Sayuri's note:

l wanted to serve Willy's corn in the soup and as corn meal (fresh ground) in okra fritters. Willy Dowdy was an old-time farmer who lived in our neighborhood and taught Joe a few things about farming when he was young. He grew an all purpose variety of white dent corn he said was "good enough for mules and people." It grows up to ten feet tall and you can save the seed to plant the following year, unlike many hybrid seeds sold today. After Willy passed away, we had to ask Willy's daughter Nell (her actual name is Willy-Nell) if we could get some more seed from their corn crib because we had missed a few growing seasons while living in Japan and needed seed corn. Ever since then we have called it Willy's Mule corn. When the corn is young, you can eat it as creamed corn and use it in all kinds of dishes until it gets too hard. When it matures, the corn becomes hard with dented kernels, and after drying it, the corn can be ground for corn meal or animal feed. We hope you enjoy Willy's corn in its different forms like we do!

I wanted to add Somen noodles to our late August menu because in Japan we eat Somen noodles during the summertime and especially during the Obon festival, in mid-August. Obon celebrates the annual return of our ancestors' spirits to our homes. We have a memorial service for them in our homes in which we create a pair of animals, made of vegetables, for the spirits to ride to and from home on. Two animals are placed on the front of a special altar for the occasion: a horse, represented with a cucumber with chopsticks for legs; and a cow, represented by an eggplant with chopsticks for legs. When the ancestors are on their way back home, they are in a hurry to get to their loved ones, so that they use the horse to get home as fast as they can. When they are returning to the world that they came from, they use the cow because they are in no hurry to get back. I decorated a cucumber horse and an eggplant cow on the table near the front doors of the pavilion.

The strawberry and raspberry plants that survived from last year's flood produced a lot of berries this year, so I wanted to use them as sauce of the Basque cheesecake.