Winner of the Gourmand World Cookbooks awards for 'Best of the Best Cookbooks in the World in 25 years' 2020, 'Best First Cookbook and Best Cookbook Photography' 2018 and 'Best Cookbook in Japan' 2017. Harvest Niseko is the guide to Japanese home cooking. Written together by friends and colleagues of Niseko's famous catering company Niseko Gourmet, Tess Stomski and Chisato Amagai offer over 100 recipes and an explanation on what to have on hand in your Japanese pantry. Each recipe is simple enough to cook for a week night dinner for the family yet when paired together will impress for a dinner party. Recipes are organised into 10 chapters of the famous 'Niseko-farmed' ingredients of cabbage, asparagus, egg, tomato, potato, rice, daikon radish, carrot and lily bulb, beans and tofu, and pumpkin, explore various cooking techniques and offer traditional and modern flavours from throughout Japan, all with the international kitchen in mind. Harvest Niseko also explores the lives of ten inspiring Niseko farmers and eight creative chefs as they reflect on their childhood memories, career defining decisions and culinary journeys. www.harvestniseko.com 'There's often a direct relationship between chef and farmer in Niseko that adds a special significance and quality to the dining experiences on offer here. When long-time local chef Tess Stomski decided to dig a little deeper and learn more about these connections, she uncovered an incredible world of stories surrounding the lives of local farmers and what goes on behind the scenes of Niseko's now-famous food industry. In this world a young 'natural-cultivation' farmer massages and sings to his tomatoes; an older farmer extracts flavour and sweetness from this carrots by storing them under the snow in winter; and a rice farmer introduces ducklings to his paddies in spring to organically control insects, before selling them as ducks to high-end restaurants in autumn. These stories and many more form the foundation of Tess's four year labour of love - exquisite new recipe book Harvest Niseko. The books' 100 recipes have been created in collaboration with Chisato Amagai, another local chef and colleague at Tess's former catering company Niseko Gourmet. Dishes are easy to cook traditional, and modern Japanese, with some taking inspiration from French, Italian or Asian cuisine but incorporating local ingredients. If you set yourself up with Tess' suggest pantry it's very easy to go out to your local supermarket wherever you live and cook up and authentic Japanese meal.' Kristian Lund, Powderlife Magazine

"We Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world. What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.... [W]e mutilated the bodies of enemy dead, cutting off their ears and kicking out their gold teeth for souvenirs, and buried them with their testicles in their mouths.... We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter. As victors we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes against humanity; but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that if we were on trial for breaking international laws, we should be found guilty on a dozen counts. We fought a dishonorable war, because morality had a low priority in battle. The tougher the fighting, the less room for decency, and in Pacific contests we saw mankind reach the blackest depths of bestiality." ---- Edgar Jones, WWII Veteran

One of the vital aspects of traditional Rinzai Zen koan study in Japan is jakugo, or capping-phrase exercises. When Zen students have attained sufficient mastery of meditation or concentration, they are given a koan (such as the familiar “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) to study. When the student provides a satisfactory response to the koan, he advances to the jakugo exercise–he must select a “capping phrase,” usually a passage from a poem among the thousands in a special anthology, the only book allowed in the monastery. One such anthology, written entirely in Chinese, was translated by noted Zen priest and scholar Soiku Shigematsu as A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters. Equally important is a Japanese collection, the Zenrin Segoshu, which Mr. Shigematsu now translates from the Japanese, including nearly eight hundred poems in sparkling English versions that retain the Zen implications of the verse.

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

The plantation experience from the perspective of language, Evolution of the Japanese Language in Hawai'i, Plantation Terms, Plantation Pidgin, Camp Names, Hanabata Days, Jan Ken Po, Nostalgic Illustrations, Foreword by Arnold Hiura Book jacket.

A collection of more than 100 recipes that introduces Japanese comfort food to American home cooks, exploring new ingredients, techniques, and the surprising origins of popular dishes like gyoza and tempura. Move over, sushi. It’s time for gyoza, curry, tonkatsu, and furai. These icons of Japanese comfort food cooking are the hearty, flavor-packed, craveable dishes you’ll find in every kitchen and street corner hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Japan. In Japanese Soul Cooking, Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat introduce you to this irresistible, homey style of cooking. As you explore the range of exciting, satisfying fare, you may recognize some familiar favorites, including ramen, soba, udon, and tempura. Other, lesser known Japanese classics, such as wafu pasta (spaghetti with bold, fragrant toppings like miso meat sauce), tatsuta-age (fried chicken marinated in garlic, ginger, and other Japanese seasonings), and savory omelets with crabmeat and shiitake mushrooms will instantly become standards in your kitchen as well. With foolproof instructions and step-by-step photographs, you’ll soon be knocking out chahan fried rice, mentaiko spaghetti, saikoro steak, and more for friends and family. Ono and Salat’s fascinating exploration of the surprising origins and global influences behind popular dishes is accompanied by rich location photography that captures the energy and essence of this food in everyday life, bringing beloved Japanese comfort food to Western home cooks for the first time.