Maggots, Butter, Kaki & Kabu

A slow day. I found out that it costs $2,000 to fly home. I wonder what life will be like when there is no more cheap oil. No, despite prices (which have been going down here recently, but are still higher than before) I don't think oil is expensive - not if you take into account all the costs which are currently left out. So I wonder how I can ever get home in the future if I miss this chance. I suppose I should put that $2,000 toward a sailboat.

So to keep my mind off of the fact that I am effectively stranded in Japan for the rest of my life, I chopped wood. Tomoe was busy making use of the persimmons that have been getting softer and moldier by the day. The soft ones are no longer bitter, so she used them as a sauce on some of the pickled kabu (turnip) that we also snatched from the neighbor's field. The sweetness goes nicely with the salty pickled flavor of the kabu. Highly recommended. Although, the looks are deceiving. It looks like apples in some kind of nice orange sauce and it is quite shock to the tongue when you first taste the salty turnips. Scary how, even if I know what it is, my visual impression overrides my logical thought.

Speaking of persimmons, the other day I had to dump a big bucket of what was supposed to become persimmon vinegar, into the compost. It has been sitting in our hallway fermenting for over a year, but we needed the bucket for this year's batch. When we checked to see how it was doing, we found fruit-fly larvae and mold on the top, with a foot of dried up, vinegar-less persimmon pulp on the bottom. I took a swig to see if what little liquid did remain was vinegar, but no such luck. (Photo of the bad persimmons below)

But, life is not all disappointments. I made my finest batch of butter today, using a thin skin of fat that I got off of the whey left over from making cheese a few days ago. It didn't make much, but I am happy because it is the butteriest tasting butter I have made to date.