food | kimberly ah

Jul 17 2015

adventures, Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening

Plot #6: Back to the Jungle

I failed again this year to make my garden neat and tidy. It’s a jungle again. I feel like the tomatoes are more disorderly than ever and the cucumbers…well, let’s just say not thinning them out early on has created a tangle of rebellious vines that will not take the hint to stay in the plot. But, growing in the jungle are teeny, tiny edamame……and the beginnings of a strong crop of green beans. The daikon are almost done, but I pulled this huge guy last week and Naoto enjoyed it on Sunday night. And I picked our first red tomato! It was a Sweet 100 and I shared it with Naoto. It was so sweet and juicy! I hope there are hundreds more in our future!

So far, we’ve harvested almost 15 ounces in radishes, peas, tomatoes, and lettuces. It’s just the beginning!

I hope to have some balcony* garden pictures next week. Some of my vining plants are finally starting to bloom and I think it’s my best summer out there yet!

How is your garden growing?

*I’ve begun calling the balcony the lanai as a nod to the Golden Girls.

Tagged adventures, food, forest park, garden, gardening, summer

Jul 09 2015

1 Comment

adventures, cocktails, Japan 2015, My Love Affair with Tokyo

Hasegawa Happy Hour at the Suzukis

During our stay in Tokyo we were lucky enough to have happy hour with Jess and her family. We drank yuzu umeshu (plum wine) cocktails and Jess made sukiyaki. Sukiyaki, made at the table in a Japanese hot pot, usually consists of meat and vegetables cooked in a broth of soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Jess sliced up the vegetables and presented them beautifully, in true Japanese fashion. We had two types of beef, tofu, cabbage, leeks, burdock, two kinds of mushrooms, and noodles in our sukiyaki. Jess browned the meat a bit first (on a pile of leeks!) And then she added the broth to finish cooking the meat. And then Jess removed the meat to make room for the pile of vegetables and noodles. Mmmm…it was delicious. The beef was perfectly seasoned by the slightly sweet broth and the vegetables’s textures were the perfect complement. Naoto and I think a nabe pot and a table-top burner is in our future. I definitely think it would be a fun cold-weather activity with friends!

And, to add a little excitement to the evening, there was a sizable earthquake (7.8) that night off the coast of Japan! It was a little bit scary because it was so much more powerful and lasted a lot longer than the other tiny earthquake I’d experienced in Japan before. I just kept looking at Jess to see if she had any panic in her eyes. (She didn’t and she calmly turned off the burner in case things did get any scarier!) We turned on the TV to see that the subways had been briefly halted, but by the time Naoto and I left, everything was up and running like nothing had happened.

Whew!

Thanks for being such great hosts, Jess, Keiichi and Ethan!

Tagged adventures, cocktails, food, I *heart* Japan, Japan

Jun 25 2015

5 Comments

adventures, Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening

Plot #6: The Growing I’ve Missed

We came home from Japan and it was more than a week before we made it to see the garden! I know that sounds crazy, but I was deep in the fog of jet lag and any time I was awake, it seemed to be raining. When we finally made it over, we were amazed at how big our plants had grown. We even had a few things to harvest! Pictured above is the plot (looking north). You can see that I never did fill those four square feet I had left. But the good news is, I have two tomato seedlings on my balcony that have grown like gangbusters and will be transplanted this weekend. We finally thinned our daikon enough for them to grow into respectably-sized vegetables! I was only able to harvest two, but the others are growing nicely in their square. None of the beets were ready though, much to my disappointment. Our Juliet has some nice green tomatoes and the Sweet 100 has some, too! On the north end of the garden, the peas are going crazy and I have four edamame plants, a crazy square of cucumber plants (too many for one square!), and two volunteer tomatoes (to be transplanted soon). I reserved one square for a loofah plant that I started on the balcony. It’s looking good, but I’ve read that loofah aren’t good as transplants. I’m going to try it anyway and hope for the best.

One of my goals this growing season is to weigh our harvests so at the end of the season we can get an idea of how many pounds of produce we are eating from our garden. This was our first harvest: lots of komatsuna lettuce and some radishes.

It feels good to be back in the garden again!

Tagged adventures, food, forest park, garden, gardening, summer

Jun 23 2015

4 Comments

cocktails, Simple Summer Suppers

Hasegawa Happy Hour: Summer Solstice Edition

Naoto and I had a little party for two to celebrate the summer solstice on Sunday. It was a good chance to eat on the balcony together for the first time this season and to recreate one of my favorite new drinks from Japan, the Spumoni Cocktail. I ordered a Spumoni during our anniversary dinner and fell in love, ordering it at almost every izakaya after that. Campari, grapefruit juice and tonic are the only three ingredients, so it’s nicely bitter and really refreshing for summer. For dinner, we made steak salads (and sadly had to move to wine because we finished off the Campari!) We grilled a steak on our stove and added it to a bed of lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, eggs, avocado, and goat cheese. It was so delicious and a great way to make an expensive steak feed both of us.

