The Chrysanthemum and the Chopstick

M, her glass of gold wine, and an early autumn sunset.

The farmers' food stalls are heavily stocked, as are the fish markets especially with fish like mackerel and sardines getting fattier with the colder water. A few days ago, I had a craving for octopus, so we picked a fresh one up at the local market. How fresh? Well, the tentacles were clinging onto my hand tightly enough that I had to use my other one to pull it off and drop it into the pot. I love these things but they're a pain to clean, picking out the beak and peeling the head off the guts. They are much easier to handle after they've been boiled. I cut the poor dude, who's turned from a dull gray to a blushing red, into little pieces, and dropped him into a sauce of onion, garlic, tomatoes, red wine, etc., then added the octopus juice from the boiler pot along with rice. The finished product was as close to Portuguese octopus rice as I can get it. Thank god the girls also like tako.

 Yesterday, I took the girls to Koyasu, the village I wrote about in the last post. We stopped at the farm at the very top and bought chrysanthemum blossoms and a kind of potato I've never seen before, the size of small creek stones. The woman who runs the farm (the farmess?) explained how to cook the blossoms, and we ended up standing around in the late afternoon sun, chatting and nibbling on various things for a while. She even had her son run and fetch the tree pruner so she could cut down some jujube fruit, called natsume in Japanese, that we could taste. Unfortunately, bugs had already beat us to them, so we'll have to wait until next year.

Back home, M boiled the chrysanthemums. We had them with a slight vinegar/shoyu marinade along with the creek-stone potatoes that M had cooked in the rice.