Indeed, I am still crazy busy at work with this grant application, but hopefully it should be all done today. In the meantime we still need to sustain ourselves and the Japanese one-plate is on the menu again with an unexpected variation. Indeed, I prepared the green beans with miso and the pickled onions, but we have some fresh simmered small bamboo shoot on the plate now, that I didn’t prepare! 

There exist two types of bamboo shoots, the big one I’ve been cooking quite often because you can find them everywhere and the small one that are more let’s say “wild” and that one needs to pick in the forest. Picking bamboo shoot is a real fun sport, basically it’s hiking and them crawling in bamboo groves. We’ve had the chance to go bamboo shoots picking with our friends from Tsunan once and it was really awesome. Like wild mushrooms picking it takes some time to figure what to pick and to know the good spots. Unfortunately in Isumi we don’t know yet these spots and people keep them secret, like everywhere!! But one of the guy we met on the tennis court came to bring us some small bamboo shoot simmered with sesame oil. There is something here quite unique with Japanese, is that they love to offer us food they make and local products. I think it goes together with this tradition of food souvenir etc… I need to do some research about that! 

Anyway that’s how we ended with a perfect Japanese one-plate, with only fresh and delicious local products.