Tag Archives: Food

Nishin Soba

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Nishin Soba is a typical dish from Kyoto, which consists of a soba noodle soup with sweet marinated dried herring added. As Kyoto is far from the seaside, it was hard to bring in fresh seafood from the coast, so dried herring established itself as one of the easier to transport fishes and became one of the important sources of proteine in the past.

As you can guess from this description, I ate this dish when I was in Kyoto in December, but I still wanted to put it up here, because it remained in my head. The taste of sweet herring together with a traditional Japanese soup flavour was completely new to me in that situation and at first I was a bit at a loss as to how I should judge it. But I grew to like the taste very fast and appreciate its difference to the other dishes I’ve eaten in Japan and also back in Europe (Yannik didn’t, btw. :P ). For me, the subtle sweetness did fit very well with the broth and made for a well rounded meal together with the soba.

If you want to try it yourself, the following recipe might be helpful. I found it under this link and translated it for you (hopefully without mistakes :D ). Enjoy your cooking!

http://www.rakuten.ne.jp/gold/suginoki/c0312.html

You will need (for 4 persons):

  • 400g soba noodles
  • 1 sweetly cooked herring (you can either buy it or prepare it this way(scroll down))
  • 1 leek
  • 4 sheets of dried laver / seaweed
  • 7 cups of dashi broth
  • 120ml of mirin (sweet soy sauce)
  • 120ml of soy sauce

Preparation:

  1. Mix the dashi broth, mirin and soy sauce in a pot and let it boil up to prepare the soup.
  2. Boil the soba in plenty of water until they are boiled thoroughly. Pour the water and put the soba in 4 bowls. Add the soup to each bowl.
  3. Add the finely cut leek, the dried laver and the herring on top. Enjoy your meal! :)

Matcha Parfait

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Again it’s time for a small break from the sightseeing articles and instead a good moment for a food-related post. After all, who doesn’t like tasty food, especially if it’s sweet and nice-looking :D

Therefor behold the mighty fine dessert that is Matcha Parfait (see below). Now first of all, matcha is powdered green tea and is also the tea that’s used in tea ceremonies. It’s definitely not cheap, but the taste is really unique and i can only recommend to try it, if you have the chance. I guess, you might even find it in asia shops in Europe, although i don’t know about the quality in that case.

But back to the parfait. When you have something as nice as matcha, it would be a waste to only make tea with it, so there are various products featuring the matcha taste, for example icecream, desserts or sauces. The picture below shows a parfait of matcha cream, cookie, matcha icecream, yoghurt icecream, mochi and fresh fruits – a very delicious combination! It might have cost me around 1200 Yen, but it was definitely worth it :D

International Cooking Class

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It’s already a bit late, but I still wanted to share a few pictures from the International Cooking Class in Higashi Hiroshima. It’s beeing held two times every month with different people from different countries introducing dishes from their homecountry to the participants. In December a friend and I took the chance to teach some German dishes, which were appropriate for the wintertime  and really had a blast with all these nice Japanese women, who were really eager to learn a lot about our cooking and Germany. So please follow the link below for some pictures and also contact me for the recipes if you’re interested :)

Photo Album

Omu-Rice

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Omu-Rice (オムライス) is basically a rice dish, in which the rice is wrapped in an egg omelette with some sauce on top. While the specific sauce and the preparation of the rice may vary, one of the most common variants includes some vegetables in the rice, while the sauce itself is dark and a bit bitter as well as sweet. But that’s just the baseline and there are restaurants that specialise on preparing the various kinds of this dish in many places in Japan. And apart from the sauce (although Worcestersauce might be a good base) I think it’s pretty easy to prepare this dish yourself. It’s a simple but really tasty food in my opinion :)

Japanese Cuisine

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I still wanted to update the food section a little bit and starting with this article I have a few more in preparation to post over the next weeks. The pictures below were taken in the hotel where we stayed at our field trip to the nuclear power plant in Shimane prefecture (payed by the university, yay :D ). We stayed one night there and our reservation also included a dinner, which consisted of several servings of Japanese cuisine I would normally haven’t eaten (because of monetary reasons or because of taste). But as everything was payed for I decided to eat everything that would be served.

Below are the pictures of nearly everything we ate, but I sadly forgot to take one picture of the deep-fried food in between. Well, I guess I’ll have to go and eat that another day again to report ;)