Season of Mist and Mellow Fruitfulness

Fukushima peachesFood-wise, Fall is the best season in farm country Japan.  The last several weeks saw an epic grape harvest.  Typhoon 11 spooked many Fukushima and Yamagata vinyards into sending all their grapes to market early, allowing the laws of economics to do their thing.  Small red grapes with no seeds, big red grapes with seeds, medium-sized green grapes with seeds, big green grapes with no seeds, medium-sized purple grapes with seeds, big purple grapes with seeds, and even big purple grapes with no seeds - the best kind - were available en masse at a fraction of the price of last year, all locally grown and locally sold.  

My Mother-in-law recently purchased ten big bags of the best kind of big purple grapes with no seeds for about eighty-five U.S. dollars, and we've had the best kind of big purple grapes with no seeds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the last week or so.  I can say without a doubt that they have been by far the best grapes I have ever eaten.  For the last three days, I've been making smoothies from four different types of grapes: small red grapes with no seeds, medium-sized green grapes with seeds, big red grapes with seeds, and big purple grapes with no seeds - the best kind.  First, I put grapes into the blender, then ice, then blend, and even the seeds are reduced to pulp.  And I don't even have to add relatively inexpensive, locally-produced honey, because grapes, like bananas, are sweet enough.  Before blending, the mise-en-scene is so beautiful that I almost feel guilty blending it.

On top of this year's spectacular grape harvest is the superabundance of Japanese "pears", or "nashi" as they are more appropriately called, (since they taste nothing like and look nothing like the fruit which we in the West refer to as "pear").  This summer was hot, so the conventional yeoman wisdom states that good nashi are hard to come by, but keep in mind that this is the fruit that cost five dollars a pop in the U.S. in the 1980s, and I live within walking distance of more than one orchard.  The produce of these orchards is often brought over spontaneously in what is the latest iteration in the Japanese gift-giving cultural meme.   

It has been an incredibly hot and sunny summer, resulting in what many locals are calling the best peach-harvest ever.  Fukushima City is always either number one or number two in Japan every year for peaches, so for this year to have been the best year ever means that this summer I possibly tasted the most delicious peach ever produced by human hands; this could have been the time I went peach picking a couple of months ago, just before my second daughter was born, when I picked and consumed nine sun-warmed peaches in just under a half-hour, or it could have been today, when I went to Azuma Onsen and enjoyed one of the season's last giant peaches after a relaxing hot spring bath.

Onsens are Japanese hot spring resorts and not at all like the hot spring resorts found in other countries.  Instead of just a muddy hole in the ground, complicated plumbing directs natural hot spring water into artistically crafted giant bathtubs of wide variety surrounded by a traditional Japanese ryokan or even a confluence of vending machines.  Onsens are usually located in the mountains.  Azuma Onsen, which I visited today, is public, which makes little difference except in the price (about three dollars for entry).  I sat in a stone bath with my daughter and Father-in-law today above the clouds, and my copious sweat allowed a physical and psychological break from the first cold day of the season.

After our bath, my daughter and I shared a big, juicy peach, which we purchased from the vendor next door.  Grown high-up in the mountains, today's peach was probably the last Fukushima peach I'll eat this year; and since I'm planning on returning to the U.S. soon to pursue medical education, today's peach was possibly my last Fukushima peach ever, if not for a very long time.  I could look on the bright side though: nashi season is just starting, and we're still several weeks away from apples and persimmons.

My daughter fell asleep in the car on the way back to the house at about six o'clock.  Recently, she's been taking naps in the evening and staying awake until midnight or later, which makes it difficult for Mommy and Daddy to eat dinner.  I decided to view staying up late as an opportunity to produce my first nabe of the season.  Nabe are giant pots of stew, traditionally cooked in fall and winter, which usually keep for a week or so, during which, like a raga, there is a variation on the theme in a smaller pot.  

We went vegetable shopping around ten o'clock at Saty, the late-night supermarket around here, and bought a variety of vegetables which we do not grow to combine with those we do grow in the making of a delicious soup.  I decided on a pumpkin base over tomato, and boiled pieces of pumpkin until they were soft, before mashing them up in a traditional Japanese mortar and pestle and mixing the resulting goo with hot water using a (traditional Japanese) whisk.  I added potatoes, satoimo, which is a Japanese potato variety less starchy than American potatoes, naganegi, which best translates to green onion (though much bigger and stiffer), and rinkon, which is a kind of root vegetable that I have no translation for but is my favorite vegetable as of this moment.  I boiled the resulting combination for five minutes before adding red, orange, and yellow bell peppers, a type of Japanese mushroom called shimeji, and cauliflower.  I'm excited for the variations that this week (and maybe next) will inevitably produce: bouillon nabe, cream nabe, udon nabe, rice nabe, ramen nabe, Thai curry nabe...