Hello there again readers! I apologize for this blog post coming rather late, I've been rather busy this past week and it'll probably stay fairly busy for a while. As such, I'd like to apologize in advance for any future delays in posts. Also, happy Valentine's Day (or, for people like myself, Single's Awareness Day!)!
With all that out of the way, today we're going to delve into foreign lands a bit. Today's entry is something that my mom vaguely described to me once when we were grocery shopping at the wonderful little Koyama Shoten (in Dublin on Sawmill, for those local readers). She said my dad (the Japanese of my two parents) used to make a funky summer dish that was really fast, really simple, and really good. Clearly, the weather would have us believe it's not summer, but if you're like me and you keep your room at around 74F with a space heater (my birds seem to be happier at this temperature), it can always be summer.
The things you'll actually need:
That said, let's get this started!
The first thing you need to do, as with most noodles, is get some water to a boil. For one clump of somen, I believe they say six cups is good, because you need to be able to submerge the whole thing fast, you'll see why later. While your water gets up to a boil, take your three veggies (you could experiment with more) and chop them into roughly quarter-discs (see right). Put them all in a bowl...and then you basically wait for the water to finish getting to a boil. No big deal. Eventually it'll get there, and then you want to put the noodles in there and submerge them as fast as you can without breaking them. Then you want to keep the noodles separated with your chopsticks as best as you can for about two and a half minutes. Once it's been that long, dump them into a strainer and rinse those bitches with cold water. From there, you can just add to your veggies, put in a healthy amount of soy sauce, stir 'em up a bit, put in a few pieces of ginger if you like, and then refrigerate it for about half an hour. From there you can keep it refrigerated, preferably covered, for a day or two (second time I tried making this I made some to give to a friend, gave it to her on day three...first and only time I've had a complaint about my cooking, stuff had started fermenting. I still feel bad about that SORRY TIFFANY).
With all that out of the way, today we're going to delve into foreign lands a bit. Today's entry is something that my mom vaguely described to me once when we were grocery shopping at the wonderful little Koyama Shoten (in Dublin on Sawmill, for those local readers). She said my dad (the Japanese of my two parents) used to make a funky summer dish that was really fast, really simple, and really good. Clearly, the weather would have us believe it's not summer, but if you're like me and you keep your room at around 74F with a space heater (my birds seem to be happier at this temperature), it can always be summer.
The things you'll actually need:
- Tomato (just one is fine)
- Cucumber (again, one is fine - I actually only used half)
- Green onion (unpictured)
- Soy sauce (regular variety soy sauce is fine, but I prefer light soy sauce for this)
- Somen (you can probably only find this in a Japanese/Asian market, in the noodles section)
- A pair of chopsticks
The other things are just heavily recommended items to also get if you venture to an Asian market, because damn. The two little containers next to the curry box are rice seasoning, which is fantastic and fairly cheap for how long it lasts. Curry blocks are also excellent. Rice, well, duh. The little sealed can contains azuki (Japanese red bean), an excellent ingredient for desserts and smoothies! You can seriously put it in just about any smoothie (pre-blending, of course) and it'll be the most interesting deliciousness you'll ever get from a smoothie, in good ways. I also highly recommend getting ginger, which I also use for this entry even though it's not necessary, because it's delicious and good for sinuses. Wasabi powder recommended if you ever want to try making your own sushi (which is balls hard, I would just like to throw out there).
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| GREENSSS? WHAT'S GREENS, PRECIOUSSSS? |
That's pretty much it! Quick, easy, and delicious!
With that, a couple of other announcements:
First, I kindly ask that if you've read this far, you read the post previous to this one, or at least this summarized take-away from it: please, PLEEEEASE criticize me! I know I'm not perfect and I can't please everyone, but I can't even try to do that if no one tells me what they don't like about what I'm doing here!
Second, if you didn't respond to my Facebook post about it, please let me know if you would be interested in a blog about learning how to program, as I'm considering doing one as a side project in my extra spare time, which I may or may not have until the end of this quarter. It won't take priority over this blog, so no worries on that front.
Okay, I think that's it for today. Oh, and my birthday's in two days. I accept cash, credit, Steam games and Japanese foil Magic cards. I'm just kidding. But seriously Japanese foils.
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