Fuki

My farm neighbors give me the fruits of their labors. And I AM grateful. But sometimes I do feel at a loss.

Yesterday a friend handed me a huge bundle of fuki. Dear me... What is fuki? It looks like a type of rhubarb and like rhubarb, only the stalk is edible. It has a bitter flavor and is very stringy, but it can be peeled and then boiled a couple of times to remove the bitterness. In other words, there is a lot of work involved with fuki! And I had a whole bundle plopped into my arms!

The other thing about fuki is that it needs to stay out of the sun after being picked and it needs to be cooked up quickly to retain its tenderness. So I was on a time factor. On a Wednesday!

I put my bundle of fuki in the kitchen sink full of water and left it for the day. It was the best I could do on a Wednesday morning.

At 6:30 I came home and sighed when I saw my kitchen sink. Before I began dinner I had to do something with the fuki.

And so I peeled, and peeled and peeled! It is an easy job, repetitious. Just pull away the outer layer with a thumbnail. But I had a lot of fuki! I boiled up two large pots of water and put the fuki in to boil. (TWO BATCHES!) and then dumped out the water and boiled the fuki again. (And I was still peeling.) Finally, at 7:30 at night I was ready to make a dish with the fuki. Some of it.

I consulted the Internet and found a fuki recipe that I could make with things I had around the house. (Besides just the fuki.) Leiya was on chat and caught me while I was rejecting various fuki recipes.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm cooking fuki and I don't have time to talk with you."

"What is fuki?"

"It is a spring Japanese vegetable and you can be grateful that you will probably never have to cook it. Good-bye."

I went back to my fuki and simmered it up with some deep fried tofu. I flavored it as best I could.

When Tetsu came home (the rest of dinner was pretty sparse) I grumbled that I had been making fuki all evening and didn't even know if it was edible.

"Hey, this is great, Tanya. Your fuki is delicious! Yum, yum, look, I'm eating it all up. I like your fuki."

"It's a good thing you do because there is at least three more dinners' worth of fuki still in the kitchen sink."

This morning I spotted a different farm neighbor in her field.

"I think I'll offer Yano-san some of the fuki I prepared last night. There is so much left."

"Um... I wouldn't do that. I LOVED your fuki... but I don't think it would suit Yano-san's palate. It might taste a little bit too "foreign" for her."

It seems that Tetsu was just trying to be diplomatic about last night's fuki. It is not really of "share some with your neighbor" caliber.

What am I going to do with all the fuki still in my kitchen sink?

In the country

As promised, here are pictures of the rice fields behind my house.

Actually, a rice field with a farmer just getting ready to put in rice. The rice is started in hot houses on flats and then the flats are set into the planting tractor that pulls off a few stalks at a time and plunks them deep in the flooded field. Around the edges of the field (where the tractor can't get close to) the farmer and his family will hand plant the rice stalks, wading in the mud. It gets to be a family event with a everyone sitting around the edges of the field eating rice balls.

I thought the pick-up truck carrying the flats to the field was interesting. Like tiles of a green carpet!


And here is a newly planted rice field rice all in nice straight rows. The ducks will come soon and swim around through the rows looking for polliwogs to eat I presume. And gradually the countryside will become a huge carpet of green!

I love my countryside scenery.

Tokyo sightseeing

Today I have some leftover photos of this weekend. City pictures and maybe not exciting to most people but to Tetsu and me, the country bumpkins that we are, a completely different side of Japan that we usually never see.

After leaving the Umihotaru tunnel, Tetsu and I drove to Yokohama which is the main port of mainland Japan. Speeding along the highway, looking at all the ships and cranes and freight containers made me wonder what my grandfather would think if he stepped into Yokohama today. More than a hundred years ago he left Japan through this port and worked his way across the Pacific on a freighter...

Tetsu and I had heard of a historical brick storage complex in Yokohama (probably built to hold freight those hundred some years ago), and we took a little time to see what it was all about.


There was a music and band festival being held that day and people were out in hordes! Not exactly the historical place I imagined but certainly different from events that Tetsu and I usually attend.

Yokohama is a lovely place and I'd like to visit again (when there are less people.)

Residential areas in Tokyo sure are dense!

The image of Mt. Fuji along a highway wall.

A lot of tall buildings!

Leaving the Tokyo area to head home.

And introducing Sky Tree, the tallest TV tower in the world. It opens to the public today but you can be sure Tetsu and I aren't going to be making a visit to the observation platform for a few more years. The waiting list is horrendous and Tetsu doesn't like heights. I don't think it is going anywhere.

Tomorrow's pictures will be of the rice fields and nature behind my house. Certainly different from Tokyo!

