Ichigo — Beautiful Japanese Strawberries — Where My Heart Leads

Inspired by @kimonomom ‘s husband who fluidly whipped up a layered strawberry fresh cream cake for her, I grabbed a tray of Japanese strawberries to go with a chocolate hazelnut cake I’d ordered for a birthday.

Japanese strawberries are easily double or triple the price of regular US ones you’d find in supermarkets, and the price reflects the quality difference. They are fragrant, sweet, juicy, and happy. A friend who did an artist residency in Kawaguchiko near Mount Fuji came back saying the plants there looked so happy and healthy that she’d be happy to be a plant there!

So Kimono mom’s husband quickly whipped up the fresh cream, and sliced the strawberries whilst their little 2 or 3 year old helped out spreading out the strawberries on the cream and digging in at the same time. It’s really eye opening to see how much exposure their little girl gets through “helping out” at the kitchen with peeling carrot skins, mixing ingredients in a mixing bowl, and even learning that each rice grain has seven gods in them. Respect!

After enjoying the beautiful chocolate cake with Japanese ichigo, I contemplated making the fresh cream cake too and stumbled upon an American home and living website that demo-ed how they made the cake. A couple things struck me. How much sugar they added to the strawberries when Kimono Mom’s added none because it needed none. And how rough even in a filmed demo the baker was with mixing bowls and utensils. It’s a huge cultural difference. The sugar, the treatment of food and objects.

Produce and Seasonings

It also got me thinking about plants and soil — do strawberries taste better when there is better sun, better soil? And if produce is relatively tasteless, then people end up adding a lot more seasoning — which isn’t naturally healthy. Because the best tasting foods are foods with their natural sugars etc abundant. It’s almost a cyclic cycle — if foods lack their natural “umami” or taste, then people might add chemical seasonings. Which calls for soda, alcohol to balance the chemical OR gets people off kilter.

Still fresh in my mind — when my friend’s son, who has food sensitivities came back from a lunch where he had ketchup (with sugars and chemical additives) he was so hyper and excited that it was a struggle to get him to calmly sit down and focus.

What we eat, consume affects us as do our choices in what we consume and eat affect the environment.

Where My Heart Leads — Food for thought:

• Has it happened to you that you notice yourself wanting a coke/alcohol because of what you’ve been feeling? What’s going on emotionally then? Did you notice it? Could you process it?
• It’s really inspiring how much open the parents are in letting their kid try their hand in things. How might you give them the opportunities to do so more? (Thinking of the book — French Kids Don’t Throw Food. A fun read.)

And for anyone who loves watching cooking videos or are interested in seeing how inspiring parenting looks like, check out kimonomom on youtube.

For those interested in how and why people grab the sugar and the emotional cause behind it, you might wish to check out an interview with Kimberly Ashton on how she uses whole foods to heal emotional food cravings.

Originally published at https://www.wheremyheartleads.com on February 10, 2022.