A Fukuokan's Notes from Sapporo

We are at the height of rainy season. There already was a giant mudslide in Atami, Kanto region, a couple of days ago and a big rain is forecasted for the next couple of days here too. 

Humidity has always been above 60 percent and washings never dreed perfectly. It is by no means a pleasant season in this country (sorry for the Olympians who are forced to wear a mask in this condition) .

However, in terms of food, there is some solace to me, one of which is the arrival of new sweet potatoes. 

We have some pieces of baked sweet potato every single morning. Sometimes we have no other starches for breakfast.  

Last season we had to struggle a lot to find sweet potatoes of our kind, which should be fluffy, rather than pasty, and not so sweet. But the sweet potato market has been dominated by  soggy and overly sweet varieties for the past several years. 

To make things worse, it seemed more people wanted to eat sweet potatoes last season. So shelves for sweet potatoes of any kind became empty quite often and the prices were beyond  my sense of acceptable prices for sweet potatoes (I don't believe Japan became a "cheap" country as mentioned quite often recently).

In desperation to get acceptable ones, my husband has even tried Furusato Nozei (basically, a publicly organized donation scheme in which you donate some money to a local government and receive local delicacies or something representing the area in exchange for the donation) as well as JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives)'s B2C site-- with no  success (I personally feel the quality of things we can get through this kind of businesses have been deteriorating year by year).

Then, here finally come the new potatoes!

When it comes to the sweet potato, I think new potatoes are generally flakier and less sweet than one that have been stored for a long time. 

I hope our struggle cease for a while, hopefully until next season.