Spring Supper

I've been in Japan so long I forget what people eat for Easter, so last night I just made a dinner that celebrates spring: green pea soup; sauteed gyouja ninniku (Japan's version of ramps); and pasta with shrimp in meyer lemon cream sauce. Dessert was a strawberry crisp with too much soupy juice to bother taking a picture.

The pasta was made with this recipe from the Toronto Star, with the only substitutions being cavatappi pasta instead of linguine and a splash of chardonnay to make up for the paltry juice of my little meyer lemon. What a fantastic recipe! Maybe it's because it's my first encounter with Meyer lemons (I finally found one, a tiny little thing grown in Shikoku), but yum.

The gyouja ninniku was simply sauteed in butter and flavoured with salt and pepper, my first time giving it such a simple treatment. Now I know why there are so few recipes for ramps out there: they don't need much done to them. The soup was just frozen peas breifly cooked in stock made from the shrimp shells, pureed and garnished with a dollop of homemade yogurt. (That "homemade" is not meant to be show-offy, by the way- yogurt is one of those products, along with nattou and orange juice, that is very hard to find these days, thanks to the earthquake.)

 

Comments

[kat]

lovely spring meal!

[takiko]

This meal temps me.
I think it is suitable for spring because color scheme is good!

[Claudine Co]

I and my husband forgot about Easter altogether also (though we were both raised Catholic) this year! I think in the US the traditional foods are ham (usually smoked or honeybaked - I'm not too fond of American ham) and lamb (which I do like). Your spring dinner looks lovely! We made a paella (not for Easter specifically, but as something that would make lots of leftovers for the rest of the week).