A taste of Spring.

In typical fashion, I stopped by one of my favorite grocery stores on my way home from my last trip to Kamogawa.

I was set on bringing these babies home with me:

Some sort of strange leafy vegetable???

Yes that's right...once again, nanohana! The same lovely flowers from my previous post...except that they are only good before they flower.

Last year when I still lived in Kamogawa, I had the opportunity to go nanohana picking...and wound up coming home up with bags filled with this stuff. Not wanting to let supposedly edible good food go to waste, I did a lot of research on different ways to cook nanohana.

It's not so common to consume it this way, but if it's freshly picked, nanohana can be eaten raw and tastes kinda like broccoli! The most typical way is to boil it and season it with salt, soy sauce, etc. When you cook it, you have to be really careful though...cooking it brings out its slightly bitter taste, and if you overdo it you'll taste straight bitterness.

I am not a big fan of bitter things (thinking of bitter melon aka ゴウヤ), but after a bit of experimenting, I found the most wonderful way to eat nanohana!

The below photo is from last year, but I went out of my way to buy nanohana just so I could make it again this year:

Nanohana, scallop, and mushroom soup!

Pure genius, and it's so easy! It's not much more effort than throwing the ingredients into a pot of diluted tsuyu (yes, like the kind used for soba and udon noodles) and bringing it to boil.

This cold weather has me constantly wanting soup! Tomorrow I am planning to make more soup, this time with komatsuna (小松菜), hiratake mushrooms, ham, and soymilk!