Daikon radish salad with ume plum dressing

It was "Columbus day" today.  Columbus found the Americas about 510 years ago so it's a big holiday as celebration.  Since a happy monday today and yesterday I met one of my friend after a long time who came form Japan, I had wine kind of too much last night because I was so happy!  That's why this morning I wanted to have something refreshing.

Do you know Japanese ume plum (called umeboshi)?  It's a kind of pickles.  It's really sour and refreshing. 

 It has a lot of citric acid so makes you recovery from fatigue and to my joy it even helps recovering from a hangover!  That's great so I made a salad with ume plum dressing.

Daikon radish salad with ume plum dressing

• 0.75 pound of daikon radish
• 1/2 of green onion
• 1 sheet of seaweed sheet
• 0.15 oz of dried bonito shaves

Ume plum dressing

• 3 pieces of ume plum 
• 3 Tbs of olive oil
• 1/2 Tbs of soy sauce
• 1/4 tsp of wasabi

1,  Remove a seed from ume plum and chop it to a paste with a knife then mix all ingredients of dressing

2,  Cut a daikon radish into julienne strips (called Katsura-muki) and cut into thin sticks

3,  Cut green onion into thin slices

4,  Shred a seaweed sheet and put on a plate.  Place cut daikon radish on it and put green onion and dried bonito shaves then put ume plum dressing on it

It made me so refreshing so I could enjoy happy monday:))  Thanks umeboshi, you are great and love you♡

Japanese mustard spinach salad with dried bonito mayonnaise sauce

Do you know "dried bonito" (called Katsuo-bushi)??  It' made from just bonitos.  It takes lots of process to make it, like boiling in a huge pot, smoking, drying in the sun...and more!  The taste deserve to do the effort!!  It's like flavor (umami) itself!!

My roommate saw dried bonito shaves in my storage and said "I know this!  It's only for Dashi, right?".  No no, that's not true!!  Exactly we can make really tasty dashi soup from dried bonito.  But Japanese people use it not only for dashi but also for tofu, rice bowl, stir-fried udon and even just cooked rice!!  I mean dried bonito can easily make your food so tasty.

Even though I made stir-fried Japanese mustard spinach a couple of days ago, still I have a lot so at this time, I 'm gonna show you a recipe for salad which has lots of Japanese mustard spinach!!

Japanese mustard spinach salad with dried bonito mayonnaise sauce

• half pound of Japanese mustard spinach
• a carrot
• 0.15 oz of dried bonio shaves (I just used one small pack like this.)

• 4 Tbs of mayonnaise
• 1 Tbs of soy sauce
• white sesame seed
• Japanese hot pepper
• salt

1,  Cut Japanese mustard spinach into 2 inches length and carrot thin

2,  Boil hot water and add a bit of salt.  Blanch Japanese mustard spinach and carrot for 1 minute or so then remove from a pot and cool down with cold water immediately and squeeze tightly

3,  Put all ingredients in a bowl and mix them very well

Even though I used just simple ingredients, the taste could be so deep and complicate because dried bonito did work very well!!  I thank dried bonito for helping my cooking a lot :))