GREENS FIGS AND WHEAT SOBA

 

The combination is deliberate, but the enjoyment is individual. Coming back from my hike and swim in the valley, I have preconceived this menu on the road and luckily I had a mile to go on foot when hitchhiking worked again and got a faster ride home for this food! Folks, let's define "home" for a second here, especially those old-time followers of mine with keen eyes familiar with my food scene for the past couple of years and now thinking, Wait a minute: is this a new place by the author? It is. And officially I am blogging from a different backdrop - but it's all good (I have sadly moved from Mrs. Cole's aviary of a house with mountain and ocean views to a cottage not far away hidden under avocado and banana trees with tiny lanterns strewn in branches). Solo for a few years now and luckily only have moved twice on the island, transitionary is my attempt at defining the embodiment of my home, I am my home, and where I go welcomed and loved, I "unpack" my sense of belonging, what I take with me will not change, my heart is permanent of course. Food I cook is also my sense of home I nourish myself as if I was back with family or during my nuptials days - I have to eat well to relive that comfort, and quite frankly to live up to that old standard hard to match alone because the taste was out of this world when you were all together. But I try everyday. And today the figs and the scallion infused noodles don't disappoint with my wild hunger. Dropping my hat and backpack on the wood floor I went straight for the fridge, washed and plated my figs then pouring the prepared soba (from Mana Foods) into the bowl and convincingly attacked kissing the figs first inside my lips sweetening my palate in anticipation for the glorious arrival of the umami from the wheat strings and delivering to my tongue blessed my tired soul and hunger and I felt erstwhile deep in my sense of home. There's a statue of a painted rooster perhaps you don't see in the blog picture who faces the fruit bowl with its beak on my new table and it's a funny unintended design; I share a home now with an architect and this figure is a special touch to a modern ambience but with a social history ethos. The "road" is also an extension of my sense of home even if walking fictitiously for all intents and purposes of burning my energy for it, high on the words. The cold wheat soba is as refreshing as the waterfalls that cascaded on my head this morning at Iao massaging the "ground of my being" and quenching my solitude for a prize with nature. I can only write haikus at this oasis, and writing in the forest always gives me, ultimately a much larger, lusher, skyward sense of home.