in deep mountains (two photos in the first row) Hydrangea is a gift of the nature that adds elegant colors to our gray and depressive rainy season in Japan. It is a popular wagashi theme for June, and often hydrangea wagashi is topped with some tiny pieces of clear kanten jelly which represent the dews on the flowers. Wagashi by Ogasawara Categories: Wagashi

Yamamomo

Yamamomo Berries My boss gave me some yamamomo (myrica rubra or Japanese bayberry?) yesterday. This fruit is very popular in Kochi and used in various ways including desserts, jam and liquor. In my hometown, it is popular to make yamamomo-shu in the same way they make ume-shu (plum liquor), which is soaking the fruit and crystallized sugar in “white liquor” in a jar and waiting for about two months. Compared to ume-shu, yamamomo-shu has somewhat sweeter fragrance and a more pinkish color, and I like it mixed with some water and lots of ice. The left photo shows the inside of a yamamomo berry. I like eating yamamomo raw, too, with a little salt sprinkled on, but very ripe ones only. They are quite sour and even a bit astringent when not ripe, and eating such unripe ones can be unpleasant enough to make you want to stay away from them for the rest of your life. My boss gave me ripe and juicy ones (thanks, boss!) I enjoyed them after supper tonight , watching TV. Categories: Japanese, Kochi

Bibingka

Bibingka Yesterday I finally tried out JMom’s bibingka recipe. When I read her post about this Filipino dessert, I got so curious because the recipe called for mochiko (rice flour) instead of regular flour. I HAD TO find out what it would taste like when mochiko is mixed with my favorite ingredients like coconut milk and sour cream. So I tried it -- and loved it very much! Looking at the photo in her bibingka post, I think the texture of hers looks more cake-like. My bibingka turned out pretty mochi-like, and I don’t know if it is the way it is or I made a mistake in conversion again or baking temperature was not correct or something. But I do love the taste. I bet kids would love this dessert with sweet, gentle aroma. It must be even better with banana leaves, which I can only imagine… I don’t know if this was a weird thing to do, but I enjoyed this dessert with hot fresh lemongrass tea. Thanks JMom for sharing the recipe! :D Categories: Asian-inspired, Sweets

Happy Saturday Night!

Tacos (From Old El Paso Taco Kit) I had this sudden craving for Mexican food + beer at around 6:30 pm this evening. Maybe it had something to do with this weather today -- rainy in the morning, sunny and hot like summer in the late afternoon. So this was my supper tonight. Of course I had these tacos with (low malt) beer! :D In case you're wondering, I didn’t use ground meat for this Mexican treat, because I had some leftover chicken breast fillets. Yes, that’s what the brown thing on the plate is. Spicy food, cold beer and a movie on TV. Mmmmm…. Happy Saturday night. Right now I’m taking a little break before dessert. I just came to my laptop to share my happiness with you all. And ice cream is waiting for me in the freezer now, and my kitchen and living room are pretty clean and tidy because a guy from gas company came to check the gas range/water heater this morning, and tomorrow is Sunday! Yay!! OK. So much for now. Time for ice cream ;) Categories: Other-areas

Mizuna and Sasami Salad

Mizuna and Shredded Chicken Breast Fillet Salad My first harvest of mizuna turned into this salad today. Compared to the mizuna I see at stores, mine is a lot softer and the color is much lighter. The mizuna and shredded chicken was tossed with wasabi-mayonnaise this time. It was one of a variety of mayonnaise dressings said to be good for mizuna salad. Other than the wasabi version, I saw mustard-mayonnaise, ponzu-mayonnaise, soy sauce-mayonnaise, sesame-mayonnaise, tofu-mayonnaise and mentaiko-mayonnaise, etc, etc… Wow! :D Categories: Western-inspired

Matcha and Azuki Separated...

