what i have been doing in this heat

It has been hot the whole week.

Hot, as in average 35-38degC mid day temperatures.

The air con is a must almost all day or i'll probably have to have ice cream every 2 hours.

Anyhow, this summer, i am enjoying many flashbacks of the days of summer 2009.

How i suddenly hated eggplants, myoga and green capsicums, 3 of the very typical japanese summer vegetables. How i suddenly felt brown rice was stink and white rice so very yummy.

How washing the dishes after dinner felt 10 times more tiring than usual. and many many more weird changes my mind/body was going through because a little baby was growing inside me.

I thought, oh man, the 25 years of loving vegetables, and washing the dishes (by the way, this happens to be one of my favourite pastime, standing at the sink to wash plates) was taking its toll on me, i'm tired of loving my veg. bring on meat and the white rice!

Well, yeah, how pregnancy hormones can be funny.

I now am back to loving capsicums, eggplants and the yummy ginger-like myoga!

We have eggplants almost everyday, a lot of the time, sauteed with ham and topped on toast with cheese, quite often in curries, and sometimes in mapo style. And i am nowhere near being sick of them yet. So nope, i still love my veggies! Blessed by the koganei farmers' beautiful produce everyday, how can i get tired of my veg?

Myoga is usually expensive at the supermart.

3 pieces of 150yen is the average now, and the koganei farmers don't seem to harvest plenty, so by the time i get to the mart at noon, there is usually none.

So when we dropped by my sister-in-law's last week, i was so delighted at what she lucked from the many myoga plants around her house!

Plenty plenty!

i love them in my miso soup, as topping on my somen noodles, and pickled to go with rice.

It is summer, but obviously my appetite is still in its usual healthy state most of the time.

what the japanese call 夏バテnatsu bate, which means tiring from summer, and which usually brings along a loss of appetite, doesn't really exist in our home, though i dread being in the sauna-like kitchen in this heat. well of course there are some bleargh days too, but we recover almost immediately.

This season, really will go to a waste if we don't enjoy the plenty of colourful vegetables and fruit that are waiting to be brought home isn't it?

Apart from the eggplants, green peppers, pumpkin of all sorts, kangkong, molohkia, bitter gourd (which i still don't like),

Tomatoes

-soooooo in season now, with plenty of colours to choose from.

Aren't the purple ones cute?

We finish them like popcorn during meals. I love these mini ones most cos they give a nice refreshing burst of tomato juice in your mouth.

Limes

I got them at 300yen for 2 pieces 2 months ago when mum cooked us some tempra pork and i wanted to squeeze some on.

Now they cost 120yen for 3 pieces.

YAY!

i so wanted to cook this on my own some day so this was a good chance to try while we have some yummy limes in season.
I did a one plate, with garlic sauteed yellow zucchini. Very summer like plate dinner eh?

cucumbers

lots of them in my fridge; i am tossing them everywhere.

we discovered, one evening, that

passionfruit, cucumbers and mixed beans make a very good appetiser!

Watermelon

Not only the red ones
these small yellow fleshed ones, called cream watermelon were super sweet too
the size of my palm.

so we halved it and scraped happily away one hot afternoon.

not only are okras in season,

these flowers called okra flower are blooming too!

no, they have nothing to do with the okra plant, but when chopped up, they are so sticky like okra!

the taste? like lettuce, and no where near okra though some say they have a tinge of okra taste.

We had them last night with cucumber, natto, carrot rice, and myoga in miso paste.

Autumn is officially here as i mentioned earlier, so the yummy fishes that we all love, salmon, sanma, saba, anchovies, sardines, are at their yummiest.

The news on tv mentioned, the harvest for sanma is not good this year, hence the increase in price, but iwashi (something like sardine) harvest is 3 times that of last year, so they are cheap!

hoho, i can't wait to lay my hands on some yummy iwashi!