Food cravings

I always have food cravings. Food cravings for any kind of Japanese food. Preferably Japanese food cooked by Japanese people.
Food here is made with such care. Focus is solely on the ingredient, its quality and freshness. The Japanese acknowledge that food taste better when it is in season. It's common to shop for groceries almost every day, thus securing fresh ingredients for every meal. The trolleys for groceries at the supermarket are no bigger than a shopping basket. That says a lot.

Right now chestnuts, persimmons and grapes are at their peaks.
Chestnuts are delicious cooked in rice with mirin and a pinch of salt. Persimmons are perfect tossed in Shiraae - a mixture of grinded white sesame seeds, miso, mirin and tofu. Grapes are superb as juice.
Takeda-san from my Chigiri-e group gave me a lot of grapes the other day. I mashed them and cooked them on low heat for 10 minutes. Then I sieved the juice. It gave me two big glasses of thick yummy sweet grape juice. So tasty that it was all gone within seconds. A perfect way to start the day.

P.S.: I wanted to dazzle my sis on visit with homemade Kuri-gohan (rice with chestnuts). I ended up with exploding chestnuts in the oven. For those of you who want to do the trick as well, - don't cut a cross in the chestnuts before you heat them in the oven. For those of you who want to avoid the explosions, do as my Ikebana teacher taught me today: Just soak the chestnuts for a while and you can easily peel them without using the oven at all!