The Problem of Abundance

The winter is almost over and we have barely touched our food reserves. We still have a ton of tomatoes sauce, pickled tomatoes, pickled zucchini, cabbage and pickled nozawana as well as many kg of potatoes, sorghum and rice. Before we know it, we will have fresh tomatoes and fresh rice. We gotta find a way to get rid of this!

Tomoe has been busy making some great dishes with the sorghum, and whatever we can't finish we will give to the chickens in the spring. Then the problem will be finishing all the eggs.

In Tokyo we were so careful not to throw away any food - always using a scraper to get even the last bits out of our soup bowl or plate. Here, we have so much that it is rotting in the hallway and I have grown numb. It doesn't feel like waste though, because it is all going back into the soil for next years crops. It's amazing to feel so wealthy with so little work (well, it is work, but it doesn't feel like it).

The photos are the sorghum. Our biggest trouble was figuring out how to get the outer shell off. We ran it through a peddle powered machine that takes the grain off of the stem, but the only way to remove the husk is to beat it - very time-consuming. Tomoe came up with the idea to put them in the blender for a few seconds, and it worked quite well, with only a few broken grains. We also pop them over the fire stove like pop-corn. They don't pop as big, but they make a tasty snack that satisfies the urge for "crunchy" without the calories (or cost) of potato chips.

Once we get the distillery built though, the *real* fun begins!