Solar eclipse

We had an early morning start today. Our part of Japan has been readying itself for viewing the solar eclipse that was visible around 7:30 am. The stores have been selling little plastic glasses/filters, the schools requested that the children be on the grounds by 7:15 am. But was it going to be a clear day? We've been having a lot of rain and the sky has been cloudy. I didn't buy the plastic filter figuring that $5 for an uncertain three minutes of solar eclipse was extravagant. (if I had had kids at home I probably would have...)

I had to be at the crosswalk this morning by 6:45 and so there I stood in the bright morning sunlight. By 7:00 the principal joined me and he was very excited about the eclipse and kept peering through his plastic filter. He let me have a glance and... AMAZING! What I perceived as a normal morning sun, through the filter was a partially eclipsed orb! But I was on duty... no time to look at the sun and I couldn't be carrying a camera. Too bad. I was probably going to miss this eclipse. But by 7:15, everyone was at school and so I came home to NOT watch the eclipse.

But wait! The news had mentioned the interesting shadows that would be made filtered through tree leaves. We certainly have the trees around here! Tetsu brought out a piece of white paper and lo and behold! Eclipse patterns! How exciting!

I do not understand why the sun shining through the leaves reflects the eclipse. Just looking through the leaves we saw nothing.

You DO see all the crescent shapes through the leaves don't you?

A beautiful piece of art right there.

And these millions of orbs (getting close to the complete eclipse) were the eclipse filtered through the fir tree branches.

Why, Tetsu! Your white t-shirt has crescents all over it!

A fascinating morning. I didn't miss not having a plastic filter at all!

Firefly of the Sea

Yesterday, Tetsu took me on another adventure. Our drives all turn out to be adventures because we never seem to know where we are going...

Tetsu announced last week that he had Saturday off and thought we should make good use of it by going somewhere. He mumbled about making an early morning start by leaving at 4:00 am. but the night before we were still watching TV at 10:00.

"Are we or are we not going to do something tomorrow? In which case I want to clean up the house tonight."

Tetsu was still hemming and hawing so I went to bed. (House untidy.)

The next morning at 5:00 Tetsu was raring to start the day (I'd glanced at the clock at 4:00, noticed he was still asleep and figured the day's plans had been put on hold.) Tetsu cleaned up the house while I took Choco for a walk and by 6:00 we were off and away.

But to where?

"Oh, south. Have you ever been to Harajuku? How about Sky Tree? Or Yokohama? There's a bridge that is interesting. We could go to Kamakura. Where do you want to go?"

All these names and I don't really know much about any of them so I don't know where I want to go and Tetsu knows perfectly well that if he hasn't taken me to any of these places then I've never been to them.

So we drove south... On back roads. After 5 hours of driving we still didn't seem to be getting to our destination (wherever that was) and my mood was spiraling. The streets were crowded, Tetsu kept throwing out new suggestions as to where we could go (he has that GPS now so he feels almighty and can go anywhere... if he could only remember the names of some of the places he's heard about.) I contented myself with reading the photography book I'd brought along. A sure formula for a headache... Reading while riding in a car, Japanese language, and the unfathomable digital workings of a camera....

But at lunchtime we stumbled upon the new outlet mall somewhere near Tokyo. Oh good. A chance to stretch our legs! The mall was beautiful but too much like Rodeo Drive with all the brand shops. A blouse on half price off for $200? No thank you. We got back on the road without any purchases.

BUT!!!!!! Look where we ended up!!!!!

This is called Umihotaru... Literally translated as "Firefly of the Sea." It is a man-made island in the center of the Tokyo Bay and is connected to land by a bridge on one side and a tunnel on the other. The distance across the bay is 14 kilometers, the bridge being about 5 kilometers and the tunnel being about 9.

The amazing thing about this bridge/island/tunnel is that the highway suddenly disappears in the middle of the bay... How is that possible? Why doesn't the sea water just lap into the tunnel? What happens when there is a typhoon? Isn't this the country of tidal waves? How could any architect conceive of a mid-sea tunnel?

Here we are driving over the last of the bridge and heading into the island. It actually looks like a large ship resting at the end of a long pier.


And this is the view from the top looking back towards the shore and over the bridge that we'd just crossed.

And this interesting object is part of the drill that was used to drill under the bay the last 9 kilometers. It was a bit of a thrill to stand next to this huge piece of machinery and think of how it had been put to work.

The bits are worn down in places and slightly rusting... Making it easier to imagine the massive job the drill performed.

Really a beautiful piece of machinery!


I'm getting carried away here.


I should have worn red or bright yellow or something. That is me down there on the left in the black.