Spumoni Cocktail

1.5 oz Campari

2 oz freshly squeezed grapefruit juice (Bottled wouldn’t be horrible here, especially if you like a sweeter cocktail.)

2 oz tonic water (I’m not a huge fan of tonic, but I like it in this. If you hate tonic, club soda could be substituted for a slightly less bitter flavor.)

orange wedge for garnish

Add Campari and grapefruit juice to a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake until fully chilled. Pour in rocks glass with fresh ice. Top with tonic and garnish with an orange wedge. Enjoy on the balcony as you toast the summer season.

Tagged celebrations, cocktails, food, forest park

Jun 22 2015

4 Comments

adventures, cocktails, Japan 2015, My Love Affair with Tokyo, Naoberly's Noodle Tour, Uncategorized

Naoberly’s Noodle Tour: The Shinyokohama Ramen Museum

Naoto had one wish for our trip–to go to the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, a “food amusement park” in Yokohama. Since we’ve been on our Naoberly’s Noodle Tour, I was almost as excited as he was to try different varieties of ramen. These three pictures pretty much represent the “museum” part of the Ramen Museum. Actually, the museum part is smaller than the gift shop! But the real purpose of going to the museum is to treat yourself to different varieties of ramen. Two floors below street level, there is an old fashioned “neighborhood” featuring the best ramen shops from all across Japan. (Shown in the top picture.) Outside each shop, there’s a ticket machine where you choose your ramen, any extra toppings, and drinks. You pay at the ticket machine and when you sit down, the servers take the tickets and serve up your order. Museum rules dictate that each adult must order one bowl of ramen at each place he dines. Thankfully, the shops all offer a “smaller” bowl of ramen (in addition to a regular-sized bowl), so you can try a few different types. Sadly, though, even that small bowl of ramen was too much for me. We started at Komurasaki, which serves Kumamoto-style ramen. Naoto had a traditional tonkotsu ramen with added pork and eggs (pictured first) and I had the King’s Ramen with fire roasted garlic with added pork and corn. It really was delicious! Aaaaaand that was the only bowl I ate! After the first ramen shop, we sat at a table in the bar area and had drinks. Naoto had an Orion beer on tap (which is apparently a big deal since you can’t find Orion on tap around here) and I had a Okinawan citrus cocktail, which may have been the best thing I drank during this vacation. While Naoto moved onto another ramen shop, I stayed at the bar and wrote some postcards. Naoto went to Shina Soba-ya (where I could see him eating from my postcard-writing station!) and had not only another bowl of ramen, but spare ribs, too! After walking back upstairs and spending some time (and money) in the gift shop, we went back down to try one last bowl of ramen. We went to an izakaya and had Okinawan-style ramen (and another Orion beer and another citrus cocktail!). It was really simple but tasty and it had the thickest noodles of any ramen I’d had before.

I highly recommend the Ramen Museum for an afternoon full of noodle fun! I have a few more Naoberly’s Noodle Adventures to share with you soon!

Tagged adventures, cocktails, food, I *heart* Japan, Japan

Jun 15 2015

2 Comments

adventures, Japan 2015, My Love Affair with Tokyo

We’re HOME (And I Already Miss the Donuts)

Goodness. The coming home jet lag is far worse than anything I’ve experienced in Japan. Naoto and I got home on Wednesday night, but it’s all been a sleepy fog around here since then. Hopefully this week I can get back on track with sleeping at night and blogging during the day (or at least blogging!)

Our trip was fantastic-Tokyo steals a little bit more of my heart every time we visit and I really loved the break of going to Kyoto and experiencing a bit of the slower pace and the older sites and shops there. In Tokyo, we hit a lot of our “regular” haunts (mainly stationery related!), but we did so many new things that I can’t wait to share with you. Oh, and I know last trip, I was all about the sakura. Well, this time, we happened upon hydrangea season and I think I took a thousand pictures of those beautiful blue blooms. And the DONUTS! We went to Mister Donut every day, of course, and indulged in all sorts of delightful treats, including matcha donuts, which were the special this season.

So stay tuned for another “Japan Month” around here with some garden posts sprinkled in!

Tagged adventures, food, I *heart* Japan, Japan

May 21 2015

2 Comments

adventures, Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening

Plot #6: Planting, Transplanting, and More Planning

Monday was a stellar day for gardening. It was sunny, in the seventies…really just perfect. I spent over four hours at the garden, planning and planting and chatting with Mr. Brownthumb and Laura and meeting new-to-me gardeners. I have part of our plot planted, but I still have quite a bit of room to play with, so I’m planning to get a few more things in the ground this weekend.

