Marine Day

Yesterday was a national holiday in Japan, Marine Day or Ocean Day.  There is a little article about it on Wikipedia    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Day
I always thought the idea for the national holiday was to make people take a day off.  Japanese are real workaholics and won't take a vacation unless they have to.  The younger generation of Japanese are more laid back but the older Japanese seem to have no other interest other than work.
We stayed home.  I thought about going somewhere but most places near here were recovering from the awful storms of last week.  Some places got hit really bad plus there is now a typhoon (number 7 of the season) heading this way.  I think we will spared the worst of it, looks like it will stay over the sea but probably a load of rain....again.  I don't mind the rain, it cools things down and the plants get watered but having a load of laundry that won't dry drives me crazy.  My washing machine has a dryer function on it but if I use it too much my electric bill sky rockets (and I would much rather run the air conditioner!).  Also the rain has been accompanied by terrible thunder storms.  Last Friday we had a thunder storm that lasted all day.   So not fun.

I'm still trying out some new recipes.  Last week I made chicken with ginger, Worcestershire sauce and sake.Nice change from the usual soya taste.

This was really easy to do.  Pan fry the chicken, remove from the pan, fry sliced ginger, add Worcestershire sauce and sake, add the chicken and cook until the liquid has evaporated. 
I also made chocolate pudding, very yummy.  The recipe is from this web page   http://norecipes.com/
Some of the recipes on there look really yummy and simple.  And when the temperature is in the mid 30C's simple is best.

Our garden is really taking off, thanks to all the rain.  Our green curtain is covering most of the windows and we even have some Goya to harvest.



Something else growing, not sure what...pumpkin??

 

The green curtain





These are lovely flowers that just appeared

This is the last week of school before the summer holidays start.  I have a lot to do as I would love to get the house clean and organised before having everybody at home for the next 6 weeks.  It is easier to keep some kind of order that way.  But it is hot, it is only 9am and I'm already too hot.