Tororo soba

It’s a very simple Japanese dish. This fresh sauce, tororo, is made from this root vegetable : Nagaimo.

Grating the nagaimo in the traditional way in a suribashi (mortar). You peel a length of that long potato and you rub it against the line of the pottery. You get this slimy texture, and that’s how we like it as it’s very refreshing. I guess some people don’t appreciate, and this vegetable is not for them.

Sudachi lime juice. A little sea salt.

Okra.

Juwari soba (100% buckwheat noodles), boiled, refreshed in iced water.

Soba and sansho peppercorns

It’s the season of the lemony sansho peppercorns. Soba buckwheat noodles are also a popular Summer food. Even cooked. So here is a simple dish full of veggies.

soba compil’

About sansho

It’s simply pan-fried with onion, carrot, bell peppers, lettuce and flavored with soy sauce. The sansho brings the tone.

Served with ume pesto scallops.
The best part is what is stuck in the bottom of the pan :

The chrysanthemum and the soba. A bridge over the years…

This blog is pacifist, throw away the sword, fight with soba noodles. As every year, I’ve eaten these noodles to pass safely into the next year. You need some kind of rope to retain you in case you’d fall in that calendar gap…
Well that’s not as if I need a pretext to eat soba, it’s more that I won’t miss any.

More Japanese New Year traditions here…/a>

Well the chrysanthemum is the symbol of the Imperial family, thus of Japan… And it’s season food. You have seen some on sashimi plates probably. Leaves are called shungiku (Spring chrysanthemum) are available in this season to add to hot pots.

This type has particularly wide leaves.

They make so big discounts on fresh soba on the last day that I had enough for a decade. I could remake some in daylight for photos.

This year’s ingredients. There are often shrimps in New Year dishes.

The noodles are boiled apart. The shrimps and shungiku greens poached in tsuyu (dashi, mirin, soy sauce). Then add the colorful stuff on top :

Yummy !