menu for January 14th, 2023

While I was coming up with the menu this month, I was thinking a lot about the new year and our garden. I saved napa cabbages from the cold, so I wanted to use it for the salad with some other vegetables. For the main dish, I used black eyed peas to celebrate the new year and garden vegetables harvested in the summer and fall, including our own canned garden tomatoes, pepper and sweet corn to appreciate the flavors of the summer. To accompany the soup, we have homemade sourdough bread with a lot of nuts and seeds, parsley pesto, and butternut squash mochi. Mochi is a traditional new year's food in Japan, and it holds a special place in my heart. When I was a child, my grandma loved to make mochi with peanuts and seaweed flakes in addition to the more traditional plain mochi for new year's. I adopted her peanut and seaweed flake mochi and added garden butternut squash into it this time. We hope you all are still sticking to your new year's resolutions!

I used dried persimmon for dessert. There are two main types of persimmon trees. One produces fruit that is sweet, and the other one produces fruit that is astringent. Wild persimmons here produce small and astringent fruit. Astringent persimmons eventually become sweet when they are very soft and overripe. We have both types of persimmon trees in my family's yard in Japan, and they fruit prolifically each fall. They produce much bigger fruit than our native persimmons (Diospyros virginiana).

We can't eat the astringent ones when they are still hard, but if you take the skin off and dry them, they will turn nice and sweet! My family makes dried persimmons every year, and I helped a lot when I was growing up there! The trees have kept watch over us (my grandma, mom, me, my sister and sister’s children now) for many generations! We planted persimmon trees in the garden, so that they too will keep watch over our family and friends here! Last fall, we harvested about 400 tennis ball-sized persimmons, but the tree has produced close to 1000 persimmons in previous years. That’s a lot!! We usually dry them to preserve them so we can enjoy them throughout the year. It always takes the whole family's effort to prepare the persimmons. Joe helps me pick them. Our kids help peel the skins off when they come back during Thanksgiving break. After peeling the skin, I hang them by the windows and sun dry them for a couple weeks, massaging each of them throughout their drying to improve the final texture and ensure even drying.

When they are done, I cut the strings off and massage them again before packing and storing them in a cool place. Natural sugar crystallizes on the surface of the dried fruit as it's being stored, giving it a powdered sugar-covered appearance. Now that they've been preserved, we can keep them longer and enjoy their sweetness in the winter time! Enjoy them in the dessert!

Here is the menu: