a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: January 2016

  • Drab Be Gone

    DrabLeaf

    This gray time of year, with day after day of clouds, drizzle, and rain, I can feel like this leaf looks. A walk in the woods, among the green ferns helps.

    Ferns
    KingRichardInTheSun

    It’s King Richard who knows how to perk me up. Such razzle, dazzle. Maybe there is something to be said about dressing up in brilliant clothes, at least wearing a flaming red hat. Hens are into dressing up too. Plain won’t do for them. Even the hens, who from a distance look like they are wearing a simple outfit, when you get up close, have feathers of exquisite patterns. “Drab be gone, drab be gone,” is their siren call.

    FeathersSpecial
    FeathersHazel

  • 煎り酒 – Irizake

    IriZakeIngredients

    Irizake, a dipping sauce made from sake, dried plums, fish flakes, and salt, is having a comeback in Japan. Historical references to this sauce go back to the end of the Muromachi period (1336~1573). During the Edo period (1603~1868), irizake was an indispensible seasoning. If you were to have sashimi back then, you would dipped your fish in irizake instead of 醤油 – soy sauce. In Japan, soy sauce did not become a seasoning for the masses until the middle of the Edo period, and its current form did not appear until the late 1800s when scientific understanding of fermentation combined with industrial manufacturing to enable mass production of soy sauce.

    IriZakeIngredientsSake
    IriZakeIngredientsSlat
    IriZakeIngredientsUmeboshi
    IriZakeIngredientsKatsuobushi

    Irizake is easy to make. You first mix the sake, umeboshi, and salt together, and bring it to a boil. Once the alcohol has boiled out, you add the fish flakes and simmer until the amount of liquid has been reduced to half. Strain it, and you have irizake, a seasoning with a history of six to seven hundred years.

    IriZake

    The very oldest versions of irizake are even simpler. The sake and umeboshi are boiled until the mixture is reduced to half. The result is strained, dried seaweed is added, and let to soak for a day or two.

  • Need a Hole in the Sky

    WetSven

    Poor Sven. After a morning deluge, he is so soaked, his feathers are dragging in the mud. Nothing looks as sorry as a wet rooster. What he needs is a hole in the sky, just what I found on my bicycle ride home from the post office. There, off to the south, a hole in the sky, a hole so bright it could have been an alien spaceship blasting its way down for a landing. I could have been seconds away from being whisked away to another galaxy. It’s one possibility if you never hear from me again. If I go silent, look up on a clear, moonless night. Somewhere way out there, far, far away, among the galaxies millions of light years away, that’s where they will have taken me.

    HoleInTheSky

  • Sad Rooster, Happy Cat

    KnifeSharpening

    Too many roosters, so some have to go. Sad rooster, happy cat. I can’t finish butchering a rooster without our cat coming into the kitchen and meowing until I give him fresh liver. How does he even know I am doing a rooster? He sleeps during the day, a long ways from the kitchen. He gets drawn into the kitchen like my husband does when I’m baking bread.

    RustyEatingLiver

  • Ups a Notch

    MoreShiitakeA

    Hmm, so this is what a shiitake feels like when you cut it up after just picking it. I highly recommend starting a day by making an omelette using mushrooms plucked at the time you break the eggs. It really ups the flavor a notch.

    MoreShiitakeB

    Getting a New Years card from a dear friend on the other side of the ocean ups the day a notch too. It’s like the old days. The card took a month to get here even though it was sent air mail. It makes you wonder where all that plane went. Guam? The Marianas? Hop-scotched through Micronesia? Each of the Aleutian Islands?

    Nengajo