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Limoncello
Chef Tony and his staff were up to their elbows in lemons last week. They removed the zest of 40 lemons as the first step in making authentic limoncello. Combined with sugar and vodka, the zest will be transformed into a lemon liqueur worthy of its southern Italian origins. It will be ready in 45 [...]
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Unattended Vegetable Stands
Unattended vegetables stands dot the road from White Beach Hotel to the main intersection in Kisami. Little wooden stands, or even just a cement step display vegetables picked just that morning in the nearby garden. Beautiful globes of onions tied together with truncated stems, fresh bundles of slender green onions, and small bags of tender [...]
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Replacing Paper on the Shoji Screens
White Beach Hotel has two Japanese tatami rooms. The paper in the shoji window screens was discolored and in some places torn. I decided to tackle replacing it and asked Koji, one of the cooks, if I could buy shoji paper in town. He assured me I could get it at Handy Home Center, the [...]
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Lighting the Pizza Oven Fire
The new wood fired pizza oven imported from Modena, Italy is in place at Mario Mare’s new restaurant at White Beach Hotel. Before we can use it to bake pizzas, we must burn a wood fire in it for ten to twelves hours for four days. We started the fire Friday evening and banked the [...]
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Timber Bamboo
I went for a walk today up in the hills behind White Beach Hotel. The sun is warm and the air cool; it was perfect for a walk. A little more than a kilometer away, there is a beautiful timber bamboo stand that clacked gently in the breeze like so many drums.
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Chef Tony’s Tomato Chutney
Yesterday Tony Scimonello, our new chef at our hotel restaurante, Mario Mare, made tomato chutney for the steak sandwiches which are on our new menu. Tony transformed a glistening mountain of fresh tomatoes and onions sprinkled with cloves and red peppers into a savory chutney. Two hours of simmering and stirring produced tantalizing aromas and [...]
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Koinobori
After a night of heavy rain, the sun rose in a bright blue sky. I rushed to get a photo of the koinobori bravely swimming over the river in the gentle breeze in a weeklong celebration of Children’s Day. The colorful school of carp kites twisted and lunged like so many trapped porpoises. They were beautiful against [...]
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