After days of grey, humid and heavy days, suddenly one morning the sky is perfectly blue, the wind is perfectly warm, the sun is deliciously burning, the cicadas sing. At dawn and dusk the kanakana mushi sing along and you know it is the perfect summer day and you hope for more to come. The rainy season has finally ended, the typhoon season has not yet started. Everyone was waiting for this time to take their pickled plums outside, and so did I, to dry them and store them for the coming year, it is also time for lazy walks and long dives in the ocean.
It is a perfect day to take a walk and enjoy the rice paddies bright green before they start turning yellow under the sun. It is also the time to harvest myoga, this little edible flower that is so characteristic of Japanese cuisine and so refreshing. Myoga grows easily in the shaded and humid areas of Japanese gardens or in the wild. We are lucky to have a lot of them that grow wildly in our garden, so the foraging is simple: avoid snakes, identify the female plant, look 2~5cm around their base and find the pinkish buds or the white eerie flowers. Delicately cut them.
AS for cooking myoga, I find that it doesn’t support much cooking so it is better to eat it raw or only slightly cooked. My favourite recipe is a simple dashi clear soup where the myoga is chopped in. It is fresh and warm at the same time, the flavours of dashi balance well with that of myoga, this is simple but always perfect. For me, myoga does not only go well with katsuobushi, but it is also a good match with soya sauce and summer Japanese green bell peppers, another classic Japanese preparation, where the bell peppers are simply cut and cooked in a bit of oil, then steamed a bit and deglazed in soya sauce, sometimes with an addition of katsuobushi small flakes. But more often you will find myoga served with tofu, a little as a replacement of ginger, which I do not like so much as the myoga flavour is too strong and overwhelms the delicate flavour of tofu.
For me, summer means swimming in the sea or the ocean, so I spend most of my free time there, catching some waves rather than in my kitchen, yet I never neglect to prepare us a good meal full of energy!
How do you like to spend your summer days when not at work?
