June is the month of "Ice"
We are halfway through this year.
This month June is an important milestone for summer.
As you know, Japanese people, especially Kyoto people think the seasonal milestone as an important event.
June has been thought as the month of "Ice".
Since 9th century, the ritual "Himuro no Sechie" to survive hot summer season was held in the Imperial Palace.
Emperor and aristocrats ate some piece of ice together.
"Himuro" is a traditional ice chamber to conserve the ice which people took in the winter. "Sechie" means the seasonal ritual.
*This image is the example of "Himuro" Japanese traditional ice chamber.
As the ice was so precious, people often offered it to the Imperial Palace, Shogun family to show their loyalty.
This is why noble people held their ice chamber to conserve the ice.
On the other hand, a sweet called "Minaduki" was becoming popular among ordinary people, which is one of the representative Kyoto's traditional sweets and is loved by people even now.
The triangle shape of "Minaduki" takes after the shape of a pice of ice.
The ice is too precious for ordinary people, they prepare the sweet which has the shap of ice, and it might have given them the "cool appearance". It is made from the mixed pwder of cake flour and rice flour and gives us more elastic texture than ordinay rice cake we eat in the New year.
The red beans paste on the triangle ice shaped base means talisman; the dark red color and kinds of beans are feard by grief, demon and evil spirits, we eat that for beat the heat of summer.
If you don't like the heat of summer, please try to eat kinds of beans to beat the evil of heat!
■Edo kiriko glass should be good for iced green tea!
Look at this !
This image of INEIRAISAN might give you the urge to come to Japan...
(If you are interested in INEIRAISAN, please click here, the word of Tanigaki Junichiro)
Today, I prepared iced brewed Japanese tea to eat Minaduki" ice shaped sweet with red beans paste".
Easy! to prepare iced brewed green tea.
1)Put the three teaspoon of tea leaves into the pot directly.
2)Put some piece of ice as follows and hold it for 5 to 10minutes.
3) When ices begin to melt, please pour to glass or cup.
(The quantity of tea is a little, but you can enjoy "umami" wish small quantity of extracts of tea leaves.
The taste of iced brew green tea contains "umami", delicious flavor of unique taste from amino acid.
You might feel relax and happy with Japanese green tea.
Furthermore, Japanese green tea contains a lot of nutritional ingredients; Vitamin C, catkin, and amino acid.
It is said that the catkin is useful to raise immunity system, it would be good to survive the heat of summer.
If you are interested in, please try "iced Japanese green tea " with "Edo kiriko glasses".
If you are interested in Edo kiriko and Japanese green tea, please see our collection from following words
Thank you for reading to the end.