Matcha Mizu-Yokan Now, this is something you don’t see very often. Lucky you! ;) I mean, most people in Japan do not make tokoroten AND mizu-yokan at one time from scratch like this. Yes, when I say from scratch, I’m not talking about making them from kanten bars. I’m talking about making them from SEAWEED. If you are not familiar with tokoroten (agar noodles), this post tells you how we make/eat the noodles, as well as how my mom is involved in this tokoroten project (?!). OK, then, what is mizu-yokan? Here is a good explanation of what it is with a recipe and nice photo by Reid of Ono Kine Grindz. His recipe calls for kanten bars, of course. I bet any other yokan or mizu-yokan recipes call for kanten bars or kanten powder; no recipe would tell you to go to the beach and pick tengusa seaweed first. Of course not everyone lives near the beach, and the seaweed has to be dried for several weeks, but that’s not the only reason. For the better taste of kanten desserts, using kanten bars/powder is recommended over gelatin liquid just extracted from tengusa seaweed. When we cook the seaweed to obtain the gelatin liquid, we add a little amount of vinegar. I’m not quite sure why, but they say that it probably won’t set well without the vinegar. Thus, the seaweed gelatin liquid is largely tasteless but has a slight hint of the flavor/smell of the seaweed and vinegar, which you don’t really want for your desserts. Kanten bars do not have that problem because such unwanted flavors are taken away during the repeated freezing process. That's why kanten bars are more ideal for making wagashi. But looks like many housewives in my hometown did not care too much about such a minor(?) problem. If you cook tengusa seaweed once, you usually end up with quite a bit of gelatin liquid. If agar noodles was the only thing you can make out of it, you and your family will get tired of the noodles. Then why not go for more variety? Maybe you can hide the slight hint of the seaweed and vinegar by adding a lot of sugar and something with a strong flavor. Yeah, why not? So, in my hometown, it has been quite popular, when making agar noodles, to set aside some of the seaweed gelatin liquid and use it for making desserts like coffee-kan, umeshu-kan, nikkei cinnamon-kan and Soda-kan. For today’s experiment, I decided to go for mizu-yokan, and to give it a stronger flavor, I chose matcha mizu-yokan. Read More Now I'll show you how I made tokoroten and matcha mizu-yokan. The left photo is dried tengusa seaweed. (It looks like this when in the ocean, but after repeated washing and drying, it turns beige.) First, you need to wash it well. Then it'll look like the right photo. I added water and cooked the seaweed for apx. 30 minutes. In the beginning it looked like the left photo. Then I added vinegar and cooked for another 30 minutes. The seaweed became very soft and the soup was thickened as in the right photo. BTW, the smell of cooking seaweed and vinegar was not very pleasant! I drained it in a cloth bag, waited until it cooled a little, and while the seaweed was still warm, squeezed out the liquid as much as possible. The tengusa seaweed looked like this after squeezing (above left photo) and I got the tasteless and colorless gelatin liquid (above right photo). To make tokoroten noodles, the liquid needs to be poured in a flat container. What’s fascinating is that, unlike animal gelatin, kanten sets at room temperature and turns out very firm. But it tastes better when chilled, so I put it in the fridge after it was set. Now, from here, it gets in a real experimental phase. I added shiroan (sweetened white bean paste), sugar and pinch of salt to the remaining warm gelatin liquid and stirred well over low heat to dissolve them completely. In another bowl, I mixed matcha, sugar and a little hot water, then added some gelatin liquid and mixed well. The matcha mixture was then poured into the rest of the gelatin-shiroan mixture which had been removed from heat. When the whole mixture was properly flavored with matcha and colored dark green, I strained it through a sieve twice to remove tiny matcha lumps. So far, so good. To make it look good and taste good, I wanted to add some boiled azuki beans to my matcha mizu-yokan. But actually that was the beginning of the tragedy. When I opened the can of boiled azuki beans, I found that it was half-mashed, almost paste-like beans, not the boiled azuki beans I had in mind. There was no way they could elegantly float here and there in my mizu-yokan, so I changed my plan and tried to make a thin layer of azuki at the bottom of the matcha mizu-yokan (left photo). I poured the rest of the mixture on top, and again, when it was almost set at room temperature (right photo), I put it in the fridge. After a few hours, I sliced the mizu-yokan, and… Ahhhhhh!!! That’s why I had to present it the way you see in the photo at the top of this post. With a hydrangea leaf, doesn’t it look somewhat like a hydrangea flower? :P Taste-wise, the matcha mizu-yokan was OK, since I couldn’t detect the taste of vinegar. But to tell you the truth, I felt a little strange aftertaste… or a slight sensation on my tongue. Maybe it was a vinegar effect? Next time I’ll try this with less vinegar and a less amount of non-mashed type of boiled azuki beans. Oh yes, there will be a next time, because I have plenty of dried tengusa seaweed left... Categories: Bloopers, Sweets

