Ginko nuts

The first time I heard of a ginko tree was when I was a kid and we saw the fossilized leaves in the petrified forest museum in eastern Washington. I don't know why that was memorable but I was excited to see that the trees are alive, well and not fossilized in Japan!

The trees can grow to be huge. Our neighbor had a tree so big that when it turned bright yellow in the fall, we could identify our village from a nearby mountaintop by locating that pillar of foliage. While fairly indestructable, her tree was severely damaged by a typhoon and she cut it down. The city of Kumamoto planted hundreds of ginkos along the roads because they are so resiliant and look beautiful but they made a huge error: there is the female "fruit" producing tree and a male "cone" producing tree, the latter being preferable for landscaping. They misidentified the trees and now have hundreds of trees that drop stinky squishy little balls all over the sidewalks. It's hard to clean up because the fruits can cause a skin irritation similar to poison ivy rash and they smell bad.

The good news is that those little orange balls (not really a fruit but a fleshy nut covering) contain a hard nut that is a delicacy. Wouldn't you know it? Honestly, not a favorite food of mine but it's good to know that if we are ever starving, we can eat the nuts and I was just told how to prepare them.

Up at the shrine, an elderly gentleman explained that I could collect some of the fallen nuts (with gloves of course), soak them in water for seven days until "the water turns black and smells bad". (This is probably why most people buy these in a can.) Then I will need to remove the hard interior nuts from the rotten mush and cook them. Uncooked, they can be highly toxic. I need to confirm that next step.

There is something about traditional Japanese delicacies that always has you on edge: you can die from eating renkon lotus roots that have not been properly cooked; you can die from eating fugu blowfish that has not been properly prepared; you can die from eating raw nuts. Eating is risky business but so very exciting.