Recipe collection vol.5 / Pasta in cream sauce with spinach and sliced bacon

Ingredients for 4 people:

・Pasta / 300GR

・Spinach
・Sliced bacon
・Sliced onion / using a half of an onion
・Butter

・Milk / 150ml
・Cream / 100ml
・Consomme / 5GR
・flour / 2 spoons
・Salt and black pepper

1 Cut and slice spinach, bacon and onion.


2 Grill sliced onion, bacon with butter and brown them.


3 Add 2 spoons of flour and pour milk and cream slowly into a pan with stirring them to avoid lumps.

4 Add consomme into the sauce. Don't use it too much or the taste would be too salty.

5 Sprinkle salt and black pepper on the pan

6 Add spinach into the cream sauce


7 Add boiled pasta into the sauce and stir it well.


8 Serve a dish and enjoy it!


-- from iPod touch

Planting potatoes with my daughter.

 Today I planted seed potatoes with my daughter, who loves potatoes so much. It's still cold in Osaka but I learned from my experience of growing potatoes last year that I should plant them earlier. Because my last potatoes, which were planted at the mid of March,  should have been grown in soil for longer time. I strongly hope my potatoes should be bigger than last ones.

 As I mentioned in my last blog of potatoes, I prepared potatoes in a popular way in Japan before planting them. Cutting into a half and Covering the surface of potatoes with ash powder.

 Cutting the potatoes and putting ash powder on them was my daughter's assignment.  She was so curious about the way of the potato's preparation asking me many times "Why do I use ash?" .

 After I told her where the potatoes should be planted, I left planting them to her. She remembered how she planted potatoes with me last year.

 My daughter was so reliable that I guess you might think "What did her father do? Didn't he exploit her, did he ?" Well, I'd better show you how I worked today! I wrapped the planting beds with bunches of straws for keeping them warm and moist. Because the air in Osaka during winter is so dry and cold and frost is also expected till the beginning of March.

She seems to love watering even in a cold winter saying, "Dad, please let me do it!"
I believe her efforts can contribute to the bumper harvest!

Simple recipes

 Today my wife cooked thinned out pak choi and daikon radishes.

 The pak chois were small but very tender and easy to cook so she simply stir-flied them seasoning with only salt.

The daikon redishes were also so small since I failed to thin them out properly. So my wife grated them to make "Oroshi-ponzu" , or mixture of citrus say sauce and grated daikon radish, which is one of popular sauce among Japanese and go well with deep fried foods. When we grate daikon radish, we always use a handy grater shown below. I don't know that kind of tool can be seen in your country but it's very useful to grate vegetables and fruits.

 The Oroshi-ponzu added to pork cutlets. I believe the combination is perfect! The refreshing taste of the sauce goes well with oily deep-fried cutlets.

Homemade compost

My wife stores perishable trash like tips of vegetables and leftover in a vinyl bag to make compost. Today we found them well fermented and I put them to my gardening plot. It looks ugly but the smell was not so bad.

The compost was so sticky that I had to make it smooth by diluting it wit water in order to distribute it to wider range in my garden.

Some vegetables were not composted yet so it looks like a curry sauce?　Well, you know it's not eatable!

I don't know how effective the " compost solution " is but it's organic fertilizer so making compost at home can give me a hope for pursuing more organic gardening, I believe.

Expansion of my gardening plots in a cold day

 It's been so severely cold days since the new year holiday in Japan that I don't feel like seeding any vegetables with less expectation of germination and many vacant gardening plots. That means it's the time to carry out my idea of redesigning my gardening plots. I spend this whole weekend cultivating my vacant plots to create more available space. At the same time, I added more fertilizer and dried cow manure into the soil for making the soil more fertile.



 The expansion required digging the soil deeper, which was the hardest job to me,  since the original soil was so hard that root vegetables like daikon radishes can not grow in soil.



 After 2-hour chore, I was able to create new gardening spaces, which are shown with yellow-lines in a photo shown below.



 Drainage is always my concern when I think of changing design of my plots. I dug deeper the soil to create drainage to make water run to a main drainage.


 I believe the expansion can give me a great hope for harvesting more various kinds of vegetables.
I want to try to grow fruits like strawberry and herbs in the new spaces. I'm looking forward to seeing my plots will be filled with colorful vegetables and fruits in near future.



--from iPad

What a poor harvest!

 As I mentioned in the last blog, timely thinning-out is very important for all vegetable gardeners. And I realized again today what really happened after I skipped thinning-out. I would like to share my fault with you and I'm very happy if you can learn from my poor result of my daikon radishes.

 All of my daikon radishes were mature but very short. I've been waiting for better growth of them for months but I decided to pull out all of them since they would be bolted if they had been left in soil.

 The poor harvest is definitely caused by me. I didn't thinned them out timely and properly. I should have thinned them out to make enough space ( about 5-inch space ) between radishes.

Thinning out in a cold day

 Working in my garden in a cold winter day is sometimes boring. No weed to be removed and no seed to be seeded. All I have to do there in this season are cultivating, watering and adding fertilizers.

 Thinning-out is also important among those "winter-chores" to make my vegetables like spinach and pak-chois bigger. Today I thinned them out expecting future's bumper harvest.  Usually, I thinned out my spinach and pak-choy with making about 5cm space ( about 2inch ) between two sprouts

Aligned my spinach in a vinyl tunnel

Thinned-out spinach sprouts

My pak-choi in a vinyl tunnel

Thinned out pak-chois

 What will happen if we don't thin out properly? I'll show you an example of my failure.

I forget thinning out my daikon radishes when they were young sprouts so my gardening ridge for them are so crowded with grown daikon radishes like the photo shown below. Making daikon roots bigger and longer requires more space but my daikon radishes have been forced to grow in the "limited space".

 Eventually, most of my "grown daikons "are much shorter than ones I harvested last season.

 I would like to show a good example. One of other gardeners have grown big and long daikon radishes since he thinned them out properly with making enough space between two daikons. He has about 10cm space between them as the photo below shows.