Fresh Lemongrass Tea

Fresh Lemongrass Tea (Iced) I forgot to post about it in my previous garden report, but my lemongrass was getting taller and taller. Other plants around it (tomato, basil and mizuna) seemed unhappy, so I cut most of the lemongrass leaves this morning and made this fresh lemongrass tea, inspired by this Japanese site. Mmm…Nice, aromatic tea. Now I feel like some spicy noodles or something… I’m drying the rest of the lemongrass leaves. Categories: Drinks

Orange Chicken for a Lazy Day

Orange Chicken for a Lazy Day This is something I whipped up today. I’ve been feeling lazy all day, with the depressing rain outside and all. I didn’t feel like cooking something elaborate, following the recipe precisely, step-by-step. So I just went through several orange chicken and sherry chicken recipes to get some basic ideas, and when cooking, I didn’t measure any of the ingredients with a measuring cup or measuring spoons. What were the ingredients for this orange chicken? A chicken breast, salt & pepper, dry sherry, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, a dash of lemon, whole-grain mustard, parsley from my balcony garden, and one more thing. To give an orange flavor to the chicken, I used something in place of orange marmalade. Can you guess what it was? While making this dish, I kept telling myself, “These ingredients are all edible, so it’s not gonna kill me no matter how I mix them.” When I’m really lazy, this is often the bottom line of my cooking. :P To my surprise, this orange chicken was not bad. Maybe a little too sweet, but not bad at all. Now I'm feeling lazy to do the dishes... * OK. Now, here's the answer: I used mom's burnt orange jam for this orange chicken. Thanks for guessing! :D Categories: Asian-inspired

Weird Combination?

Konatsu and Soy Milk Jelly Another konatsu dessert with my dad’s konatsu oranges. The top layer is made with freshly squeezed konatsu juice, and the bottom layer with soy milk. Weird combination? I had to make them two-layered instead of just plain konatsu jelly – for esthetic reason :P The soy milk was seasoned with sugar and some white rum. I thought about adding the liquor to the orange juice, but I finally decided against it because I preferred the fresh taste of konatsu as is. To me, the combination was not bad at all, honestly. Or…maybe… soy-milk jelly or panna cotta with konatsu sauce might have been a better idea. But I had much more kionatsu juice than soy milk and no cream in the fridge, so I guess this was a good choice in the given circumstance ;) BTW, do you like these plastic cups? I saved them after we ate store-bought gelatin desserts (coffee jelly and mango jelly) in the office. Yep, the tropical-looking one had mango jelly in. Categories: Sweets

Garden Report - June 2006 -

Sad news. I won’t be able to get rose hips from my balcony garden this autumn. My dog rose is sick. :(　 Remember how it looked just one month ago? All the leaves were green, looking completely healthy, and pink flowers were so lovely. Then it happened. At the end of May, some leaves started turning yellow. Then more and more leaves… When I looked close, I found tiny black spots on the leaves. This is a common rose disease, right? I used a fungicidal spray, and kept removing yellow leaves as much as possible every day, but obviously it was not enough for saving the flowers and hips from turning brown and falling. How disappointing… I heard that in other countries, dog rose just grows wild on the roadside, so I assumed that it was a disease-resistant kind which needs very little care. But with our hot and humid weather, it’s a different story here, I guess… Well, let’s not be too disappointed, because other plants are doing fine. Sweet Marjoram (blooming) and chervil. They are just perfectly fine. Blueberries are gradually ripening. :D Mizuna mustard. This is a less-bitter variety which is good for salad. According to the package, the seeds came from Denmark! Is mizuna popular over there??? Mom’s neighbor gave her 2 young tomato plants and this is one of them. According to the neighbor, this is supposed to have oblong tomatoes, so I hope this is an Italian tomato plant. If so, I’ll make dry tomatoes this summer! Dill is doing fine, as always. I’m hoping to be able to get more dill seeds than last year. These are called “chima sanchu,” a variety of leafy lettuce(?) with long leaves and a little bitter taste. Well, that’s what I heard. They say it is great with yakiniku. Think about tasty yakiniku wrapped with crispy chima sanchu leaves… and accompanied by ICE COLD BEER!(← Very important.) :D Categories: Garden

Chicken and Dumplings

Chicken and Dumplings When the humidity proves the beginning of the rainy season here, my memories of the South come back and I always feel the urge to make some southern dishes. Inspired by the Chicken and Dumplings entry by Randi of Culinary Adventures, I made this for lunch yesterday. When in the States, I always used Bisquick for making the dumplings. But I have read somewhere that for a real chicken and dumplings dish, the dumplings should be made from scratch. And now I’m fully convinced! Thank you Randi for sharing the recipe (and kindly coming over to my blog to let me know)! I enjoyed this very much. :) Categories: Western-inspired

Look for a Moai...

