Tag Archives: mountains

New addition to the kitchen

25/06/2019

I’d been meaning to buy a new cutting board for months, but I couldn’t find a simple one with a right size and colour. Last weekend when we visited my uncle & aunt’s place in Gunma, my carpenter uncle casually asked me if I wanted a cutting board. I said yes, and he picked up a piece from the wood stack placed on their living room floor, and quickly sanded the rough edges for me in what seemed like a fraction of a second.

And voila, my new cutting board. At the moment, the kitchen is infused with a fresh woody scent of the mountains.

Kindergarten bento – Blueberries (18, 19, 20/May/18)

12/07/2018

During the weekend, we went to visit my relatives who live in the mountains in Gunma prefecture, 150km north of Tokyo. It’s a secluded place completely opposite of our crazy urban life, away from capitalism with hardly any tourism.

In the private field in front of their beautiful Japanese wooden house, they grow blueberries along with potatoes and buckwheat without using any pesticides. Our daughter and I had a privilege of handpicking their lush, fresh blueberries covered in the morning dew, and putting some of them directly into our mouths. There was no one else in the field but us, with only the sound of bird singing in the background. The field where the blueberry bushes were grown was surrounded by a white net (to protect them from birds), making it seem like we were immersed in a dreamlike land covered in clouds.

We brought most of the blueberries we picked back with us, which is a true luxury in Tokyo where they are sold very expensively (usually over ¥500 for only 15 pieces or so). Now our freezer is full of these beautiful, dark, purple, blue, plump berries, so we won’t have to buy them for quite some time.

For the next few days, I packed the fresh ones in our daughter’s bento for dessert, hoping she would bask in the exquisite memory of her time in great nature.