Fall

A visual catch up.

 First, our bike trip to Lake Shikotsuko.


 We caught the sunrise from our campsite.

 We went foraging with our friends.
 

Fall has been great, but we miss all you friends and family.  Hope to see you all soon!

The projects: Part 1

One of the most wonderful (and obvious) things about growing a big garden is gathering a big harvest. But sometimes, all of that harvest is ready at once. That`s what happened with our radishes.  Until now we had rarely eaten them in any form other than salad however, so we had to dig a little to use up the bounty that you see above.

Luckily, one of our recent projects is trying to create a website.  And when I say we, I mean Brian is learning a lot and working hard to create an amazing site and I am playing with a camera, working on my food photography game.  It turns out that it`s really easy to take lovely pictures of the fantastic vistas/architecture/art/street-scapes that you come across while travelling.  It takes a bit more wrangling when it comes to pictures of food or other small-ish, indoor projects.  It`s tough to make fluorescent lighting look good, but project time for me tends to be at night so my most major breakthrough was taking pictures by day with natural light.

This is the convergence of radish bounty, website creation, and photography game-upping that created the perfect storm such that we made yummy eats AND there are pictures to show and tell!

First, Brian made this simple and delicious radish and cream soup.





Our next project attempted to use all those radish greens and the preserved lemons we had in the fridge. I made those on a whim and am ever after looking for an opening to use them.  So we made radish top pesto!

And our final pictured project (we also made pickles, but forgot to picture them) we made a sweet and spicy radish chow-chow.  Brian, being a true southerner from a long line of southerners grew up on his grandmothers` chow-chows.  I had never actually tried the stuff.  But I can now tell those of you who, eyebrows raised, are wondering what chow-chow  is that it is delicious and you should get some soon.  It`s like a sweet and spicy relish, often made with fruit - pear is a favorite.  But it`s pretty amazing with radish.  We canned a few jars of this and kept one for immediate eating.  Now, I initially wanted to cut that pile-o-sugar in half, but Brian dissuaded me and he`s right.  Chow-chow is meant to be sweet and spicy.  When in doubt, add more wasabi.  

Next time I`ll show you our garlic braid!  I am VERY excited about the garlic braid!  Til then, you can find the recipes that we used at food52.com.  Here are the links!

Radish Soup

http://www.food52.com/recipes/6634_rustic_radish_soup
Radish Top Pesto
http://www.food52.com/recipes/17651_spring_pesto_with_roasted_radish_mint_and_preserved_lemon
Radish Chow Chow
http://www.food.com/recipe/rosy-radish-relish-241334
Pickled Radishes
http://www.motherearthnews.com/small-farm-chronicles/quick-pickled-radishes.aspx

The green

First off, I`m sorry Kathy!  I`ve been promising to put up photos of the garden for ages and am only now doing so.  But with this picture overload, I am making up for it.  Now that it`s summer vacation I have a bit of time to show you folks back home what we`ve been up to in the back yard.

I had this great idea sometime in the dead of winter to photograph our back yard everyday to show how the garden grows. And how snowy it is. But daily photographs proved too grueling for me (I`m getting soft on the Japan gravy train). Later on, so did weekly photographs (very very soft). Then I kind of forgot all about it until last weekend when all of a sudden I realized our garden really had grown. The results are patchy, not the blooming time lapse I had envisioned, but you get the idea. And when I did remember this idea, I made up for lost time and due to macro, lost myself for an hour in the garden. It had just stopped raining but it was bright out so everything was glowing and sparkling with rainwater. At first glance it was a wash of green, but when I got close there were colors everywhere. And I am a sucker for colors.


And then, having written all of the above, I hadn`t publish the post yet and so the present state of the garden is lusher still.  Behold!


From the first to last photos we`ve more than doubled the garden space, and Brian has plans to hoe up more ground yet.  Our neighbors are encouraging it and they didn`t have to tell us twice.  Brian is especially eager to experiment more with staple crops, and I can`t wait to plant out more strawberries, raspberries, and to improve on last years garlic.

Soon I`ll show you some of the projects we`ve been getting up to with our harvests.  8 hours a day at a desk without much work to do is proving to be great motivation to get posts up here.

Hokkaido by bike!

We recently got ourselves some touring bikes (with a lot of help from Kathy and David, thanks guys!) from `Merica!  And ever since we have been wonderfully mobile.  It was like getting a car.  All of a sudden we could get to our schools faster than by public transportation.  And better yet, we can now get to places that public transportation does not (or does not often enough) service.  Here are the trusty steeds, loaded for a three day trip.

Hokkaido is kind of the perfect place for bike touring (although, admittedly it is the only place that I have done such a thing).  It`s got beautiful routes, speed limits are low and drivers relatively aware, camp sites everywhere, and where there aren`t campsites, you can guerilla camp pretty well anywhere without being bothered about it, AND in any town you can find a bath house for cleaning up.  Add to that the fact that Hokkaido is the breadbasket of Japan and every area has their local specialties that they grow or gather and it`s pretty hard to beat.  

Our very first bike trip we rode out to a massive park not too far from Sapporo to meet up with our friends Saga, Shinobu, Jun, Satoko, Nat, Kelly, Nathan, Sara and their son Ethan.  We stayed at a cabin there and ate yakiniku (Japanese bbq) from Shinobu`s father`s yakiniku shop.  The ride was beautiful, the park was beautiful, the food was delicious, and we finally got to play park golf!  Park golf is a lot like put put, but with real grass and no blue water or airbrushed t-shirts.  Plus, a lot of old folks are VERY serious about their park golf game.  

 Our second bike trip was our first fully packed with the tent and stoves and all.  We took an overnight trip to Asa beach with Nat and Kelly and camped right on the sand.  That ride was beautiful as well, along the river and then through farm land.  It was our first trip to the beach of the year, and we got to bike there!

And our most recent bicycle adventures took us to Cape Shakotan over a three day weekend.  Shakotan is the name of a peninsula in Hokkaido with surrounding waters so beautiful that there`s a shade of blue in Japanese named after it.  It was our most challenging ride yet, with longer distances and more climbing, but by far the most rewarding.  Wouldn`t you think this picture was from somewhere tropical?




It`s just now warm enough that most hiking trails are clear of snow now, so soon we hope to do a bike and hike.  Til then we`ll be riding to school and enjoying the garden (pictures of which are coming soon family!  Maybe as soon as tomorrow!).