Leading on from my last post, here are 3 recipes for seasonal Japanese food in February. The end of winter, before new vegetables are ready to harvest, is not traditionally the high point of the food calendar. However, the following three are tasty and full of variety in these dark evenings under the kotatsu.

Kinpira Gobo

Method

1) Cut carrots and burdock into thin strips 4cm long
2) Remove Chili seeds and cut into tiny strips
3) Heat cooking oil, then add chili and sizzle for a minute
4) Add burdock and carrot and stir fry for 3-4 minutes until softened
5) Add soy sauce and mirin on a ratio of 2:1, to a strength of your taste
6) Mix in 1tsp each of seasame oil and caster sugar and serve.

Komatsuna Salad

Method
1 ) Wrap tofu in a kitchen towel or kitchen paper to remove excess water, cut into 3 squares..
2 ) If using whole white sesame, grind seeds with a pestle and mortar until at least about half has turned to powder, a little lumpy is fine.
3 ) Mix tofu into ground sesame and stir until it forms a paste.

4 ) Wash and then ease the whole bunch of Komatsuna into a pot of heated water and bring to the boil.
5 ) Drain Komatsuna and run through cold water.
6 ) Hold the Komatsuna from the root and squeeze down with your hand to drain out the greater part of the water. Komatsuna should bunch so that you can cut it in to 5cm chunks. Start at the root and when you get to the ends of the leaf, once again drain by holding it in your fist.

7 ) Add soy sauce and salt & pepper
8 ) Spoon in Tofu paste, mix and serve.

Squid and Bamboo Shoot Stir Fry

Method
Preparing the squid (Click through images)

Cooking
1) Heat oil in a pan
2) Fry squid for 2-3 mins until translucency disappears
3) Add the mushrooms and bamboo shoot and stir fry for a few minutes
4) Season with soy sauce and mirin to taste
5) serve with torn green perilla leaves sprinkled on top.

Even in his 80s he was carrying drinking-water in buckets up the mountain.
Meals were cooked on a wood-burning irori hearth in the centre of a traditional Shikoku home, a new young generation sat at his feet.

Masanobu Fukuoka’s life, like a glimpse of bygone rural Japan, heady with animistic whispers, and more familiar to enchanted scenes in Miyazaki’s anime, Totoro, is not the destination one would have predicted for him at age 25: stationed at Yokohama Customs and Excise, as a plant pathologist. Days spent inspecting microorganisms that hitched rides in on imported produce.

Then, hospitalised by acute pneumonia, a radical change of direction started to shape the man who would become Japan’s leading advocate for organic and no-till farming, permaculture and seasonal food, long before these words acquired the meaning they have today.

Masanobu Fukuoka died in 2008, aged 95, and that exact same year, serendipitously I pulled his book, The One Straw Revolution out of the Japan Foundation Library’s book shelves.

This book has so much to say about the ways in which pollution and waste are built in to the systems of food we rely on for daily sustenance. In a culture that discourages dissent, Masanobu Fukuoka courageously questioned the interests of big business, government entanglement with farm chemical companies, and the lack of joined up thinking that has caused many of Japan’s environmental problems.

This book was out of print in English for a long time, but in June of last year, The New York Review of Books republished the English version. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in sustainable agriculture in particular, but also, more generally, a unique outlook of man’s place in his environment, and a story that echoes other courageous environmentalists of his generation, whose words are yet to be heeded.

For those in Japan, one of the most useful parts of the book is the section where he details which foods are seasonal to Japan. Here I found my first link to reconnecting with food, in a foreign country where I didn’t know what many of the vegetables were.

The One Straw Revolution is available in English

• To buy: from The New York Review of Books Bookstore
• To borrow: From the Japan Foundation Library in Shinjuku, Tokyo
• To steal: in pdf form, in several places around the web

わら一本の革命 is available in Japanese, along with many other of Fukuoka’s works,
• At Kinokuniya (Shinjuku Hon Ten)