project M

Its been a busy time so I have a few things to post. First is "project M." I have been corresponding with my friend Tomio Imaru in Japan and he sent me some lovely Japanese bowls. I am always interested in how designs of bowls develop along with the food they are used for, Tomio told me the bowls are traditionaly used for miso soup and kindly sent me the ingredients and recipe. So last week we had a real cultural exchange cooking and eating our miso soup, here are some pictures.

The raw ingredients, 2 types of dried seaweed, dried fish flake, tofu and miso paste.

Thankfully the instructions were excellent.

My favourite bit was putting a few teaspoons of wakame dried seaweed into a bowl..it looked a little like tea leaves.

Add some water...and...

And in a few seconds you have this.


Adding the miso paste

beginning to smell good

Serving out into a porringer


And eating Japanese style.


Thank you Tomio and Junko. We enjoyed it a lot.


For me in many ways it was quite a medieval experience. In medieval England everyone ate and drank from wooden bowls and it was clearly proper table manners to drink from the bowl, we see it even in high class images. The Japanese bowls also are quite similar in form to medieval mazer bowls.