I Needed Something Refreshing for Lunch Today - Somen Noodles -

Somen Noodles Well, I was quite busy for the past couple of days, shooting photos at the dance festival and posting them to another blog of mine. To tell you the truth, on August 10th and 11th, which were the main festival days, I didn’t eat decent supper because I kept moving from one dance venue to another all afternoon and evening, then went straight to work at night. On those two days, my supper was either one pack of takoyaki (octopus balls) or two sticks of hashimaki (Japanese thin vegetable pancakes wrapped around chopsticks). And on the 13th and 14th, I spent all my time in front of my laptop except when I was at work, editing my photos and changing the template of my scribble blog until my brain boiled. To prevent myself from starvation, I made a big pot of Japanese-style curry, and it was my lunch and dinner for those two days! If you are interested, the photos are here, though I haven't finished the write-up yet. Please do enlarge the close-ups of the female dancers. It took me a while to upload them in that size and with that quality, without making the post crazily heavy, but it was worth the effort, I guess. ;) Anyway, today I gave my brain and my stomach a break with cool, soothing summer dish for lunch. Somen is really easy to make if you have store-bought somen soup, but this time I used the soup I had made from scratch about five days ago and stored in the fridge. Many Japanese noodle soup recipes tell you to use kombu kelp and bonito flakes to make dashi stock, but I used dried shiitake mushrooms in addition. To me the shiitake mushroom flavor is “the must” for somen noodle soup. Usually I serve somen noodles in soup, but today I wanted to do it the way they do in those TV commercials, so I served a little thicker soup in another bowl to dip noodles in. But I poured the soup over the noodles at the end, because I figured that it was the best way to enjoy the toppings with the soup. :P Looks pretty refreshing? Categories: Japanese