Last week, I met up with my parents for plant shopping. I ended up buying a Pink Brandywine and a Red Brandywine (tomatoes) and a six-pack of Pinot Noir peppers. (I gave two to my dad and kept the other four.) My dad gave me a Juliet tomato and in March I started some Isis Candy Shop Cherry Tomatoes (Thanks, Danielle!) and Kellogg’s Breakfast tomatoes from seed. My seedlings are so tiny though, that I doubt they will amount to anything. (Seriously…they are so small, it’s hard not to mistake them for a weed!) I don’t think I get enough sun and warmth for growing tomatoes from seed, but I have a few more tiny plants left that I’m going to try to nurture into larger transplants.I also planted some edamame, cucumber, peas, limas, bush beans, butter crunch lettuce, and komatsuna lettuce seeds. And I still technically have twelve squares left to fill! I know that my tomatoes will grow beyond their allotted squares, so I have to plan for that, but I really do have plenty more space to grow more root vegetables, lettuces, and maybe some herbs. The start of the growing season really is the best, isn’t it? (At least until the harvest comes!)

Tagged adventures, food, forest park, garden, gardening

May 14 2015

1 Comment

cocktails

Hasegawa Happy Hour: Tomi Fujiyama Edition

At the end of April, Tomi Fujiyama was invited back to play at the Grand Ole Opry. Naoto and I have been following along with Tomi’s story since we saw the Made In Japan movie last month, so we were really excited to listen to her perform live on the radio. Her performance luckily fell on Hasegawa Happy Hour night, so we invited two special guests and served a sort of southern-style meal. (Thanks for joining us, James and Karen!)

I made Old Fashioneds and pimento cheese for the happy hour portion of the evening. We listened online to the entire show. Karen said it felt like an old-timey evening with a family sitting around the radio. I think we may need to look into having more musically themed HHHs in the future. For dinner, I made turkey meatloaf, baked beans, and green beans. Tomi came on at the very end of the show and she sang her favorite song, Tennessee Waltz. It was lovely and sad (Seriously, don’t listen to the song if you’re feeling melancholy!) and totally worth listening to the entire night for Tomi’s dream moment.

(This video is from 2012, but it will give you an idea of how Tomi sounds.)

Tagged cocktails, food, homemaking

May 12 2015

2 Comments

adventures, Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening

Plot #6: The Planting Begins

On Saturday, we had our official “Garden Kick-Off 2015”. We served coffee and donuts at the garden and new and returning gardeners came to check out their plots and get started on the planting season. It was very cold (and I was sorely underdressed) but the rain held off and we had a productive morning cleaning up around the garden and giving mini orientations to new gardeners. It was the most people I’ve seen at the garden at once in a long time, especially since last year I hardly saw anyone. I planted some flowers in a general community garden planter (two kinds of zinnias and alysum) and Naoto dug out a space on the hill for pumpkin and loofah growing. It was a good working day at the garden, but there is still a lot more to do in the coming weeks. On Thursday, Laura and I prepped our plots for square foot gardening. Although I am not going to do by-the-book square foot gardening, (I am not using the special soil mix and the tomatoes I plant will never only need one square foot!) I wanted to try the grid to help me plan the garden better and get more variety out of our plot. I just hammered nails in every foot along the side of our garden bed and used string to mark the grid. The string won’t last very long, but it should stay through the planting season to assist with organization. So far, we’ve transplanted the chive that we inherited in our plot (I dug it out in 2013 and it’s been languishing on the balcony in a too-small pot ever since. I decided we have room for it in our garden again.), transplanted some winter-sown broccoli (too many for 1 square foot—oops!), and planted beets and daikon. Four squares down, twenty-eight more to go! It’s been rainy the past couple of days, but this week I will be going back to plant some more once I have drawn out a plan for the rest of those squares!

Have you been planting anything lately?

Tagged adventures, food, forest park, garden, gardening

Apr 30 2015

2 Comments

Forest Park, Oak Park, gardening

Plot #6: Gardening Begins!

Naoto and I went to the garden for the first time this season on Sunday. We were pleased to find very few weeds in our plot! The soil preparation has gotten so much easier each year. (Here is what it looked like when we inherited the plot.) Because it rained on Saturday, weeding was super-easy. (And no, Naoto did not do it alone. I jumped in after this picture was taken!) After loosening the soil (not turning it!), we laid down another layer of fresh mulch and called it a day. I was planning to plant some daikon, beets, and bok choi but the water at the garden wasn’t turned on yet, so I suppose planting will have to wait a little longer.