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I just earned a full days' salary for having a lunch party with nagashi soumen and homegrown homemade french fries, beautifully seasoned.
The prefix 'home', in this instance, denotes Favorite Backwater Middle School, the 14-student bastion of cheery thought and good cooking in the mountains where I spent my birthday and any number of other memorable occasions. I leave them with the ability to pronounce 'th', knowledge of proper procedure to create a pop-up Christmas card, awareness of an obscure American festival known as Mardi Gras, and a mix CD of TV themes, Queen, and Paul and Storm.
Nagashi soumen is when you have a really, really long piece of bamboo, split down the middle. And you prop one end of this half fairly high up on a table, and stick the other half in a sieve in the sink on the other side of the cooking classroom. With a bit of rubber hosing, you start up a steady stream of water down the makeshift canal, there, and then you take your giant bowl of slippery noodles and drop them, chopstickful by chopstickful, into the stream. Those consuming said noodles are waiting along the sides of the bamboo, chopstics at the ready to fish their lunch from running water. They dip it once in your little bowl of soy broth (with ginger and scallions to taste,) and slurp it down in time to catch the next mouthful tumbling downstream.
I had never done this before. It's really very fun. You need to be dextrous! Or else just stick your chopsticks in the running water to catch all the noodles, but that's considered cheating.
The prefix 'home', in this instance, denotes Favorite Backwater Middle School, the 14-student bastion of cheery thought and good cooking in the mountains where I spent my birthday and any number of other memorable occasions. I leave them with the ability to pronounce 'th', knowledge of proper procedure to create a pop-up Christmas card, awareness of an obscure American festival known as Mardi Gras, and a mix CD of TV themes, Queen, and Paul and Storm.
Nagashi soumen is when you have a really, really long piece of bamboo, split down the middle. And you prop one end of this half fairly high up on a table, and stick the other half in a sieve in the sink on the other side of the cooking classroom. With a bit of rubber hosing, you start up a steady stream of water down the makeshift canal, there, and then you take your giant bowl of slippery noodles and drop them, chopstickful by chopstickful, into the stream. Those consuming said noodles are waiting along the sides of the bamboo, chopstics at the ready to fish their lunch from running water. They dip it once in your little bowl of soy broth (with ginger and scallions to taste,) and slurp it down in time to catch the next mouthful tumbling downstream.
I had never done this before. It's really very fun. You need to be dextrous! Or else just stick your chopsticks in the running water to catch all the noodles, but that's considered cheating.
