When you travel between one small town and another in Japan often the panorama is a vast plain of flooded fields or a towering terraced mountain of rice paddies. In early June, up and down the Japanese archipelago, rice has been planted and the ...
This past week I tagged along with veteran New York Times food writer Elizabeth Andoh to Hakuun'an, a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant and teahouse associated with Manpukuji Temple near Uji City in Kyoto Prefecture. Manpukuji is the head temple of the Obaku sect of Zen ...
More than 50 families of crab, numbering thousands of species, thrive in practically all parts of the globe. Most crab species are marine and live in salt water or the brackish waters of bays, lagoons and river deltas. A relatively small number have adapted ...
As summer starts to roll out its smothering blanket of heat across Japan, the markets begin to fill with some of the best produce of the year. Though tomatoes are now often grown in hothouses and available year-round, they are at their best when ...
The flowers of an eggplant, like the wisdom of a parent, will never mislead you. — Japanese proverb Soon the markets will be filled with two of the most versatile and delicious fruits of the summer: the tomato and the eggplant. With innumerable recipes, these staples ...
There are five sets of five rules one must consider when attempting to make traditional Japanese food: the five colors (goshiki); the five methods (goho); the five flavors (gomi); the five senses (gokan); and finally the five viewpoints/considerations (gokan no mon), a Buddhist treatise ...
For thousands of years, populations living close to the sea have found shellfish an easily obtainable and convenient source of protein and trace minerals. Shellfish is the general term for crustaceans (shrimp, crab, lobster) and mollusks (clams, oysters, squid and octopuses). All of these ...
Legumes are a family of flowering plants of more than 18,000 varieties, including peas, beans, lentils and peanuts. They grow on almost every continent except Antarctica and range from dwarf herbs in alpine climes to massive trees in the tropical forest. The species that ...
In Japan, the woods traditionally have been imagined to be the epitome of all that is unknown and fearsome in nature -- dark, enchanted places inhabited by magical foxes and raccoon dogs that children are made to fear from an early age. At the same ...
A fiddlehead, that small plant that grows in the Saint John River Valley in the spring, and which is said to be symbolic of the sun. — Alfred Bailey The season of the fiddlehead is upon us. The tightly curled young tips of various ...
