Tag: soba

Oh no! The pantry is empty!!!

Welcome September!!! Honestly, I don’t remember there was a month of August this year… and September starts in quite a gloomy mood… bye bye summer vegetables and welcome autumn!!! With the first butternut squash in and no more korinki… rain and chilly wind.

But while when I open my fridge it is, somehow, always easy to think about something to cook… my pantry recently has been rather empty. I was so much waiting for the new rice to arrive, and for my favorite flour too, that I completely forgot that we were running out of everything: no more pasta, no more regular flour, very little olive oil… 🤭

Our bread are now whole wheat bread as this is the only flour I have left. And so our our pancakes and crepes! Not that I dislike it, but A. sometimes prefers a mix of flours.

And last night when it was time to cook dinner, after another long day of work, you know, when you are starving and you want something quickly ready so that you can sit back and have a nice break… the very last thing I had was a pack of dried soba… I was dreaming of pasta, but soba would be a good alternative, well the only alternative! Because there is no meal if there is no carb in our house!

The plating was made in a rush and the picture taking in a rush too, but the recipe ended up being perfectly balanced and taking advantage of the end of summer vegetables that are bell peppers and the nalta jute. So let me share my recipe with you, in case you are in a rush and have soba noodles nearby.

End of summer sautéed soba (2 servings)

  • 2 portions of soba noodles (dry, fresh, semi dry…)
  • 1 bell pepper (color of your choice)
  • 2 big handful of nalta jute
  • 1tsp of olive oil
  • 2tbs of soya sauce

Boil the soba as indicated. Rinse well after they are cooked and keep in water.

While the soba are boiling, wash and chop very thinly the bell pepper. In a large heated pan, add the oil, the bell pepper and cook at medium heat until it soften. Wash the nalta jute and add to the pan. Continue cooking at medium heat until soft too. Drain the soba and add to the pan. Stir well. Add the soya sauce and stop heating. stir again well and serve immediately.

If you manage well you should have your meal ready in 15min!

Fireflies season

The end of May in Ohara is a beautiful season. The greens on the hills change from fresh greens to rich ones and the paddies from the typical yellow green if very young rice plants to a beautiful shamrock green. It is also the beginning of the rainy season, of hydrangeas blooming and warmer days. At bight it is possible for a few weeks to see fireflies.

Japanese have something for fireflies 蛍 hotaru. I didn’t recall seeing fireflies often as a child, a rare few times in Lozere, but not much. And since we moved to Japan and went to see fireflies at Chizanso in Tokyo with our friend I. who always had the best info about things to do, I kind of understand the sweet magic and the kind of nostalgia they bring. Seeing fireflies at Chizanso was great, but it is an orchestrated event when they release fireflies in the garden. While the magic is there, the artificiality of it is hard to neglect. It’s like seeing lions in a zoo…

In Ohara we are blessed with rather clean streams of water and great nature (I can’t say it is everywhere when I see the palettes of glyphosate at the garden center…) and we can see fireflies in their ecosystem. We first saw some in our garden one Sunday night, and since then every year we go for a walk when the season comes. And for sure with a bit of patience and the habituation to darkness you can spot a little green light blinking. If we want to be lazy, we walk to the nearest stream in the paddies, and there we can see plenty.

A firefly in our garden

The fireflies season is the perfect transition between the end of spring and the beginning of the summer. It brings many greens in the plate broad beans and zucchini. Tomatoes from the green house that are ripe, sweet and juicy. It inspired me for the recipe of the simple plate on the top picture: soba, fava beans and zucchini in soya sauce and a peeled tomato, also with soya sauce. I love when the juice of the tomato mix in the soya sauce, eaten together with the cold soba it is divine.

Call it cooking… or not

But damn… this was a super delicious combination…

You remember me cooking in apron over my suit right after work? Well I was preparing dinner with the leftover veggies: kabocha and tomatoes. I also picked some fresh parsley in the garden and was thinking about what to do with them when the crave for soba noodles just came. All was decided… And that’s how this recipe of kabocha soba was born. It was so delicious that I really need to share it with you! Moreover because it’s been a while I haven’t shared a proper recipe!!

Kabocha-soba (for two regular servings)

– 125-150g of dry soba noodles (I use 100% buckwheat flour noodles)

– 1/4 kabocha

– 1 large very ripe tomato (if not the season anymore where you are use a tomato preserve without any seasoning)

– a few sprigs of fresh parsley

– 1tsp of soya sauce

– a bit of olive oil

While the water to cook the soba is heated, wash and cut in small cubes (5-10mm) the kabocha. Wash the tomato and dice. In a pan grease with a bit of olive oil, start cooking the vegetables. Add 1/4 cup of water if the tomato is not juicy enough. Cook under cover until the kabocha is soft but not too much. Add the chopped parsley and stop cooking but keep warm. The sauce shouldn’t be liquid or juicy. Just moistened a bit.

Cook the soba as detailed on the package. Serve in bowls. Top with the vegetables, add the soya sauce. Eat immediately and enjoy the perfect balance between the rustic soba flavor, the freshness of the parsley, the sweetness of the tomato and the creaminess of the kabocha, enhanced by the salty taste of the soya sauce!

