Chazuke is green tea poured over rice. It’s the ultimate Japanese comfort food, a sort of articulated porridge that warms the soul and fills the belly. In this gourmet version we add a heap of koumiboshi nori.

Driving the country roads, it seems the hills are dressed for the holidays, the dull winter landscape bedecked with persimmon-jeweled trees. I can’t help but see them as festive and ornamental.

From time to time, we’ll let a log burn down and roast round taro roots in the coals. They are smooth and creamy, and with drizzle of good olive oil and a drop of soy or a pinch of salt, they sit rich in the belly, warm and comforting.

Like all animals this time of year, I notice a growing craving for richer foods, an instinctual drive to plump up for winter. The body craves a bit more oil, a bit more fat, and all things hot.

Many a flowering bush is threaded with the flossy vines of jinenjo, a jungly mass of their leaves matting the crown.Their papery seeds flutter like medallions in the cold breeze and a few remaining mukago dangle ready to fall.

In Japan, food is imbued with symbolism that speaks to a way of being, a way of thinking. A respect for nature defines Japan’s spirituality and its cuisine and the two are inextricably linked.

Making onigiri is an intimate act and homemade ones, laced with love, taste the best. Watching the practiced movement of Kuniko’s hands I was reminded of a day some years prior.

I too would be more tempted by a sultry fig, its thin blackish purple skin stretched taught over a teardrop sac of flowers forever concealed. How do you know when a fig is ripe?

Even I get a thrill when the pink tipped straw colored smooth skinned rhizomes of shinshouga, new ginger, line the shelves at the markets in early summer. They’re just beautiful enough to make your heart race a bit

I wish I could stand on the spine of summer and pin it in place. But summer no longer holds its shape. A great shift is underway, arrhythmia in the earth’s heartbeat.

What is the musicality of a meal in Japan? a young man once asked me. I had just given a slide talk on kateirtori home cooking and he, a musician, was curious.

A dozen ume trees bloom each February in our small orchard. Their white, single petal flowers glow in the cold misty air, a delicate promise of a forthcoming spring.

Takashi walked in with a handful of fuki, the hollow stems ofthe native Japanese coltsfoot plant, and said, the first time I’ve ever bought fuki. The first time because fuki are a thing to forage, not purchase,

We gather handfuls of warabi, bracken fern, caught before they unfurl. Every year, every wild vegetable we forage is first enjoyed as tempura.

If characterized as rigid notions of etiquette, table manners can feel forced and stringent. But I’ve always found great beauty in the layered gestures of movement at the table.