Umeshu

At the end of June I made some umeshu, plum liqueur. I've been wanting to do it for years, and finally got around to it this year. Now, I say 'made', but it's only really a matter of flavouring ready-made alcohol, as you would when making sloe gin. In fact, it's illegal to make alcohol in Japan unless you are a licensed producer. No home-brew or pea-pod wine here I'm afraid.

Making umeshu is very easy. When the plums are in season (when they are still green), every supermarket has them displayed along with everything else you need (rock sugar, white liquor and storage jars) along with a poster showing the recipe. When I got home I found that the liquor carton and the sugar bag and the label on the jar also featured the recipe for umeshu, though each one was slightly different!

So here's what I did....

Firstly, you have to pick out the stem part from each plum, using a toothpick or something similar. I thought this might be rather fiddly...

...but the stems actually pop out really easily. It was quite a satisfying little job!

Next, wash and dry and plums. Wash and dry the container you'll be using too. I followed the directions carefully and sterilised it by wiping it with alcohol too, but that probably wasn't necessary. Last year, H made a tiny amount of umeshu from a handful of plums from our tree. He didn't have a suitable container so put it in a large Coke glass, with a piece of clingfilm and a rubber band in lieu of a lid. And it was good :-)

So, for a kilo of plums you need 1.8 litres of white liquor (a standard Japanese measure) and between 500 grammes and a kilo of rock sugar, depending on the recipe you use. Not surprisingly, the sugar bag recipe called for a full kilo! I used about two thirds of a kilo bag.

Layer in the plums and rock sugar...

...and then pour in the liquor.

And that's it!

Now for the hard part: leave it in a cool, dry place where it won't be disturbed for as long as you can bear to wait. Again, the recipes varied but the general consensus seemed to be that it needs at least 3 months, but 12 months or more is better.

Like most Japanese houses we have a trapdoor in the floor downstairs, opening into the crawlspace. It allows (reasonably!) easy access to all the pipes, and lets fresh air circulate, coming in through vents in the walls. It's also the perfect place to store umeshu...

Here's how it looked after a week. The plums were starting to float and the sugar was largely dissolved:

I looked again this morning  and the sugar had completely dissolved. Now I just need to try and forget about it for a few months. Maybe I'll crack it open for Christmas...



Valentine's Day

Did you do anything special for Valentine's Day?

Here in Japan it has become 'traditional' for women to give gifts to men on Valentine's Day. Homemade chocolates are a common choice for someone you actually love, while shop-bought ones will do for colleagues and other people you feel obliged to give to. Hey! I just realised! H didn't get any chocolate at work this year. Shame, he usually brings it home and shares it with me :-) Anyway, men are then supposed to reciprocate on March 14th, known as White Day, although I don't think a lot of chocolate making goes on then...

Anyway, at K's preschool everyone in the upper classes (all 8 students) were instructed to bring in a little handwritten card and sweet of some kind for each of their classmates. He enjoyed writing them, and later showing me all the cards he had received. He even shared some of his chocolate with me!

Meanwhile, I stitched up a little card for H, from a design found here. I finished it (ie did 90% of it) late the night before. H opened it and said 'Are they hearts? I thought it was a bra at first'. Hmm...



I just looked at the website I got it from again, to get the link, and realised that the hearts aren't actually supposed to be joined together. I also should have left out the top centre stitch to make an actual heart, as opposed to bra, shape. This explains the nagging feeling I had that my card hadn't turned out as good as the ones I had originally seen. Doh.

For Valentine's Day dinner, I made cheese fondue. Fun, easy, yummy, out of the ordinary. I (thought I) was super-organized, getting all the ingredients the day before. It wasn't until after lunch that I realised I didn't have any of those little fuel blocks to cook the fondue with. Another 'Doh'. Collected K from school, drove to the other side of town to buy them, came home... couldn't find the fondue set. I. Have. Looked. Everywhere. Still can't find the darned thing. So it was fondue in a little saucepan cooked on the stove, and eaten with regular forks. Oh well.

Dessert though.

Dessert was good. No 'Doh' moments at all there.

The recipe (find it here) was actually very easy, but please don't tell anyone. The impressiveness-to-ease ratio is very good on this one. I followed the recipe with no changes, but I did make the cakes in advance and then leave them in the fridge until it was time to bake them. Oh, and the recipe said to tip the cakes out of the ramekins to serve them but there was no way I was going to chance that. Eaten straight out of the dish, with cream and strawberries - yum. Reheated in the microwave the next day - also yum. I will be making these again...

December days

Not surprisingly, the times I have lots to tell you about are the times when I'm too busy to post. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that December was busy. I composed lots of blog posts in my head, usually in the shower, but never actually got around to writing anything. So here's the Reader's Digest version, just to give you a little taste of the days leading up to Christmas here in the Monkey household.

The month started like this...


... and went on to cover things like this...

...and increasing amounts of this:

One of our advent calendars this year was made up of activities to do with K, such as this...

and this:

There was quite a lot of this sort of thing...

...and this too:

We made flowers for the concert guests...

...and then it was finally time to hang up the stockings:

There were lots of things that didn't make the photographic cut too, like our annual potluck party (topping last year's, with 42 attendees), a couple of Christmas concerts and school parties.

And of course Christmas Day itself, and the all important concert; but they are stories for another day.

Happy Hallowe'en!

