Category: Everyday Life

A small pleasure

I read in a mystery that they also examine the vitreous jelly in the eyes of a corpse to find out if the deceased drank alcohol.
I don’t know how drinking might effect my right eye as it recovers from the operations I had, but I thought it was probably better not to drink until the eye recovered completely, so I have not been drinking since last August.

So I naturally started to pay attention to drinks or foods other than alcohol, such as sparkling water or tea or vegetables.

My interest in vegetables started with sweet potatoes.

Dried sweet potato (from many places) – I ate half-dried sweet potato, too. But I wasn’t impressed much. I like dried sweet potato coated with natural white sweetener.

Sweet potato (from Shizuoka) – I bought 10kg from a net shop. I was attracted by the pictures of sweet looking roasted sweet potatoes on their web site, and they got a lot of great complementary reviews. However, the first one we tried was not sweet at all, and we were actually disappointed. And I might have made a mistake in how to keep them, because about ten potatoes ended up rotting. I heard sweet potatoes become sweeter a while after they are dug up. We hoped so, and looked forward to it, and waited, waited, waited. We even bought a roasting pan specially for roasted sweet potatoes. (We kept on eating them all this time.)
When we finished all the sweet potatoes, about ten percent of the 10kg turned out good.
But the best sweet potato for us in the past was one we got from a neighbour some years ago. Her kid had been to a sweet potato digging event at kindergarten, and we still don’t know why we got some. They were impressively tasty.

Vitamin daikon radish (from Fukuoka) – We found it by accident in the part of the supermarket where they sell stuff from local farmers. We were curious and bought it. It was small and short and had a stronger green colour then the usual daikon radish.
We didn’t know how we were supposed to eat it, but we sliced some up anyway and gave it a try. It was surprisingly sweet! It seems to be less watery than the usual kind. It was tangy and delicious when grated.

Winter spinach (from Oita) – We have been fans of this vegetable since last February.
It costs a little bit more than the usual spinach and it goes off sooner. We want to enjoy its sweetness, so we cook it up simply!

Awakening of Inca (from Hokkaido) – Yellow, and tastes like chestnut. I saw it listed at a net shop and was curious about it, but it’s a little expensive for us. The other day, I found it at a neighbourhood supermarket! Hurrah!
We wanted to taste the potato itself, so we just boiled them. It is still a potato, but it is slightly sweet, and the chestnutty taste comes through. It doesn’t go mushy, too. We think it’s a tasty potato.
They say it sprouts easily, and that it’s best to keep it in the fridge. I probably shouldn’t get excited and buy too many, even if we happen to see some at the supermarket.

Red potato (from Okinawa) – We also see these sometimes at the supermarket, and tried them for the first time. Hmm. It is exactly potato. It was slightly sweet, but we weren’t as impressed as we were with Awakening of Inca.

Nanohana (probably from Fukuoka) – We’ve bought it a few times since last year, when we first tried it. We like the slightly bitter taste. And it has the look of spring.

– YS, 27 February 2007

27 February 2007