The Garden: Cooking with the Garden

It is pretty difficult to find fresh culinary spices and herbs in Japan. Most of the time we can only do with herbs from jars. Yet, the choices are quite limited to the types of cuisine popular with Japanese. Occasionally even if one is lucky enough to spot them on fridge shelves in supermarkets, they are as expensive as gold.

After the quake, the concern about the safety of food seeded in me the desire to create a small piece of kitchen garden.

Since the summer, we have been enjoying the lush produce of basil and parsley.

I have been greatly fond of thyme, a herb that is used to season pork and fish dishes. Their elegant look of straight-upward rising stems with small and neat leaves has charmed me greatly. The fragrance, which could be fishy to some, has turned me a slave to them.

Thyme (百里香)

The other day, I replaced perilla frutescens (しそ) with thyme on the recipe. I was not sure about how it would work, but the several spoons of thyme magically turned a traditional Japanese dish of aubergine and pork mince into a western delicacy (<- please be warned that 'delicacy' might be a pure exaggeration).

Before I had an idea about how I could use lemon balm, it had outgrown the flower pot. I followed a recipe on the Internet to mix it with garlic and olive oil and used it as an alternative to pesto. Different from the thick and sometimes greasy taste of pesto, the lemon balm provided a refreshing tint on the tongue.

Lemon Balm （檸檬香蜂草）

I was not a big fan of chives before I started to cook in Japan. The strong smell, like that of garlics, which does not dissipate for several days always irritated me.

K's father planted the first chives in the garden, and I was then compelled to use them as they matured. I have used them to make Japanese egg rolls (卵焼き). To my surprise, They are delicious without any aggressive and residual odor. It is probably because I did not fertilize them very well as there was a secret hope in me for their ill-being. I am now grateful that they have survived my cruelty deriving from a relatively shallow knowledge about the world of cuisine.

Garlic chives (にら, 韭菜)