I love Hallowe'en. Any excuse for fancy dress always goes down well with me, and the fact that it almost coincides with my birthday probably comes into it too. This year I didn't really do much for Hallowe'en myself, but I did help K to enjoy it. First off, I subliminally steered him in the direction of wanting a skeleton costume for his preschool party...

I got a cheap black tracksuit, some white fabric paint and this skeleton template. Back in the summer when I was in the UK, I bought some freezer paper, so I finally had the chance to try freezer paper stencilling. If you're not American and/or a craft blog fan you may not know that freezer paper is paper which is waxy on one side only. If you cut a design into it and then iron it, waxy side down, onto fabric it sticks to the material and creates a waterproof seal. Paint over the stencil, let it dry and then peel off the paper - ta da! Skeleton bones!

H suggested that I put bones on the back too, and then paint by hand onto the gloves and socks. Well, no. This will be quite good enough, thank you.

Anyway, we all went to K's preschool on Saturday afternoon for their Hallowe'en party. As well as his preschool classmates there were also children who attend the school for weekly English classes, and some former students, siblings, friends and all. First off they did some songs and games indoors...

... and then they headed out to trick or treat.

Hallowe'en is gradually becoming more well known and popular in Japan, but it's still not a big event and the average citizen would certainly not expect trick-or-treaters turning up on their doorstep. The school had arranged for the children to go to the old people's day centre across the road, and 2 private houses nearby. I suspect that the school provided the treats too!

The treats are behind you, little skeleton boy!

Then it was back to school for a bit of apple bobbing before going home again. Here's K with Rika-chan, his friend, classmate and daughter of 'Mr' Jason, his teacher and our friend.

Today there was another little party within school-time, so the costume got a second outing. I thought I'd add a little Hallowe'en charm to K's lunch and had a go at making severed fingers like Jo's. I showed them to K in the morning and he was very enthusiastic, but they returned untouched. So I ate them.

And now the witching hour draws near, so I will bid you goodnight. Keep your doors closed tightly tonight!

Cooking time!

K loves to help out in the kitchen, and 'mixing' is definitely one of his favourite things to do. The other day we made these super-easy 5 ingredient peanut butter cookies, found via Mary Beth's blog Salt and Chocolate. They were a bit too sweet for us; normally I'd reduce the sugar in the recipe but as the only other ingredients were peanut butter, chocolate chips, an egg and baking soda I thought I'd better not mess about with it too much! Yup, no flour and no extra fat. Admittedly they did taste rather like sweetened peanut butter with chocolate chips in, but who says that that is a bad thing?

Our other recent mixing activity was rather less tasty - playdough. I found a recipe for it here, and K had fun cooking it up.


Then we divided up the dough and worked in some food colouring to make red, blue and green dough as well as leaving some plain. That's what H was doing in that picture I posted yesterday :-)

After that it was just a matter of playing! The dough was not too sticky and generally quite nice to handle. It reminds me a bit of Silly Putty, in that it will stretch but it will also snap if you pull it quickly. Still, I think the one that Mum used to make for us when we were little was better. Do you still have the recipe Mum?

Overnight Caramel Walnut Rolls

Since getting the bread machine I've been wanting to make something a bit fancy, so when I saw this recipe (found via Penelope Loves Lists) I thought I'd make them for breakfast on New Year's Day. You make the dough and shape the rolls in advance, put them in the fridge overnight and then just leave them to rise for half an hour and bake them. Easy!

Of course, I hit a slight snag when I got up on New Year's Day - no electricity. Luckily the recipe calls for the rolls to be left in the fridge for at least 12 hours and no more than 48, so we had them on the 2nd instead. And there were still some left for this morning too. Yum.

Christmas Day

Happy Birthday to me...

It was my birthday last Friday and I had a good day. It started with an unexpected Skype chat with insomniac Mum and Dad. To be honest, Skyping can be a bit of a pain at times, with poor connections making it difficult to talk to each other and K trying to disconnect stuff or play with the mouse. But this time it was all as it should be, and we were able to have a nice, relaxing chat; even K was on his best behaviour and performed well for the camera.

After an easy class with a private student, K and I joined Cian, Lisa, Vivian, Cally and Alex for a lovely birthday lunch. K was reasonably well-behaved and I had a special birthday dessert, complete with candles (luckily not the actual number of my age. That would have been a fire hazard) and everyone in the restaurant singing Happy Birthday.


Lately the cold weather definitely encourages baking, and K is keen too. One of his favourite books at the moment is Maisy Makes Gingerbread, in which 'Maisy needs flour, sugar, eggs, butter and ginger'. Therefore everything we make now is also declared to need those ingredients too. Well, we didn't make gingerbread, but we did make a cheesecake on Friday afternoon. Yum. H came home a bit early and we had a big one-pot nabe dinner, followed by a visit to H's mum and dad's (taking the cheesecake. Yum.)

It really was a lovely day and I had some nice cards and gifts too (as in 'I had some cards and gifts. They were nice' not 'I had cards and gifts. Some of them were nice'. Don't you just love the English language?). The birthday atmosphere carried over to Saturday night's Hallowe'en party too, where Cian presented me with a birthday cake. It was slightly battered where the box had been knocked over by a drunken guitarist, but it still tasted Very Good as a mid-afternoon snack yesterday.

So now that my birthday and Hallowe'en have passed, I suppose Christmas is next on the list. Gulp.