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| For the previous service, I cooked four dishes,
“somen-uri”, “ezo-kabura”, “zuiki-mochi”, and, as soybeans had
just been harvested, boiled beans. I cooked for 44 people by
myself and packed the food into small containers. There were
44 people so the amount to be cooked was terribly large. Although
I was able to find spare time to cook, it took me three to four
days to complete the preparation. |
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| That's right. I must start preparing the ingredients
for the cuisine in the spring. First I start by procuring wild
edible plants. Last spring, I collected sobana, azami, kinoshita,
itadori, takenoko, udo, katahana, zenmai, and warabi. In the
fall, I collected sugimimi (sugi-hiratake), nameko, yukifuri
(kuritake), maiko (maitake), masugoke (masutake), kanoshita
(buna-haritake), mukugoke (mukitake), and nezumitake (houkitake).
I also obtained some wild nuts such as gaya, and a small amount
of hashibami. I am always walking along the mountain path looking
around, thinking perhaps there might be something useful for
cooking. The harvested ingredients are pickled for preservation
or dried and used later after rehydrating them in water. It
really takes a lot of time and effort. |
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I've never felt troubled even when I had
to cook a lot. “Ho-on-ko”is a ritual passed down for generations,
and we should treasure the tradition. That's how I feel when
I cook. I also feel happy to have made it when people praise
the taste.
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