Yesterday after talking to my parents the phone immediately rang again inviting me to an event which I could have sworn was planned for the next day (today, not Saturday). In any event, I was told to be be ready in exactly an hour by the Kobayashi's and then escorted to a remote park in a hilly area. The event was of great interest to me, focusing on mountain vegetables (Sansai), which are plentiful around Shikaoi this time of year. Sadly the weather was uncooperative, ranging from complete downpour to faint misting. The original plan of picking vegetables ourselves was scraped in favor of just eating under the protection of long hut made for Yaki niku barbecue (because we had a lot of school kids - my students - in the group). A group of adults had graciously gone earlier and collected the vegetables we would use. With the arrival of Spring comes one of my favorite Japanese foods, Sansai ("san" meaning mountain and "sai" sort for vegetables). These are early vegetables - the first green of the season really - and are picked when they are still very young. They don't look like your average corn or broccoli. Being young plants they are packed with all the nutrients they will need to grow; add to this the soft edible meat owing to their early harvesting and you have one of my favorite foods. Anything with sansai is good but my favorite method is tempura with just a touch of sea salt. I have made sure to include a picture of its production. The grilling was no less tempting with yakisoba, flavorful BBQ'd lamb, and grilled wild mushrooms and onions (ainu negi). Japanese cuisine at its finest and the perfect excuse to skip my run at short notice. The one awkward picture of Mitagaku-san (very nice man that organized everything) explaining the different wild plants we were going to eat was due to me holding one edge of the paper and taking the picture at the same time and a spider crawling near my hand.
I want to remind all my readers that all small thumbnails to the left side can be enlarged by clicking on them.
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