My love of autumn quells the sorrow of summer passing. In the pink glow of a lean morning the raspy coo of doves opens the day, while the pulse of cicadas brings it to a close, urging us into the the gloaming.

Kuniko is sparse with her praise but she’ll often praise my dashi which, after all, I learned to make from her. The kombu flavor whispers more than shouts. Jouhin, she’ll say, calling it elegant.

I dry it in the sun for a day or two and grind it up to make a shiso salt called yukari. It’s a fresh alternative, with tart undertones, that adds a summery salinity to summer vegetables, picnic onigiri, cocktail rims, and much more.

I sliced up a few biwa to sauté with gobo (burdock root). They fruits stand up well to cooking, maintaining their color, shape,  and sweetness and make for a prefect sweet, creamy partner to the nutty crunch of burdock root.

I crave the physical act of cooking, of working with my hands while my mind wanders, of practice in creating something immediately tangible, necessary, and inherently impermanent.

A healthy tokozuke is sweetly pungent, the aroma pleasantly sour and nutty. Its consistency light and airy as though foaming from within like a blossoming flower.

The abundant and notoriously fleeting beauty of smooth, steel-gray barked cherry trees dressed in ruffled pink coats is a quintessential emblem of Japan. It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the zeal of the season.

Japanese parsley is revered for its fresh, herbaceous good taste. It is cultivated for culinary use but it also grows wild. It's the perfect compliment for a rich bot broth of wild boar or duck.

Foraging brings to mind a hunt, or at least a bit of a search, but I’ve come to know these hillsides well so that these days it’s really more like collecting from a vast and wild garden.

The new year had barely dawned and we were already harvesting. Now they are already on their way out and today we ate freshly foraged fukinoto for what is likely the last time.

Kuniko has an intuitive skill with plating, a sense for balance, for shape, for arrangement, all of which starts the moment her knife meets an ingredient on the cutting board.

The language of taste and texture in Japan is far more varied, vivid, and complex than my native language allows for. So many of these words don’t have translations because they describe subtle variations within categories of textures

In the kitchens of ancestral homes, hands fly as fast as they can in the final hours of a waning year for the New Year’s meal known as osechi must be set before the passing year expires.

When you marry into a family, you marry into their food. And there are just some dishes that seem to bring comfort in a way that bespeaks a meaning deeper than the sum of its flavors.

I never really knew a turnip before moving to Japan. But here they are a staple, hearty but not heavy, starchy and sweet, the exact thing for crossing the bridge into winter.

Yuzu satozuke, rinds preserved in sugar, is a poor man’s marmalade. The citrus is juiced, the inner pulp removed, and the peels roughly sliced. A quick blanching fortifies the color and aroma.