Celebrating - the end of the garden, Halloween, and friends

The past month or so time`s been disappearing like a 10 year old`s Halloween stash. Partly because we`ve been a bit busy (by our admittedly, rather lax standards)and largely because there`s a certain date looming large in our near future. The countdown to our first return home in about a year and a half is on. And we`ll be home for Christmas no less! Exactly one month from today!

Our days have been filled with winterizing the garden, preserving the bumper crop, brewing pumpkin beer, making cheese and use-up-all-the-scraps muffins, enjoying the last bit of biking around the city before the snow makes pedestrians of us for the next 6 months or so, library books, permaculture, Halloween, writing for a food column for an online expat magazine, friends, banjo/guitar and most recently, decorating for Christmas. I know that last one is a bit sacrilegiously early, but because we`re leaving Japan on December 14th it seemed like only two weeks was too short for decorations.

The garden got a complete overhaul for next year. We`re still getting the fall/winter crops, but the summer plants went out with a bang. We`ve still got a couple of garden tomatoes reddening up inside even now. But with such a late bounty, we decided to try our hand at canning. We did everything pickles, tomato sauce, pickled jalapenos, habanero jelly, and habanero hot sauce (the habanero bush was prolific). Along similar lines, ever since we started brewing beer I`ve been trying to find good ways to use all those spent grains. Composting is the obvious choice. Soap worked out pretty well. Granola was ok. But the winner by a long shot has been muffins. And recently, I`ve been trying to make said muffins even more recycled. So when my friend Kelly and I made a batch of mozzarella, I saved the whey and used it as the liquid in the muffins. And though it`s not recycling, Brian and I foraged some fresh rose hips from beside the river and threw those in the mix. They`re so beautiful and taste a bit like cranberries, though not as sour. Here`s a glimpse.

Then came Halloween. Last year Halloween was a pretty low key affair at school. But this year I leveled up. When we moved in to our apartment last year, we found an inexplicable bag full of costumes. Masks, wigs, weird hats and horns, a sword, a gladiator`s vest... you get the idea. So this year, I`ve got a class of only 7 girls, and the teacher is about to retire, so it`s pretty easy to talk everyone into doing fun activities. On Halloween I took all the costumes to school, along with a pumpkin and a bunch of apples. I wasn`t sure how well the costumes would be received, being that Japanese students are typically quite reserved. It was awesome. The girls kept trying out different combinations of awkward bits of costumes together. They were completely taken in by the jack-o-lantern and roasting pumpkin seeds, and they even gave bobbing for apples a respectable go. I`m plotting bigger and better things for next year.

This past weekend, our friends Saga and Sanae invited Nat and Kelly, Brian and I over for a sushi dinner. Saga`s superior at work used to be a sushi chef (no small feat in Japan - one must make rice for a number of years before even being allowed to touch fish), so we all chipped in for a beautiful selection of fish, got a feast, and even a lesson. It was delicious and hilarious. We promised to make western food for all of them when we get back from the States. Food exchange. Brilliant.