The chicken and dumplings recipe called for dry sherry, and it gave me a perfect excuse to buy my first bottle of it. When you want to buy rare (well, rare in Kochi, Japan, at least) imported liquor in Kochi, this is where you should go. As far as I know, they have the best variety of imported liquor in this prefecture. Everything I wanted including Marsala wine was available at this liquor shop. Always. Usually in the daytime, there’s only an old man or his wife in the shop. What’s impressive is that they always understood the name of the exotic (I mean, for most of the elderly in town) liquor I told them. They never ever looked like “What the hell is that drink you are talking about? I’ve never heard of it.” But to locate the requested liquor in the shop, they always needed to call their son on the cell phone and asked where it was. And they found it. Always. So if you live in Kochi and occasionally look for imported liquor, remember this place. It’s ”Liquor Gallery IZUMI” on Sangyo doro in Izumi-cho, Kochi city, not too far from HARD-OFF. Look for a big moai statue in front of the shop. (I have no idea why they have moai there... :) Categories: Sake, Kochi

Another Experiment and a Better-Than-Expected Result

Jam & Cream Tarts and Cherry Tarts When I finished baking thumbprint cookies with mom’s burnt jam the other day, another idea popped up in my mind. The idea was using the jam for tarts. But if I put the jam alone in cookie tart shells, isn't it almost the same as the thumbprint cookies which were not bad but not really a great success? So I thought about combining the jam with pastry cream. Luckily, I have a good pastry cream recipe that one of the readers (she called herself "a fellow baker") gave me in her comment to my post about a year ago. I made the pastry cream over and over to try it with various kinds of fruits or jam, and I liked it every time. Most of the time I used heavy cream to make the half-and-half called for in the recipe, but this time I used vegetable whipping cream to make it lighter. Since mom’s jam had a little strong taste and slight bitterness, I thought rich cream might be overwhelming. These American cherries were bought for a back-up plan. If the test batch of the jam & cream tart would taste terrible, I was going to give up on the idea right away and make cherry & cream tarts with the rest of the pastry cream and tart shells. Unfortunately the cherries were not sweet… with not much cherry flavor, either. (Maybe not quite ripe yet?? It was hard to tell when they were on the shelf in the package.) So I made one test sample of each of the jam & cream version and cherry & cream version, and tasted both. And you know what?! They were both GOOD!! :D So I made more of both kinds of tarts The pastry cream made the taste of mom’s jam a lot milder and gave a different kind of sweetness to it, so the slight bitterness from the jam became a pleasant aftertaste. Honestly, the tart would have been rather bland without the bitterness.The cream also supplemented sweetness for the cherries and made them taste a lot better. * Note that now I have chervil leaves to garnish my desserts. ;) Yep, they are from my balcony garden. BTW, the shells are store-bought cookie tart shells. (No wonder they look good.) My conclusion: Pastry cream is a savior! :D Categories: Sweets

Colorless, but NOT Tasteless!

Konatsu sorbet I made this sorbet from dad’s konatsu oranges a few days ago. Too bad it looks so very colorless in these photos … The color of konatsu juice is light yellow, so there was nothing I could do about it. (Of course I didn't want food coloring.) Because it is colorless, this konatsu sorbet may not look tasty, but actually it IS very flavorful. I think I added just right amount of sugar to the konatsu orange juice this time. The sorbet turned out not too sweet, not too sour… just perfect for me, and it tastes so refreshing after a spicy or greasy meal. Categories: Sweets

