thanks to kusakabe-san for having me out to his studio in miharu. what a wonderful time and place.
-
- renkon trays
Monthly Archives: March 2008
don’t buy fukinoto on sale, get it straight from the source.
tempura udon (with fuki no to)
i have to make a bit of a correction. after our adventures with sansai tempura, i went out to visit kusakabe-san in fukushima. in his small town of miharu i had the pleasure of eating some tempura udon, with fukinoto tempura. it was freshly picked and tempura’d and totally different from those tokyo sale fukinoto.
a little bit bitter and very green tasting with the crunch of the tempura totally rocked on top of the tasty udon tsuyu. yum!
we ate a lot more delicious food as well, such as:
appetizer
10 or so different kinds of tofu at the tofu restaurant.
11-dessert.
miharu pictures
entrance to yuuhoutoubou.kusakabe-san in his kiln yard
yuuhoutoubou from belowteam miharu and me
-
- saskunei seeds
-
- dancing fire wood kiln
-
- entrance to yuuhoutoubou.
-
- yuuhoutoubou from below
-
- kusakabe’s work with tons of koge
-
- kusakabe-san’s work
-
- gas kiln reworked into a soda kiln
-
- guest room and observation tower
-
- newly built saskunei at friend’s of kusakabe-san’s place
-
- reconfiguring
-
- saskunei smokeless kiln
-
- loading
-
- heating up under the fire box
-
- offerings: sake, fruit, salt
-
- the super cho saskunei smokeless
-
- inside the fire box
-
- damian checking the pyrometers
-
- kusakabe-san in his kiln yard
-
- yasmin-san
-
- team miharu and me
-
- sun ring
Tempura-a-rama and mountain veggies.
there are a plethora of random interesting looking veggies in the super market called sansai or mountain vegetables. i have been a little intimidated to try cooking some of them, but the other day when masa and i went grocery store we found, on sale, kogomi (ostrich fern) and fukinoto (giant butterbur). we also picked up some renkon (lotus root), carrots, eggplant and mushrooms and decided to do tempura.
actually, that’s all kind of a lie, i saw these veggies on sale and wanted to get them cuz they looked cool, masa was like, what are those? and i was like, i have no idea, but i’ll look them up on the internet. in the end, the fukinoto tasted terrible and we decided to do tempura because we had the other veggies in the fridge and we do have a tempura nabe (pot) after all. we thought the bitter fukinoto would taste good fried but we were WRONG.
Ostrich fern: there’s a whole lotta fern up in there, raw, stretched out and tempura-ed. Unlike the fukinoto, the kogomi or ostrich fern was great! very densely green tasting and just overall cool.
Pot for cooking tempura and finished product. We made tempura bananas with nutella for dessert. yum.
Lemons.
sarah’s lemons
my inspiration…
my lemons
i made three kinds from world vegetarian. the first one is salted lemons, morroccan style, my favorite that i tried at sarah’s house. i ate so many of them, sorry sarah! blue jar is simple lemon pickle, next is sweet and sour lemon chutney and last is the same but with the wrong ingredients, but it still tastes yummy.
Awesome Show.
Right now at RBR we have a show up by 25 year old autistic artist Hirotaka Moriya. Hirotaka is part of a special needs occupational center in Chiba, Japan called Marui Hiroba, which translates to something like Round Plaza. Hirotaka loves food and menus and doing Shodo (Japanese Calligraphy) and Sumi (Japanese brush drawing) art. He does hundreds of drawings per day.
Here are some pics of the show.
Next month I’m going to visit Marui Hiroba as well as a clay studio run by Midori Takahashi, ceramic artist and organizer or Hirotaka’s and other art shows by the occupational center’s artists.
Last Saturday the Moriya Family came to RBR to spend some time at the exhibition. I got to eat lunch with them. The Moriyas are awesome, kind, crafty people who were totally meant to be parents.
preserved lemons!
super thanks to sarah for gifting me “world vegetarian” before i left florida. after tasting sarah’s many preserved lemons i was addicted. once i was home i immediately bought millions of lemons and got to work.
in the backround you can see my messy kitchen, pitiful collection of spices, salt pig made by bill the potter and my soda fired fish dish, turned negi holder.
completed red project
here is my completed book from the red project. it’s full of 29 pages from other artists, and my one circulatory system page.
other’s pages:
