Also directed by Junichi Mori, starring Ai Hashimoto, and based on the manga of the same name by Daisuke Igarashi, the food movie; "Kobayashi Winter/Spring Episode" has a similarly high Douban rating of 9.0.
The movie tells the story of a Japanese girl, Ichiko, who returns to her hometown of Kobayashi (Kobayashi is a small village in the midst of villages in northeastern Japan). There, Ichiko spends her days doing her own farming, planting, gathering and harvesting, making her own food and enjoying it quietly by herself. Sometimes it is also shared with friends and neighbors. The story is told in Winter and Spring in the Little Forest.
In the winter story, the following seven dishes are told:
1 Tricolor Cake
Ichiko's mother used to make a tricolor cake when she entertained a rare guest (who Ichiko thought was her mother's past lover) at Christmas.
The cake was a pure white rectangle covered with thick buttercream, and when cut with a knife, the cuts were bright red and green, the representative colors of Christmas, with the red part added with sweet rice wine made from red rice, and the green part with spinach, and the two kinds of cake batter were poured into the same mold and baked.
Ichiko used black rice to make sweet rice wine, adding a little water to make it thick, because black rice is glutinous rice type, so the brew is very sweet. Although the brewed sweet rice wine is dark black, it turns a very pretty purple color when you add sugar, oil, wheat flour, and baking powder to make a cake batter.
Purple and yellow go well together, so make another yellow cake batter with steamed pumpkin.
Pour the black rice wine cake batter into the mold, not more than half the height of the mold. Pour in the pumpkin cake batter until the mold is about 8 minutes full; bake in the oven.
Immediately after baking, cool with the puffed tops facing down. This way, all surfaces are now smooth. Then punch the cake horizontally so that the color is also vertical.
Finally, decorate this cake with buttercream and this cake will be a purple, yellow and white cake.
2 Natto-flavored sticky rice balls
You start making natto three days ago by wrapping softly boiled soybeans in a straw bag and putting a straw inside so that it produces better sticky filaments.
Dig a hole in the snow, lay a mat, cover it with a layer of straw, and bury it in snow.
A lot of things are buried under the snow, including cabbage, green onions and spinach. White radishes and carrots are buried in the earth. Being buried under the snow keeps the temperature at a certain level, and you can use this to make natto as well.
Once the natto is ready, with sugar and soy sauce, pull the steaming hot, smooth and soft glutinous rice dough that you just beat into small balls, throw them in and mix them well.
One bite can eat a lot, so I want to keep so non-stop eating.
3 Frozen radishes and dried persimmons
Peel the skin off white radishes, cut them into long pieces, poke holes in them, put a string through them, and hang them outside to freeze at low temperatures, so that the dried frozen radishes can be kept for a year.
Here is mostly cooked before freezing, with raw radish can also be. If you don't have time, it doesn't take much time and tastes good.
Frozen radish is a must in boiled dishes. They are cooked with pickled herring soaked in rice broth. Frozen radish soaked in water is very flavorful and really tasty. Adding seasonal vegetables, wild greens and bamboo shoots are perfect.
In the fall, when persimmons are still hard, in order to make dried persimmons, pick them along with the branches, leave the tips, peel off the skin, tie the T-shaped tips with a string, and hang them under the eaves of the house. Occasionally, they were pinched with their hands so that they could be made into soft dried persimmons.
Dried persimmons are great straight up as a tea time snack. Cut into thin julienne and add to cold shredded radish, the sourness of the vinegar and the sweetness of the dried persimmons complement each other with a beautiful color and deliciousness.
4 homemade bento
Ichiko cooks by herself and grows her own vegetables, such as radishes.
Ichiko works at a supermarket and brings bento to a boy she knows (that boy eats alone just a sweet bread, even if it's a meal).Ichiko makes grilled onigiri (rice balls) by spreading miso on rice from her hometown.
Add baby carrots pickled on the spot, and mom's exclusive omelet, whose secret to a good omelet is adding honey. In winter, it's easy to put heat-resistant bricks over the fire to let the radiant heat seep out a little, and add a pan on top to heat up your home-made curry. Great for baking sweet potatoes, too.5 Red bean series
Stuffing red beans into sticky rice balls or dough tastes great.
Blend wheat flour, salt, baking powder, and water, and ferment for an hour. Put red beans in the dough and wrap it tightly.
If you steam it, it's a red bean bun.
The red beans are freshly picked and not yet hardened, so when you want to eat them, you just need to boil them a little.
It can also be used as an ingredient for cooking soup.
Mixed into the base of a muffin cake and baked together, gently broken open, fragrant.
Simmer half-cooked red beans straight away and eat them straight after chilling.
If you put the sugar in too early when you make the red bean filling, no matter how you cook it, the red beans won't cook. In fact, you have to wait until you can easily pinch the red beans with your fingers and then put sugar.
6 Pasta Series
Add wheat bran (bran is wheat husk, a byproduct of making flour) to the flour to make the dough.
To make the stock: remove the head and guts of the dried small fish, slice the dried shiitake mushrooms, carrots, white radish, burdock, and deep-fried tofu, pour water, cooking wine, and mirin in a pot, season with soy sauce and ginger juice, and adjust the heat to set the pot on the stove.
Spread the dough into a thin sheet, pull it into small pieces and drop it into the broth.
You can also cut the dough in three sections and roll it thin with a rolling pin and place it on a preheated iron griddle and the scones will expand.
7 Pickled fiddleheads
Pick the fiddleheads by gently running them up from the roots and gently picking them from the part that breaks the most, preferably the ones that haven't bloomed yet.
Direct consumption of fern first dusted with ashes, soaked in boiling water overnight, you can remove the bitter taste.
To pickle fiddleheads, cover them with a full layer of salt. To serve, rinse with water overnight to remove the salty flavor and then blanch and serve, topped with ginger teriyaki sauce for a refreshing taste.
It can also be made into a stew or used as a topping for miso soup.