Local living

Since things have been pretty go-go-go recently, I`ve been spending more of my free time trying to relax. One of the ways I enjoy doing that is by experiencing some parts of Japanese culture I`m not often exposed to in my daily life. Onsens will always be my all time favourite, but I do love a good cooking workshop or tour to give me some inspo, whether or not I actually bother making the recipes afterwards.

Cooking Workshop at Hamada Shoyu
Just before winter vacation, I attended a workshop held at a local soy sauce manufacturer. I thought I was in for a cheeky wine tasting to begin with, but it turned out that they`d just put three different types of soy sauce into fancy glasses for effect.

I guess I`d never really paid much attention to how different varieties of soy sauce tasted until that point, but it was really interesting to taste them and be instantly told which varieties paired best with certain foods. Something I didn`t know until that day was that soy sauce from Kyushu is special since it contains sugar.

Despite not being soy sauce related, the menu of the day was traditional Kumamoto new year cuisine: ozoni (soup containing mochi), hitomoji no gurugu (a simple dish of green onions wrapped around themselves) and karashi renkon (lotus root with Japanese mustard).
It was interesting to see how they made karashi renkon; forcefully smashing the lotus root into a bowl full of miso paste and mustard. There I was thinking it would be a delicate piping operation, but alas Kumamoto has a bit of grit. I'm not a huge fan of wasabi and the like, but it sparked an idea for me to do a twist on the recipe and add yuzu kosho (a magical citrus chilli paste) instead. In terms of the other recipe, we quickly established I`m too heavy handed to guruguru my green onions nicely, so I`ll stick to the stuff requiring aggression.

After eating all we`d made, we headed to the gift store and I bought way too much yuzu (yes, I`m obsessed) miso and some amazing soy sauce roasted sesame seeds. They also have a cafe upstairs selling desserts flavoured with their sweeter soy sauces, which I will definitely be trying some point in the near future. Soy sauce soft serve, anyone?


Creation of Green Tea Tourism Monitor Tour

Most recently, I went on tour of the Kuma area, near Hitoyoshi. Unbeknownst to me (and likely many others, hence the monitor tour), Kumamoto has quite the array of green tea plantations. We barely spent any time at the plantation, but we did visit on a very misty morning and picked our own leaves to fry in tempura batter later.

Lunch at Ryukinka no Sato was very quirky, with every part of our bento box having an element of tea: rice cooked in infused water, soup made with tea stock, fish, chicken, hamburgers and tofu all flavoured with tea, along with a croquette and an omelette. Following lunch, we went to Tateyama tea store and got a chance to sample around 14 different teas, along with brewing and pouring them ourselves.

Although it was a good concept, of course with it being a monitor tour there were a lot of teething problems. That and the fact I felt nauseous from too much green tea flavour consumption put a little downer on it, but if nothing else it`s given me a new area of my prefecture to visit when I want a nice day out in the countryside. Not quite the same as a clotted cream scone and a cuppa, but it`ll do.