Kaya Nuts (Patreon)

Just learned this...

The Kaya is an evergreen coniferous tree that has long been loved for its hard beautiful wood and delicious nuts. It's sacred, too. 

The wood is pale yellow (or rarely sometimes red) and glossy with gorgeous grain. It has a nice sweet, citrus aroma and is heavy, hard, resistant to humidity and decay and ages beautifully. 

These days, it's used to make only the best go and shogi boards or tables, prized for its silky feel and the sound made when putting game pieces down. It's also traditionally been use to carve Buddhist statues.

The below table has a price tag of 189,000 yen, nearly $2,000. 

The wood used to be used to make bathtubs and even boats, but not anymore. The trees are quite rare now and I hope being preserved. Not used for go tables and such.

The kaya tree also has seeds sometimes called the Japanese almond. You have to soak them for a few days to remove the bitterness before cooking, but they're said to have a wonderful aroma when roasted. It's also said your life is lengthened if you eat some. They used to be part of New Year's dishes because they were considered so lucky. 

There were some folk medicines that made concoctions with them to treat intestinal parasites and other such nasty things. Burning limbs from the tree kept insects away, by the way. 

Overall, the kaya nuts were thought to be so good at purifying that they could cleanse the impurities a samurai took on during battle. After they returned from a bloody (yet victorious) fight, they were served kaya nuts alongside chestnuts (kachiguri...kachi/勝ち means to win) as a cleansing ritual.

In sumo, even today, kaya nuts are buried inside the sumo wrestling ring (dohyo) as it's being made along with rice, salt, dried squid , kelp and chestnuts to calm the sacred fighting space.

Oh, in Yamanashi Prefecture, the seeds are used to make a candy called kaya ame. Yum! 

So, the reason I went on this little kaya seed jaunt is because I found a bag I bought when I visited Mt Shigi in Nara several years ago. I can't remember why I bought them.

But I evidently didn't realize I could have eaten them. I'm guessing it's a couple years too late for that now. But I did put them in a little bowl with my other treasured friends. They don't mind. 

Also...

Hey! Would you like me to post more here? I don't mind at all. I'm always afraid I'd be bothering people. I don't know why. But I could pick like the same day every week for a blog post about something or other, then have the recipes and sounds, etc. as extra on random days. Summer festival is coming up and am definitely going to record that.So, if I wouldn't be spamming your inboxes with notifications, I'll start doing a Sunday night blog post kinda thing. I kind of think it would be fun and get me in a good routine. Ages ago, back in the early days of blogger I used to do that for years. I kind of liked being on the look out all week for something to blog about, then writing it up Sun night.  

What do you think? Actually, the more I think about it, the more fun it sounds. XO, 

terrie