Coral berry or 'Manryo'

In the gloom of winter, lies this plant called coral berry...

The Japanese have a more colorful name...
Manryo (万両), as in '10,000 Dollars'? 

The bright red berries certainly light up the dull of winter...
Other than that, they are a source of food for the birds...

Japanese plum aka 'ume'...

It snowed yesterday... 

Was chopping firewood when the snow came in... 

Took time off from wood-chopping to smell the flowers...

And in the midst of winter, it is but the Japanese plum or ume... 

This was taken in the early evening when the sun was still quite high...

Experimented with artificial lighting indoors with this shot...

Back to the snow... took this shot of the fields the next morning...

The snow had melted quite a bit...

We are lucky to have the privilege to enjoy such scenes a few times in a year...
(PS: Just came back from an overseas trip to Chiang Mai...)

Pumpkins, the butter scotch type...

I love pumpkins... both the eating and the growing...

For the last few years, I almost always have my lunch in the university cafeteria... 

And boiled pumpkin is always part of my selection for lunch...

The predominant nutrients in pumpkins are the lutein (which is supposedly good for the eyes) and both the alpha and beta carotene, the latter of which generates vitamin A in the body. (Source here)

The butter scotch pumpkin is quite new to me...

We first saw this pumpkin at the local farmers' market...

We liked the taste and decided to keep the seeds...

We last harvested about 4.9 kilograms of the pumpkin...

And we have been enjoying eating them, bit by bit...

This evening, my sweeto haato just wrapped a portion of one pumpkin, and placed it on top of our wood stove...

Wooh, it was really very delicious...

It does not have the chestnut-like taste as in some pumpkins...

Instead, it is very sweet, and has a 'creamy' texture, should I say?

My sweeto haato also tried making pumpkin cake...

Hmmm, just nice for my tea breaks...

And pumpkin soup... 

Thick, with a little milk, and spruced up with some parsley from the garden and black pepper...

To close this post, here is a picture of the over-cooked pumpkin in one of our cooking adventures with the wood stove... 

We experimented by putting two types of pumpkins (botchan and butter scotch), and two large onions into a dutch oven, and placing the dutch oven inside the wood stove as we retired for the night...

(Mr. H had wanted to see the outcome of this experiment.)

The onions and the botchan pumpkin had somewhat turned into charcoal... 

The butter scotch pumpkin was a little burnt, and I ate it... 

Looks like the heat was still too strong for cooking inside the wood stove...