Gazing at the moon

Today has been fine and dandy.

The weather here has been sunny all week but that good weather finally gave up on Wellington and it's been raining all of today. Well, drizzling. But that's fine with me. Saturday means sleeping in late, not doing much and talking to Ryan lots on skype. That is, when skype doesn't randomly cut out on me. The internet connection is really annoying here - I don't know when it's going to work and when it isn't!

I'm glad you're keen to try some of my recipes dad, I'm having a really fun time trying them all out actually. And I think the curry one has probably been my favourite one so far actually! I bought curry powder especially because I've seen it a bit in recipes.

Today I went simple and made myself some soba. Soba are Japanese buckwheat noodles. In Japan the three main noodles are ramen, soba and udon. Although there are some others such as somen, which is eaten cold in the summer. Anyway, my favourite is definitely soba in its simplest form - cold (hot too) with a simple dipping sauce. Normally when I've had it it came with some spring onion and grated daikon to mix in with the sauce. I didn't have daikon, but I did have spring onion, which made a nice addition.

Here's the recipe for the dipping sauce for four people:

200ml dashi stock
3Tbsb dark soy sauce
3Tbsp mirin

Then you just heat it until it comes to a boil and you can either cool it and have it with cold noodles, or leave it hot, it's up to you! This sauce wasn't quite the one I remember having in Japan, but I thought it was really tasty :) Oh, and just to clarify - you don't really put the noodles in a bowl and then the sauce over top. Usually they'd be served drained of the water they were cooked in on a bamboo mat (like the ones you use to roll sushi I guess) and then the sauce in a bowl on the side. As you eat, you dip the noodles in the sauce.

Yummy!