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THE next day came around.
After breakfast, I saw Techi off as she went to the orchard. Then, I finished all the chores I hadn’t managed to get to yesterday. At noon, Techi came back with Kon and Sayori, and the four of us savored chilled Chinese noodles for lunch.
Now, it was the afternoon. We seemed to be fine with our measures for the summer heat fatigue at the moment, so I figured I should start thinking about measures for heatstroke next. I visited the supermarket to stock up on my ingredients and sprang into action immediately after I returned.
Sterilize preserve jars by boiling them in a pot. During the wait, repeatedly wash slightly pricey and good quality lemons produced locally in Japan under running water. Be patient—wash every single spot meticulously.
This could be said for all citrus fruits, but their skins were a feast for mold and nutritious for humans. Because of that, it was easy for them to grow mold. Even if they didn’t look like they were moldy, sometimes, they might have invisible spores all over the skin.
I’d heard that when people in the cheese industry were involved with the fermentation process, they would avoid eating citrus fruits altogether so that they wouldn’t accidentally get mold spores onto their bodies. This was only hearsay, so I didn’t know how true it was, but what I did know was that it was indeed easy for citrus peels to grow mold. If you didn’t cook your fruit, the mold might spread in no time at all.
Frankly, I had no clue whether washing citrus skin could get rid of all the spores. It might only serve the purpose of giving me peace of mind, but I still washed the fruits thoroughly just in case. Then, after draining all the water, I cut the lemons into slices.
I used a toothpick to remove the lemons seeds, trying not to damage the fruit whenever I could. I took out a jar of honey I’d stored deep inside the cabinet.
“Uh-oh, it’s gotten all stiff,” I muttered.
Sometimes, liquid honey would harden inside jars and bottles. It would become a consistency similar to jello—no, agar jelly. It will be a challenge to use it like this, but if you warm it gently in water around 104 degrees to 122 degrees, it will melt easily and regain its liquid properties. This wouldn’t affect the taste either, so you could enjoy it as if it were a brand-new jar.
If your honey container was made of glass, you could heat it directly, but if it was plastic, it might melt in the heat, so you had to be careful. Transferring your honey from your plastic bottle to a glass jar might be a good idea for long-term storage.
Lectures aside, this meant that I had one additional task to do. I put another pot on the stove and heated my honey jar over low heat. I waited until the sterilization was done and honey was ready.
Remove sterilized jars from the pot. Fill them up with lemon slices. Pour in honey until full. Screw the lids tightly before storing in the fridge. After one day, your lemon-infused honey will be ready.
Lemon-infused honey was a convenient ingredient to have on hand. It could be used in lemonade, lemon pie, and so on.
Some people prefer to store them in room temperature instead of the fridge, but from my experience, lemon-infused honey grows mold easily. If it were just honey, that wouldn’t happen, but because you added lemons and the water content of the lemons, it provided a better environment for mold to thrive. You couldn’t afford to let your guard down.
Neither honey nor locally produced lemons were cheap. If these things grew mold, it would burn a very sad hole in my wallet, so I moved them straight into the fridge to avoid such a travesty.
It was also important to consume them as soon as possible after making them, so I decided I’d make lemonade for Techi and the others tomorrow.
The recipe for lemonade only consisted of one step: dissolve lemon-infused honey in chilled water. You could use sparkling water instead or add things like mint. A pinch of salt would also help you replenish your salt reserves.
This kind of lemonade was an effective measure against heatstroke. You could rehydrate, replenish your sugar levels—plus salt levels if you added that—and ingest some citric acid. On top of that, it was even refreshing and tasty. What more could you ask for?
You could spread it over meat like jam. It also had a good affinity with certain types of fish like salmon. There was even the option of making a lazy person’s edition of a lemon pie by using store-bought pastry and baking it with lemon-infused honey as the filling. Then there was toast with lemon-infused honey or sandwiches with salmon, herbs, and this honey. I’d heard that some people mixed it with potato salad as an accent to give it more variety. Hm, I should test out all of those when I have time.
In the back of my mind, I considered all the things I could do with lemon-infused honey as I stashed my preserve jars in the fridge. That was when a certain bag caught my attention. It jostled with a rustle with my movement, as if reminding me that I mustn’t forget about them.
“Ah, right… It’s about time, isn’t it?” I muttered to myself. “Okay, I’ve got to check the weather forecast and aim for sunny days.”
My words were directed at the pickling plums in the fridge. They were dyed bright red, having absorbed the color of the red shiso. And now, they were only waiting to be dried under the sun.
Ideally, you’d want to dry them under the midsummer sun under a cloudless sky so that it would produce plenty of umami and acidity. Once I returned it to the salted plum juice after the drying process, the umeboshi would be ready. The flavorful and sour umeboshi will elevate the taste of your rice to a whole other level.
Putting umeboshi into your lunchbox during summer will help your food last longer, and because they are pretty much little balls of salt, they also help prevent heatstroke. They are also just as versatile, if not more versatile, than lemon-infused honey. Above all, I’d invested quite a lot of money and effort into them, so I had to be careful not to miss a good opportunity.
Once again, I muttered to myself, “I’ve got lots to do in summer too, huh?”
Summer was hot and humid, which meant that everything went bad and grew mold more quickly. It definitely wasn’t a season suited for making preserves, but my schedule was still going to be jam-packed. In fact, this was going to be my prime season for making sun-dried things.
There were still plenty of preserves I wanted to make. And I also have plenty of time, so I should try my hand at everything I can, I decided.
But that was the future, not the present. For now, I focused on the preparations for dinner tonight.
Tonight, I would make bitter melon chanpurū. The ingredients were pork, tofu, eggs, and bitter melons. Apparently, this combination made it a good way to fend off the summer heat fatigue and heatstroke as well.
Now then, the problem is whether Kon and Sayori can withstand the bitter melons… I guess I’ve got to do everything I can to make it easier on their tongue. And so, I began by curbing the bitterness by rubbing in salt and parboiling it in hot water.