Pizza and barbecue in the countryside

When the weather is nice, Futomi and Sweden Hills are very nice and calming environments.

From time to time I get invited by my friends in Sweden Hills to come out for some barbecue or other activity. Since it is a bit outside Sapporo, I often do not have time (I work too much), but two days ago I had the chance to visit for some barbecue and pizza baking fun.

There were still some strawberries in the garden.

I arrived at around 12:30 or so, and they started a fire to put some lunch on the grill. We had different types of meat, sausages, pickles, barbecued tofu, and barbecued konnyaku to name a few things. My friends grow lots of stuff in their garden, and there were still some strawberries available. In the fall, there are many types of vegetables to have too.

In Japan, people barbecue all kinds of strange things. These are tofu (left) and konnyaku (right). 

A Polish friend and former colleague also showed up with his son. When they showed up, we all had some more food. After an hour or so of rest, we also started making pizzas. My Polish friend was there to make the perfect pizzas in the pizza oven our Japanese friends have built themselves. The oven is very nice, and we did manage to make some very nice pizzas.

You also barbecue onigiri (rice).

There were some cultural misunderstandings along the way too, though. For example along the lines of:
"Where is the basil and were is the oregano?"
"When I said 'bring anything you need for pizzas', that is the type of thing I meant."
"It never occurred to me that there could be a household with no oregano in the house."
But everything turned out well in the end, haha.

A fish sausage.

We made many pizzas, each made a slightly different way since experiment #1 had too much ash on the pizza after being in the oven, and #2 had stuck too the aluminium foil too much, and #3 was a bit too moist from too many fresh vegetables on it, etc. etc.

After the pizza experiments were over there was another hour or so of resting. Then it was time for dinner... We had another round of barbecue, with more meat, more sausages, and more of everything. So, not a great day for my diet, but a great day with lots of good food.

The first pizza, pre-oven

The first pizza, in oven

The first pizza, post-oven