And the hazy dot on the horizon I think is the end of the tunnel... Or maybe a special ventilation island for the tunnel.  In which case the tunnel end is further on.  The island just slips down into the sea and the highway comes up again at some far away point.

Even the island surface is artistic.


Umihotaru itself is 4 stories high and besides two floors for parking it has a lot of shops and restaurants. The nice thing about it is that once the parking is filled, that's all the people that are going to be on the island so the crowds weren't overwhelming. Of course to cross the bridge, visit the island and go through the tunnel to the other side of the bay runs about $35 a car but it was nice to sit on the deck with a cup of coffee and watch ships passing by and enjoy a short but very different vacation.

And here we go around the loop and back onto the highway heading under the island and under the depths of the sea...


It took about 15 minutes to make the rest of the trip through the tunnel.


I've lifted this picture off the Internet so that you can actually see how the road and island disappear into the sea. Not a picture I could have taken myself!


Our car took us other places in the late afternoon. I'll post those pictures later. We arrived back home around 9:00 at night (using the tollway) making it a long day of driving for Tetsu but he was ever so pleased with himself for discovering a place that excited me so much!

Sewing room work

I spent a lot of time getting my sewing fix yesterday! It sure feels good to get things accomplished!

I have finished quilting Mrs. Furui's applique medallion quilt. I'm leaving the binding for her to do so this isn't considered a finish yet. Hopefully we will get it photographed in one piece before she takes it to the hospital. This was a learning project for me... I've never done crosshatching on the machine, I've never done such extensive meandering. I probably should have thought of something more striking than stitch in the ditch for the pieced borders but I was getting tired. Mrs. Furui did an excellent job of basting so the quilt moved not an smidgen. Still... all in all this took a lot more time than I had expected it would. I was hoping for a three day project and this took nearly three weeks. Of course a lot of time was wasted while I pondered what I should do on the next rounds etc...

And I put together a small baby quilt in the remaining afternoon. I have wanted to do this quilt for a long time and I first saw it on Sew Create It's blog and followed her link to the tutorial on Bee Square's blog. This went EXTREMELY fast and was a lot of fun to do. I may put on a border still if I find any time this weekend...


Chip approves!

Babies

My friend at the Japanese sweet shop just had a new grandchild. This morning we were talking about the differences in customs for new mothers these days. Though it has been 30 years since my first baby, I thought I'd reminisce today (before it gets too far in the past that I forget!)

With our first baby, I still didn't speak much Japanese and I remember visiting the doctor and having things explained to me and not really understanding much at all. And doctor offices then (and now!) often have an inner waiting room with other patients waiting just on the other side of the curtains. I distinctly remember thinking

"Everyone in this room is understanding this doctor's conversation with me, but ME!"

With one baby I remember the doctor consulting his calendar and announcing that I would be wrapped up in a long piece of gauze (in those days they didn't use girdles) on Dog's Day because dogs give birth easily. It didn't seem to be a very medically sound reason for choosing this day (and let me tell you, that gauze wrap was uncomfortable!) but that was what the custom was.

With our first baby we wanted Tetsu be present at birth but we were the very first couple to make such a request and the doctor thought it a very odd American custom. No such thing as Lamaze classes so Tetsu, me and the hospital rolled with the punches. Young, first baby, not much Japanese language. I REALLY needed Tetsu there. With our other two children at different hospitals, for some reason they wouldn't let Tetsu attend the births.

"That's okay. I saw it once."

"Let me tell you, fella! It ain't for your observation!"

I managed the others alone.

In those days, though Western hospitals were letting mothers go home the day after having a baby, in Japan mothers were still being kept a week. I remember people being so surprised when Princess Diana was televised leaving a hospital with Prince William the day after he was born. My sweet shop friend's daughter-in-law came home after 5 days so things are changing in Japan too.

"They kick you out of the hospital these days because there are not enough beds to go around. Poor girl..."

And new Japanese mothers will go home to their own parents' house for a month to let their mother take care of them and the new baby. I've always thought it a shame that the father gets very little bonding time with his new baby that first month. Sometimes he will only visit the hospital after the baby is born and then a month later go to pick up his wife and baby.

At the very least, the new mother's mother will come to stay for a month to do all the laundry and cook and wash dishes etc. In the old days, it was supposed to be bad luck and bad for the health for a new mother to touch water. A new mother wasn't even supposed to bathe for a month. YUCK! You can be sure I threw out all those Japanese customs right away. Tetsu mother came and helped for a week or so but we had our own tiffs about how this new baby was going to be cared for (does the baby sleep face down or face up?) and Tetsu's mother gave up quickly, went home and let me make my own American mistakes...

I think I'll go upstairs and think about making a baby quilt for my friend's grandchild.