Simmered Kanpyo Gourd Kanpyo no nikata

They may look like the shoelaces of a sneaker, as some of my students have remarked, but the long dried thin strips of kanpyo come from a large round gourd called fukube. The vegetable grows to an average weight of 12 pounds. After the harvest during the hot and humid summer in Japan, a machine peels the skin of the gourd and cuts its flesh into 1½-inch-wide strips. The strips are then bathed in strong sunlight for two days, which produces a concentrated unique flavor with a sweet acidic sm