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The wildly grown squash-looking plant was a winter melon.
I told you that a squash-looking plant started growing wildly in my garden before.
It suddenly appeared and I didn’t know what it was because I didn’t plant it.
Well, it turned out to be a winter melon, which is common in the Kansai region. We usually put it in miso soup. It isn’t eaten so much in the Kanto region, and I had never seen it before I moved to Shiga.
It looks like a melon, but the color inside is white.
like this.
We cut it into blocks and put them in a soup.
It is quite big and a bit troublesome to cut, so I don’t like it so much, but it seems to be very popular here in Shiga, I see it all the time.
Winter melon miso soup is one of the dishes of Kyodo Ryori, local cuisine that I talked about in Chapter 8 of The Ikigai Diet.
Plants which have been grown in your region for many centuries are suitable for you from the viewpoint of Shindofuji. This one especially being wildly grown almost like Masanobu Fukuoka’s vegetables, must be good. And I now know where the seeds came from. From a local natural farmer.
We usually buy vegetables from this farmer who grows vegetables using the Natural Farming method. Last year I just threw the seeds of his winter melon in the garden. I didn’t plant them, so I didn’t expect them to sprout, but they did. What a powerful plant.
So although it is troublesome to prepare, I will use it a lot this autumn.