This week in the blue belt life – posted an awesome hearty soup recipe from 500 Vegan Dishes by Deborah Gray, updated the vegetarian recipes page, and added the Mizuna Mind Opener recipe in English. Still working on a template for recipes that looks good on mobile and that I can plug recipes into relatively quickly. We eat well in the blue belt household and it is only right for me to share in that bounty. So fire these recipes up, let me know what you think, and have a productive week ahead!
Every weekend I visit the Ginza Farmers Market to stock up on the best produce in Tokyo and catch up with my friends at the market. Each visit is a ritual – in addition to getting outside and procuring fresh foods that will drive me toward greater health, I get to build community, interact with vendors, visitors and regular shoppers, and always learn something new, about the produce, the people, or a particular area of Japan. Selection at this market is generally much better than supermarkets, with hard-to-find items like kale, spaghetti squash, and butternut squash – to name a few I picked up today – available when in season.…
On December 6, 2014 I shot the video for “A Day at the Ginza Farmers Market” and five interviews with the manager of the market and vendors. Last week I finally uploaded the last interview video, completing the series. The market is more vibrant than ever as education spreads on healthy dietary choices and sustainable farming practices. This market really is a one-stop shop for all your culinary needs – from staples like rice and pasta to fresh fruits and vegetables to free range organic eggs to specialty items like dried shiitake and various types of seaweed. I personally do fully half of my total shopping here, with the remaining…
MasterDebator, the most sensible critic of my stand on Christmas, has once again spurred me to consider my worldview from a different angle. In a recent discussion he posed the following: what power do we have to really affect the suffering of people beyond our immediate family and community? One might even go further and say how can you really affect anything beyond yourself – and do we really even have control over that? I’ll answer that definitively – while we may not have ultimate control over even our own suffering, we do have control over our thoughts, actions, and emotions – that is unless we give that control over…
This week goes out to my second home, the Ginza Farmers Market. We put in the finishing touches on the video over the last week, and although there is some more fine-tuning to do within YouTube, I think it is ready for wider release. Though this has only cracked the shell of the egg, so to speak, of an infinite topic in which I am interested, this has been the largest project I have undertaken since my exit from my former life. I am truly indebted to everyone who made this work possible. Below, allow me to acknowledge the many collaborators who made this video possible, and who support the…
