Spring begins not with a date, but with a bite. A flicker of green against a brown hillside. A flavor so alive it startles the tongue.

When the bottle emerges at the end of the night, it is more than a digestif. It is an offering. A return. A quiet act of defiance against haste, against forgetting.

The final hours of the fading year are a fevered devotion. In the kitchens of ancestral homes, hands fly. Osechi — the New Year’s meal — must be prepared before the old year exhales its last breath.

The air was perfumed with the fragrance of the heavens brought down into the valley of time. Thick and golden, unmistakable. Osmanthus in bloom. From that first inhale, the rhythms of Mirukashi pulled me back in.

They say figs are the sweetest fruit, and perhaps it was the fig, not the apple, that tempted Eve. It was fig leaves, after all, she chose to cover herself. I too would be more tempted by a sultry fig.

Spiny, armored, almost feral. These little land urchins split open to reveal the sensual heart within: a glossy nut with a caressible curve, rich as lacquer, hued like burnished mahogany and warm earth.

June arrives soft and swollen with rain. Tsuyu season — plum rains — breaks open with claps of thunder and settles into a steady thrum. The air hangs heavy with the scent of something ancient.

After a warm spell that left me wondering where winter was hiding, it blew in on an icy north wind. We brought the first load of wood up to the house and built a fire in the wood stove. I pulled sheepskins out of storage, one at each bedside to caress bare feet on cold […]

October, a golden season of ripe rice and goldenrod, turns to orange and red in November as the colors of autumn thicken. But we are still reveling in the season of shinmai, dining on the new crop of rice. The plump, chewy grains pair so well with other autumnal flavors like Ginko nuts, mukago, and […]

I think time just might just be the most essential ingredient in good cooking. Because cooking with care takes time. And care — for your ingredients, for your kitchen and utensils, for your guests or family — shouldn’t be rushed. Washoku, Japan’s culinary tradition, asks the cook to preserve and present the purest interpretation of […]