Sake to Sakana #1 Tosa Space Sake

* The author of this post does not recommend sake-drinking to anyone who has not reached the legal drinking age or who should not consume alcohol due to medical/psychological concerns. Finally! I’m posting about sake and appetizers -- a new project I had mentioned LONG time ago. The first entry is going to feature this Tosa Uchu Shu 土佐宇宙酒　(Tosa Space Sake). I know. It was launched on April 1st, 2006, and it’s already June! Didn’t I tell you that I’m a procrastinator?　:P Maybe some of you have read about this space sake project in my another blog or somewhere else. The full story in English is available here. (Well, I should say half of the story, because it only tells you what happened before the launch of this unique sake.) To my pleasant surprise, I also found that someone outside Japan already tasted Tosa Space Sake and posted about it in English here!! :D OK. Now I’m going to share with you some inside stories that only I can tell to the English speaking world ;) Read More After the yeast safely came back on Soyuz in October 2005, 18 (some websites say 17) breweries in Kochi started making sake with it. Then in November 2005, Russia claimed that the space sake should not be sold because the contract said the yeast was to be sent to space for research purpose. According to our local newspaper, Japanese side had chosen the “research purpose” alternative because it was cheaper than sending the yeast to space for future commercial use, but they thought there was an unspoken agreement about making space sake with the yeast. Then some sort of legal revision took place in Russia and the unspoken agreement seemed to have been cancelled, the newspaper said. The solution was sending some yeast to space again at the end of March 2006, for the purpose of future commercial use this time. That means having to pay enormous amount of additional money, but the good thing is that it was NOT added to the price of Tosa space sake. When they finally came on the market in April 2006, they were in the favorable price range -- almost the same as other junmai daiginjo-shu. Appetizer #1 Chicken with yuzu-kosho and black sesame seeds (Also see this post) This did not go very well with this space sake. Somehow it brought out the greasiness of the chicken. On April 1st, several special events were held in Kochi to celebrate the launch. I heard one of them was a drinking party under cherry trees to enjoy the first batch of Tosa space sake, viewing beautiful cherry blossoms. Doesn’t that sound tempting? Too bad I was extremely busy at that time and missed the application deadline. Also, I missed the chance to get the space sake of my favorite brand. Though all the breweries in this project were required to use the space-traveled yeast and local sake rice to make the space sake, of course the taste of the resulting products varied according to the technique each brewery used. (Actually, they were allowed to choose from 6 types of local yeasts that came back from space and 2 types of local sake rice, so the combination chosen also contributed to the difference in taste, I believe.) Advance orders poured in. The space sake version of several prestigious brands from small breweries were sold out immediately after the launch (or never available at stores), leaving no chance for a procrastinator like me. :( I was disappointed, but not terribly disappointed, to tell you the truth. Why? Because I had heard that the ones launched in 2006 were made from the “dry yeast” with little possibility of any mutation to happen as a result of the space travel. The real excitement will come next year… when they brew and launch the ones made with the “wet yeast” which may surprise us with some kind of mutation. I’m definitely going to place an advance order for a couple of them next spring. Anyway, it was in the middle of May when my attention was finally back on the space sake project after the busy days. I bought this space sake named “Uchu hikou (space flight)” by Kikusui Suzo. Now, if I want to see what difference the special yeast made, I should buy a junmai daiginjo by Kikusui made from the same kind of rice, through the same method and with the same kind of yeast which did NOT experience a space travel, and compare the taste. Unfortunately I have never tried regular Kikusui 菊水 daiginjo before, and I didn’t buy a bottle of it to use as a “control sample.” Therefore, I cannot tell how different this space sake version is from regular Kikusui daiginjo. Sorry. When I opened the bottle of this “Uchu hikou” first, I felt that the aroma was kind of “wet” (does this description make sense??) compared to the ginjo-shu I usually drink such as Bijofu 美丈夫 or Tosazuru　土佐鶴. But it may be the way Kikusui usually is. According to the shopkeeper, this is a rather “dry” type with a moderate fruity fragrance, and I think it’s true. Sorry, that’s all I can say about this “Uchu hikou”. Appetizer #2 Avocado & bonito with store-bought lemon dressing This was very refreshing and good with "Uchu hikou." Before and after drinking the space sake, I googled quite a bit to find out what other Japanese consumers (esp. Kochi locals) said about Tosa uchu shu. To summarize what I’ve read so far, the brewers had the impression that the space sake has somewhat more body and fragrance than regular ginjo or daiginjo-shu. Also, I think I read on someone’s blog that the space sake version of Bunkajin 文佳人tasted richer(?) with a stronger body compared to the regular Bunkajin. (But now I cannot find the post anywhere so I could be wrong.) It was one of those that were sold out right after the launch, thus not available until next year. I’m determined to be more prepared in 2007 and place advance orders to get this brand and a couple other brands I like. Oh, and apply for space-sake drinking party under cherry trees. :) Categories: Sake

