February 4th, 2009
The winter is almost over and we have barely touched our food reserves. We still have a ton of tomatoes sauce, pickled tomatoes, pickled zucchini, cabbage and pickled nozawana as well as many kg of potatoes, sorghum and rice. Before we know it, we will have fresh tomatoes and fresh rice. We gotta find a way to get rid of this!
Tomoe has been busy making some great dishes with the sorghum, and whatever we can’t finish we will give to the chickens in the spring. Then the problem will be finishing all the eggs.
In Tokyo we were so careful not to throw away any food - always using a scraper to get even the last bits out of our soup bowl or plate. Here, we have so much that it is rotting in the hallway and I have grown numb. It doesn’t feel like waste though, because it is all going back into the soil for next years crops. It’s amazing to feel so wealthy with so little work (well, it is work, but it doesn’t feel like it).
The photos are the sorghum. Our biggest trouble was figuring out how to get the outer shell off. We ran it through a peddle powered machine that takes the grain off of the stem, but the only way to remove the husk is to beat it - very time-consuming. Tomoe came up with the idea to put them in the blender for a few seconds, and it worked quite well, with only a few broken grains. We also pop them over the fire stove like pop-corn. They don’t pop as big, but they make a tasty snack that satisfies the urge for “crunchy” without the calories (or cost) of potato chips.
Once we get the distillery built though, the *real* fun begins!
Posted in Winter, farming, food | Comments Off
January 31st, 2009
This was the scene a few weeks ago. The winter was moving slow, but there was still hope. This morning, however, I was too depressed to even get my camera out, as I awoke to the sound of pouring rain washing away all our hopes of trudging through chest deep snow, sleeping in snow caves, and leaping from the roof into meters of fluff.
I hate climate-change - and so does poor Kentaro (pictured below)
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January 25th, 2009
Just testing out a new (known about) area today. It used to be where the school kids practiced skiing before the new ski hill with the fancy lift was built. Back then, everyone hiked up to ski down. Now it it is unheard of in this area.
Unfortunately, this year the snow is like spring snow - late spring snow… and it is not even February yet.
Posted in Winter, village life | Comments Off
December 30th, 2008
Every week brings its own stresses. This week we were trying to write all the new-year cards to friends, family, and past customers. A few days ago we went to the local paper maker and made our own postcards. While most of them are nothing one would ever pay for, it was a lot of fun. The hard part is writing them and addressing the envelopes - something I have never had a habit to do, but figure that it is something we should start now that our “past customer” base is growing.
The photos are of us making paper. Since we had rented the place out for a half-day anyway, we invited a friend / neighbor to join in the fun and share the costs.
The paper here is famous because of the quality of the water, and bleaching effects of the snow. The water is one of the “100 cleanest” in Japan, which apparently makes it ideal for making high quality paper. The snow in this area is ideal for bleaching the bark that will eventually become pulp. snow reflects certain rays from the sun which can turn a brown bark into a white bark in just as few days. Japanese also use the snow to bleach silk and other woods and materials.
In other news, The challenge has begun. For the next five months or so I will have to find new and exciting ways to photograph snow and not have all my photos turn out just like last years.
There was about 40 cm (16 inches) already on the ground after one day, and it was supposed to snow for the next week. Unfortunately, sunny weather today left us with less than a foot still on the ground. I guess this is good as Tomoe and I will be away for a week, and if it really snowed that whole time we wound not even be able to find our house when we got back.
Posted in One Life Programs, village life | Comments Off
December 12th, 2008
I had an opportunity to head up to Akiyamago again yeasterday, taking a potetial business partner to show him all the glory of our area. Its sad that there is no snow except for on top of the mountains, but even without leaves on the trees it was just as awe-inspiring as with.
The monkies were also out in droves. I just kept looking at them and wishing I had my gun, as you are paid $200 for a dead monkey. (just kidding, of course. I don’t have a gun, but there is a $200 bounty on monkies. I could have made a few thousand dollars yesterday!)
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December 11th, 2008
Oh how easy Tomoe is pleased. Just look at that face as she prepares to use the new pasta maker. I am generally pretty stingy when it comes to buying new gadgets for things that can be done by hand, but this one is pretty nice - and it uses no electricity or gas. The thing that one me over is how easily I can roll out my bread now to various thicknesses. No more hurting my hands with that rolling pin again.
It also works great for making soba or udon, so we will be able to use up all that soba we will harvest next fall.
