so this article is all about one of my favorite meals out here in japan: soba. i LOVE soba sooooo much (not as much as udon, though). it's buckwheat noodles and is really good for the skin and has a lot of vitamins. last week we got the awesome fortune of making soba! (yeah, another rather late post. sorry. finals)we were taken to gifu (a prefecture that's rather far away) and the ladies there spoke NO english, but they were so kind and patient with us and told us that no matter what, because we're there and we're doing what so many japanese don't even do, we're already awesome.
yeah right. i was at a table with three other perfectionists aside from me. haha!
so we go in and the room has many tables with big wooden bowls on top with a giant rolling pin (i mean, almost longer than me giant) sitting under it. three much smaller bowls were on the top filled with flour, buckwheat flour, and bread flour. i shall now show the steps with the pictures :3
so here we have the bowl of the three stuff to mix it.because i mixed it, i didn't get a picture of me actually mixing it or what it looked like while in the bowl, but it was REALLY thick and hard to mix once it got the hot water in. we have to mix the two in the bowl together, pour 100cm of hot water in, put more of the mixture on it, pour more hot water in, and mix until "it's the thickness of an earlobe". the little on the right is just flour to powder the table for a later step
here's the mixture just before we pour in the water. once it was thick enough, we got to throw it all one at a time into the bowl REALLY hard. that was the part i had the most fun at :)
rolling out the "dough". so that rolling pin is different (as you can see). you spread your hands across it to keep it rolling, that way there's even pressure on it. when i did it, i didn't do it correctly and it kind of went...odd. needless to say, once i did it, i didn't do it again. this step literally took up most of our time... UGH
once it's 1cm thick, we fold it over on top of itself and use this SUPER sharp knife to cut up the dough. the thinner, the better. it was tedious, so i went and washed while it the others cut it up
here they are after. that little piece after wards is the part i messed up on and fell off. but that's a lot of noodles :)おいしそう！
(looks good!)
while waiting, i had tea! :)see the little blue bowls in the background? we poured special sauce into them and would dump green onions and the soba noodles in there and eat them. was SO good. i tried it without the sauce and it tasted so...gross... yuck. with the sauce, is soooo good!
the end result! IT WAS REALLY GOOD! and because they were so thin and long, we were told we did a GREAT job and that even most japanese people when first starting out don't do that well. i was so happy.sorry for the late update. as always, check my facebook and to my friends/family back home, please remember when commenting not to write my real name.
to wrap things up, i will include my lovely engrish on clothing special:
the other day, i saw a boy wearing an awfully nice attire, but then when i saw his pants (i was behind him), i saw he was not only wearing sweat pants (a rare sight in japan during the day), but that there were golden angel wings going down from his butt to the back of his calf. pretty, right? couldn't help but look at the butt and then i noticed there was writing right at the top of his butt. it read:
ABSOLUTE EXPLOSION
light a match, boy
STAY WARM!
~星子☆
