Partial excerpts of text from KURASUKOTO
Original text: Mikinaoko
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Colorful soups, salads and baked goods topped with jewel-like pulp.
Each dish is so delicious and beautiful that you can't help but feel happy even after the feast.
In Adansonia, there is a "measure" that they have spun out over time.
"All you need is enough money to live on.
"Be a child's best friend,
I've decided that I'd quit the store if I was too busy with my work to tear my family apart.
The couple's unique values come out of their mouths one after another.
Their sense of style, the secret to creating breathtaking food, and the way they deal with their families...
Wanting to know more about any of them, I went to Itoshima in autumn.The owner, Tatsuya Maeda and his wife, Yukari, serve up creative dishes and sweets while taking care of the ingredients produced on Itoshima.
Measure of food
To create while leaning on the rhythms of nature and life.
The air was getting chilly. It's the entrance of autumn when the sun across the street gives us a cheerful warmth. You can't help but take a deep breath when you see the golden ears of rice that hang down the sides of the river and the majestic mountains. The train running through the magnificent scenery is like a miniature. It felt like a bit of an excursion before heading to "Adansonia" in Itoshima. As we drove on, relying on the navigation system, we found a small house. The vermilion tiled roof with blue tiles in places is a delight. In front of us, the bright blue sea, which is even better than the color of the sky, sparkles.
Kneading pasta is one of Tatsuya's daily tasks. The pastry board wobbles when you apply force from above to the rounded fabric. Stretching, cutting, and working silently, they look like children who have lost themselves in a game of clay.
Measure of material
Ingenuity and ideas that bring out the charm of the material.
Adansonia's cuisine is full of wondrous charm. From hors d'oeuvres to desserts, the restaurant has a dignified yet simple atmosphere. However, it is the chef's skill as a chef that supports the stable and authentic appearance of the restaurant.
Tatsuya says he once trained at an orthodox French restaurant in Tokyo. From the way vegetables are cut, to the way ingredients are cooked, to the concentration that goes into making a dish... The lessons he learned there were certainly the foundation upon which Adansonia's cooking was built, and he says he still cherishes them today.
In terms of technique, of course, the chef says every day of the week, "Don't waste your food! This could still work!" He said. Don't leave even a single grain of rice on the pot for Makanai. The shells are eaten in pot-au-feu or curry after the soup is removed. If you freeze egg whites left over from making sweets, they will foam easily, and if you cut off the leftover bread, you can process it again for dessert. Most of the materials were secondary or tertiary processed. The food had a sophisticated atmosphere, like antique clothes, and it was cool.
Colorful vegetables served with carrots pilaf. Tatsuya is now addicted to Russian preserved foods. Fermented with carrots, cucumbers and other vegetables of your choice, it makes a great pickle. It's easy to use for cooking and the color is beautiful. "Whenever there are scraps of vegetables, I put them in this jar," he says, adding that this is another way to avoid wasting food.
Measure of confectionery
"Making" is the spice that makes life more enjoyable.
Yukari's sweets making is lighthearted. It's handy and there's no hesitation in making it. The emerald green shine muscat cake was topped one after another with a lot of white chocolate and decorated with olive leaves as an accent.
The finished product climbs onto the cake stand and if you look closely, you'll notice a slight difference in expression. The flesh and the orientation of the leaves are subtly different. I'm changing the direction just a little bit so we don't have the same child (candy), and if I had 100, I'd make 100 different things! and seems to be having fun. I made chocolate (brown) and mascarpone (white) terrines, respectively, and arranged them in a targeted way, or made a package with sea shells from the sea in front of the shop and dried flowers from the plants in the garden. These are photogenic, adorable, attractive sweets. Yukari-san is able to make people excited through her sweets.
I'm self-taught when it comes to making sweets. If I had to say, I'd say it was my father's influence. When I was young, my father ran a buckwheat noodle shop. There was always buckwheat in the house, and I lived around buckwheat. I remember how I was embarrassed to eat buckwheat tea and the lunch boxes on the excursions had buckwheat in them. Therefore, buckwheat flour is always familiar to me. When I was in elementary school, I used to bake cookies and cakes instead of flour, and since they would get crumbly or burnt, I would think of formulas and research how to make them into pretty shapes!
Yukari says that in her childhood, she spent her days experimenting and making things by hand. She would dye plants if she wanted a cute pink handkerchief that her friends had, and she would make beet boards and rafts for summer water play. On one occasion, when she came home from school, her father told her to pick some edible wildflowers, and the wildflowers she picked were dried and mixed with salt... She experimented with herbal salts.
Measure of family
To be a child's best friend.
I don't feel like I'm a parent to my children, and I feel like my family is my friends. Yukari came aboard the boat I was rowing, and the children came aboard... I feel like I'm traveling while everyone is talking and laughing. Traveling should be fun, right?
If the purpose of the work becomes "just money", we are forced to stay open longer. He said he would be financially satisfied if he worked twice as much as he does now, but he wanted to value something more important than that.