Fava beans and wakame

I’m a great great fam of greens such as asparagus, green peas, green beans, snap peas eda mame and fava beans. I could eat them all the time! Unfortunately the season for each is rather short but luckily they follow each other and overlap a bit so from March to August there are always some nice greens to eat!!!

Now is the season for fava beans and green peas and I cook them quite often. A classic Japanese preparation of fava beans in Shojin cuisine is with wakame, and I really like the association of the melting soft bean with the more slimy and crunchy seaweed. In the books normal recipe the fava beans and the wakame are simmered with soya sauce and sake. I chose a lighter version in taste and I prepared them as a sauce for soba noodles and added also some green peas. It’s almost a classic for me since I often cook something similar at that season! Here is my recipe:

Fava bean and wakame soba

– a handful of fava beans

– a handful of green peas

– a bit of wakame (I used new wakame)

– soba noodles

– olive oil and salt (or soya sauce)

Shell the peas and the beans. Peel the beans (I realized recently that it is no need to blanch the beans to peel them, raw they are easy to peel too). Boil water in a small pan to blanch them. Add the wakame cut in small pieces and then drain and reserve. In a large pan boil water for the soba. Cook as instructed. Then rinse in fresh water and drain very well. In a bowl put the soba, pour some olive oil, add salt or soya sauce, then the vegetables. Stir gently and serve.

Soba salad

I’ve been so busy at work running from one place to an other and with some tension when our robot was making its debut on stage, and with the moving that I barely cooked and even barely thought about writing a post to share with you a delicious recipe. .. for which I must apologize!

But as little as I cooked I still found some very nice combinations for a simple Japanese meal that can be prepared everywhere else than Japan since the ingredients are easy to find. What you need is a pack of dry soba noodles (I use only 100% buckwheat flour noodles, but it’s up to you), some green beans, a few fresh okras, some spinaches or mulukhiyah, a piece of fresh cod fish, soya sauce, 1 kabosu or 1 lime. That’s it! Blanche the spinach, the okra, the green beans and bath them in very cold water. Grill the cod in a slightly greased frypan. Boil the soba and bath them in cold water. Squeeze the kabosu or lime, add the same volume of soya sauce. In a bowl add the soba well drained, dry with a cooking cloth the vegetables, cut them and add to the soba. Top with the cod that should crumble. Finish with some dressing. Enjoy! 

Miso-lemon dressing

Recently it has been quite difficult to find gnocchi in our usual grocery stores, and gnocchi were our staples for late Friday dinners when we arrived in the country. So I have had to find a replacement. Today I tried soba (buckwheat noodles) that I prepared with plenty of greens and I decided to serve them not with some regular sauce made from soya sauce such as tsuyu, but rather a white miso base. And since I had some fresh lemon I also used it. The redult was even better than I expected. The sweet white miso and the lemon are a super match. The lemon taste is very present, cancelling the sweetness of the miso and the miso softening the bitterness of the lemon. So here is my recipe for 2 people.

– 200g of soba noodles, I use 100% buckwheat flour noodles

– 4 tsp of white miso

– 1/4 of lemon  

– 1 tsp of soya sauce

– brocoli, brocoli sprouts, green beans, baby spinach… asparagus, green peas, horse beans… are all good too

Boil a large amount of water to cook the soba. In the meantime in a heated pan slightly oiled cook the washed vegetables. The much remsin crispy, so don’t over cook them. In a bowl mix together the miso, the lemon juice, the soya sauce.  Serve ghe noodles in a large bowl, add the miso dressing and stir well, add the vegetables. Eat right away and have a beautiful weekend. Isumi is under the rain, and work for the museum exhibition is what I have to do today!

An other dinner at home

What to cook for your friends visiting Japan when you are back from work past 21:00 and everyone is starving? A soba salad with spring veggies of course!!! Spring veggies: asparagus, snap peas, green peas, are very easy to prepare and require very little cooking, just blanching them for 2min. Soba are also quick to cook, so in 15min I can have a dinner plate ready for 4 people. To the spring veggies I’ve added some cucumbers and a bit of brocoli sprout, as for the dressing, I mixed a bit of soy sauce with vegetal oil and just add a bit to prevent the soba for getting too sticky. You can also top the plate with some Japanese salmon, shredded nori…

So what did I get for dinner this week?

Refraining myself from cooking and letting my husband take over I feared that my dinners would invariably be pasta-steak. Hum… Not really my cup of tea… But hopefully with a fridge full of delicious veggies I got plenty of nice things and he cheated once by taking me out. Probably the most elaborated dinner was this soba one-plate with sautéed zucchini and sweet pepper, green beans and tomato, just seasonned with soy sauce. Thanks darling for this week! 

Week end lunch

Funny because I don’t often cook soba on week days, but on week end I realized we eat some quite often!  I love to cook them in a simple manner, neither in soup nor cold with tsuyu, but rather just boiled with a few drops of soya sauce, accompanied with some vegetables and often meat balls. This time it’s simply Japanese pickles (carrot, cucumbee, turnip), and the meat balls are just pork with garden parsley, salt and pepper.

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