Here is this week's lunch menu... ♪

Weekly change
Salad vegetables (kale, kale stalks, okra, kai-peppers, Okinawan pure white bitter gourd, marinated beets, soybeans)
Potato cream gratin
Wok-fried long winter melon with meat and miso
Chilled pasta with grilled eggplant
Kale Sag Curry
Onion Soup
Daily special
Tue Fried fixed type okra
water Deep-fried summer vegetables
Thu Fried chestnut pumpkin with black vinegar
Fri. Wok-fried Kukushin Chai with homemade raayu (Chinese chili oil)
Soil green pepper with salted kelp
Sun. Tempura of summer vegetables

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

We received rain over the weekend for the first time in a long time, and the weather chart shows that the too-hot summer is finally coming to an end with typhoons and an autumn rain front in sight.
Summer vegetables are beginning to show signs of fatigue, and we are now entering the edge of autumn.
Kale has been a bit sluggish in this heat, so the salad lineup will be less leafy.
On the other hand, we have a bumper crop of pumpkins and wax gourds this year, and we have so many that I don't know if we will be able to use them all, so I hope you will enjoy many of them at the buffet!

Summer reduces appetite, so it is understandable that people want to eat fresh leafy greens, but cruciferous vegetables such as mizuna and arugula, as well as chrysanthemum vegetables such as lettuce, are not good in the heat and cannot survive in the open air at this time of the year.
It is painful to hear from customers who have seen our current salad lineup that "it's too bad we only have kale as a leafy vegetable," but it is extremely difficult to harvest more than 300 kg of kale alone every week at this time of the year.
If you rely on the grocery store, you can get highland lettuce and greenhouse spinach, and I bow to the efforts of producers and distributors who enrich our tables in this way.
However, we would sincerely like to deliver only what we can pick in our fields at the moment.
The restaurant staff who come up with the menu each week have had a hard time, as there are not enough leafy greens or too many winter melons, but they have been able to sublimate the farm's vegetables into the overall lineup with various innovations.

If you watch American cooking shows,
I think that many of the dishes are made by chefs who freely select ingredients from a warehouse full of ingredients, and then show their creativity and confront each other. This is interesting and instructive, but I wonder if the structure of having "what you want to make" first and then preparing the necessary ingredients to make that "what you want to make" is also a part of the spiritual culture. The idea is that the "self" is the main subject and the environment is controlled by the "self." This can be seen not only in cooking, but also in business and technological development.
On the other hand, Japan may be a "culture of constraints. Even in cooking shows, there seems to be a culture that is interested in the "constraints" of the environment first, such as how to cook within a set range of ingredients, and then how to show creativity within that environment. This may be due to the fact that Japan is a land where people feel closer to "irresistible nature," but it may have developed further into the spirituality and richness gained by narrowing the scope of one's own restrictions, as seen in the tea ceremony and Zen, and the curiosity to discover such things.
Looking at industry, the Japanese are adept at developing technologies that allow more functions to fit into a given size, and they are good at creating products with a fixed major direction (constraint). However, it is difficult to demonstrate strength now that the direction itself is uncertain, so it is not surprising that they are skeptical of the constraint mentality itself.
But what about the future? Of course, there will be abundance to be gained beyond the pursuit of Self-centeredness. The day may come when we can live on the moon or on Mars. However, after all, there is only one Earth, and it is true that we are beginning to see the wall of its great limitation.

Oops, that was a bit of a leap. It is a big story that we cannot contribute directly to. However, I believe that whether or not we can directly contribute to it and how we live our lives are two different things. I like to find richness and fun in constraints. I want to live my life in this way, and I hope that I can convey that fun, even if only a little, through my work. I would like to have the strength to decide my own restrictions (freedom).

It's a long story, but it was a roundabout excuse for the lack of kale and a roundabout request to eat winter melon all over again!
But I mean it.
I look forward to working with you this week!