Kaiseki Chronicles #3

It’s been almost two months since our kaiseki place opened. Many things have changed already, which was kind of expected. I guess that is the way it is in the beginning stage at most of newly-opened shops/restaurants. More than half of the waitresses left and now the newcomers are trying hard to get used to their new work environment. One of the cooks already left, too. Meanwhile, I discovered some new things about kaiseki cooking in the past two months. One of the new discoveries was the way traditional Japanese chefs use special chopsticks for putting foods in serving bowls or on plates. The chopsticks are longer than regular eating chopsticks, and they have extremely pointy tips. They are called “moritsuke-bashi” and they look like this. 　 When I saw the cooks using the moritsuke-bashi, I understood why they say, “If you are clumsy with chopsticks, you can never be a good Japanese chef.” Often in traditional Japanese cuisine, just a mouthful amount of food is elegantly placed in a teeny-tiny serving bowl and topped with things like a few flower petals or extremely thin strips of citrus rind, etc. I used to think that arranging foods that way must be easier with fingers or a tweezer-like tool than chopsticks, but I was wrong. Fingertips are not pointy enough, and sometimes tweezer-like tools cannot easily release what they picked up. In that sense, I think chopsticks are really something, and I respect those who can use them skillfully. (As you might already know, I’m helplessly clumsy with chopsticks.) Those skillful people must have some extra nerves in their fingers… or maybe I'm lacking some of the nerves that should be there... It is unfortunate that the kitchen staff do most of the preparations in the daytime before I come to work and I cannot see how they cut/season foods. One thing I really want to learn is how they make dashi stock. I like the taste of simmered dishes they serve at this kaiseki place now, and I think dashi stock is the key. They don’t seem to be using extremely expensive kelp or bonito flakes -- the difference must be in the technique. That’s the secret I want to steal… BTW, I have a question to those who work/used to work at restaurants. At your workplace, are kitchen staff allowed to bring their cell phones into the kitchen and use them when not busy? I don't mean to say it is a good or bad thing to do; I'm just curious. Categories: Kaiseki

Burnt Jam

Thumbprint Cookies with Burnt Jam in the Center... OK. I finished all the posts I wanted to upload before the end of May, and now I can finally write about my last weekend. Yes, I stayed at my parents’ house, as I mentioned in my previous post, but my mom and I did not go to the beach. The weather wasn't good. If it was just the rain, we wouldn’t have minded. But it was almost like a storm, with strong winds and waves as high as typhoon waves. So, no abalone picking. No way. Instead, we (dad, mom and I) went to the orchard and picked konatsu oranges. At the dinner table at night, I was busy eating the dishes both mom and dad offered to me. Yep. Dad often cooks, too. It's not that he is into cooking; he is into health food. He loves growing “highly nutritious” veggies introduced in health magazines and trying out salads and veg. juice recipes he finds there. Mom offered me the pickles and simmered food she likes. Obviously, they are harvesting and cooking more than enough for just two of them. It’s not only vegetables that they need to consume. Dad grows many kinds of oranges -- maybe 6 to 7 kinds -- and even after dad sold them to several shops in town, plenty of not-good-enough-for-sale oranges are usually left on the trees or in the storage. So, what should we do with them? Juice? Jelly? Jam? Marmalade? Use them for baking? Mom and I always feel the pressure of having to do something about those leftover oranges. Mom is into making jam and sugared orange peels(?) these days. Last weekend, when I first went into the kitchen with mom, she looked at me with a big grin on her face and said, “Oh, here’s something for you.” Orange Jam – burnt. She said that she burnt a big potful (the biggest pot in house!) of orange jam about a week ago. I forgot what kind of oranges she said she used, but at least they were not konatsu. She insisted that the taste of the jam was not totally intolerable and I should be able to eat it with yoghurt. Another suggestion she made was using it for thumbprint cookies. So I came back to my apartment with this jar full of brown orange jam, and these are the thumbprint cookies I made today. Yeah, mom, they are OK. The jam tastes only slightly bitter, but it’s not too terrible. But…I can’t help wishing that the jam on top of these cookies was store-bought cherry jam or raspberry jam … Am I a cold-hearted daughter? ;P Categories: Sweets