sakura, sakura, sakura (part 2)

You may or may not be sick of looking at all of these sakura (cherry blossoms), but bear with me, as I truly love this time of year. The weather has been quite cool over the past week, so I have been fortunate to be able to view LOTS of sakura. Apparently, the cool weather has kept the blooms from falling off the trees, which is just fine with me.

Here are some sakura that I found while walking to the gourmet supermarket. There is an area above our place called Sakuragaoka (literally cherry tree hill), this area has tons of trees, especially alongside the Ishizumi river. I ran into some seniors enjoying the blooms.

The nearby Asahigaoka neighborhood, which I posted about earlier was still in full bloom too.

At the gourmet supermarket, I was excited to find basil, which was grown in Okinawa--their climate is like Hawaii's, so for the most part of the year it is like summer there. Since I had a nice amount of basil in hand, I envisioned turning it into...pesto. So, I bought myself a baguette and made pesto this afternoon. If you have a food processor, making pesto is really easy and fast!

Another ingredient that I've been seeing in the markets are lemons. Since I found a nice one yesterday at the market, I made a lemon-oregano vinaigrette. I've made this several times last year and it is also very easy to make using a food processor.

Since I've used the lemon vinaigrette mostly for summery salads, I decided to try something a little different with the vinaigrette for dinner tonight, I used it to saute shrimp with. After cooking the shrimp at bit, I added a tablespoon of the vinaigrette at the end. Then poured the shrimp over steamed beans and asparagus. The perfect warm salad!

Hope your week is going well.