In Kyushu, Japan, a New Food Movement That’s Driven by Craft and Care
19.07.2023 - 09:43
/ cntraveler.com
One February afternoon, I pulled on rubber boots and followed the writer and photographer Prairie Stuart-Wolff into a weed-choked gully not far from her rural home in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. “The inoshishi got here first,” Prairie said, using the Japanese word for wild boar. She pointed to an area of uprooted soil. Our porcine friends were after grubs, but we were hunting for fukinoto, or butterbur, a bitter leafy perennial and early harbinger of seasonal change. Clambering around a thickety slope, we picked our fill of vibrantly green fukinoto buds; the best would be set aside for tempura, while the others would be blanched and chopped into miso paste to make a relish. “Fukinoto is considered the first taste of spring,” Prairie said. “There might still be snow on the ground, and the wind may still be blowing, but the earth is waking up. When I moved here, it was the first thing I ever foraged. I feel in a way that fukinoto is a symbol of my life in Japan.”
Prairie and Hanako offer a series of seasonally minded, small-group culinary trips in Kyushu.
Foraging and elevated home cooking are activities central to the Mirukashi Salon, a series of seasonally minded, small-group culinary trips that Prairie has begun offering in Kyushu. She moved here 15 years ago from Maine, where she still spends time, with her now wife, Hanako Nakazato, a ceramicist from a legendary family of potters who hail from the nearby coastal city of Karatsu. Each session includes visits to notable local restaurants and a unique day trip to see how important traditional foods are produced: to a tea farm, for example, or a soy brewery. In her own measured and modest way, Prairie is using travel to help remedy the
The website maxtravelz.com is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.