Posted in food, village life | Comments Off
December 6th, 2008
A slow day. I found out that it costs $2,000 to fly home. I wonder what life will be like when there is no more cheap oil. No, despite prices (which have been going down here recently, but are still higher than before) I don’t think oil is expensive - not if you take into account all the costs which are currently left out. So I wonder how I can ever get home in the future if I miss this chance. I suppose I should put that $2,000 toward a sailboat.
So to keep my mind off of the fact that I am effectively stranded in Japan for the rest of my life, I chopped wood. Tomoe was busy making use of the persimmons that have been getting softer and moldier by the day. The soft ones are no longer bitter, so she used them as a sauce on some of the pickled kabu (turnip) that we also snatched from the neighbor’s field. The sweetness goes nicely with the salty pickled flavor of the kabu. Highly recommended. Although, the looks are deceiving. It looks like apples in some kind of nice orange sauce and it is quite shock to the tongue when you first taste the salty turnips. Scary how, even if I know what it is, my visual impression overrides my logical thought.
Speaking of persimmons, the other day I had to dump a big bucket of what was supposed to become persimmon vinegar, into the compost. It has been sitting in our hallway fermenting for over a year, but we needed the bucket for this year’s batch. When we checked to see how it was doing, we found fruit-fly larvae and mold on the top, with a foot of dried up, vinegar-less persimmon pulp on the bottom. I took a swig to see if what little liquid did remain was vinegar, but no such luck. (Photo of the bad persimmons below)
But, life is not all disappointments. I made my finest batch of butter today, using a thin skin of fat that I got off of the whey left over from making cheese a few days ago. It didn’t make much, but I am happy because it is the butteriest tasting butter I have made to date.
Posted in farming, food | Comments Off
November 16th, 2008
For those of you on the edge of your seat as to what is happening with my strep throat, I’m feeling much better after a shot or two of gin (I had no antibiotics to sooth my throat so I opted for the alcohol cleanse). Of course, that means no cutting wood with sharp tools today. Oh well, there is a lot of cleaning and storing to do for the winter (snow starts Thursday!).
This photo is of the carrots that Tomoe mabikied the other day. Mabiki literally means “middle pull” - or, to take the weaker sprouts from in-between the stronger ones to prevent the weaker ones from stealing all the nutrients and light from the stronger ones. In English I guess you would say “weed out”, but they are not really weeds. They were delicious.
Next to her you see the kaki persimmons I am drying.
Drying kaki is one way to remove the astringents that make some varieties too bitter to eat fresh. This area is extremely humid at this time of year, so it is hard to dry them well. We hope the fire stove will help us, but just in case, we are planning to remove the astringents with booze this year. Another way is to put them in a plastic bag and let them suffocate. It helps to add an apple or banana, as both fruits release a chemical into the are which promotes ripening.
If we left these kaki on the tree long enough, they would eventually over-ripen and become edible, but only if the crows and bears did not get to them first. In fact, this morning there was an announcement on the village intercom asking everyone to pick their kaki or cut the tree down, due to an increase in the number of bears coming into the village to snack on them.
We also hope to have a lot of persimmon vinegar in a few months. Making vinegar with them is the easiest, as all you have to do is wash them and thrown them into a bucket to ferment - no peeling or other processing needed.
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November 11th, 2008
What a great weekend! Saturday was spent gethering kaya (material for thatching a roof. In this area they use nemagaritake and susuki, but it is not called kaya until it is older and ready to harvest). This time we had no foreign guests, and I am kicking myself fro not getting around to inviting anyone. My apologies to anyone who might have wanted to join. We did, however, have about 12 Japanese folks come join - ranging from people who just wanted to see this village, to a father and three-son group who have a second home with a thatch roof, and wanted to be more involved in the process.
The susuki field is way up on top of a mountain, where there is an unbelievably beautiful flat area that was, until three years ago, home to several hundred free-range cattle. Now it is now an abandoned delapitated farm. Buildings don’t last long here in the snow country without someone to take care of them.
Anybody out there interested in starting a little eco-community in this area? Keep in mind that durring the winter, the only way in an out is via snow shoe.
Posted in Fall, One Life Programs, farming | Comments Off
November 5th, 2008
The peanuts I had been waiting all summer for are now gone, and I have a stomach ache. Needless to say, the harvest was lacking in quantity, and even in quality, but it was a very satisfying snack.
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