A New Year

We celebrated Haruko's return to Canberra with a lovely lunch at Koto on Tuesday. Koto is billed as modern Japanese - and it's one of our current Canberra faves. Haruko gave it's signature lunchtime bento box her seal of approval.

We couldn't go past their Ichigo Daifuku for dessert - but Haruko's choice was much lighter.  We liked the way it came with a lovely welcome sign!

 

We thought it would be fun to try to repeat the picture we took in a Canberra restaurant on Haruko's first visit to Canberra in July 2003. So here are Rob and Haruko again - 22 and a half years later. Old (as in duration, not in age) friends are definitely the best!!!

We love the setting of Koto too - in the restored, iconic, Lobby building in Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle.

Last night, for New Year's Eve, Haruko prepared us a very special meal based on a signature soba noodle dish. Right from the start I could tell we were in for a very special experience.......

This is the first time tempura has been prepared and cooked in this kitchen. Eggplant is s-so-o-o- good cooked this way (and so are beans)!!

And now Haruko is cooking the kakiage (a kind of fried vegie fritter with shrimp - mixed with tempura batter). It's served with the soba noodles.

I watched her make onigiri with great precision....

The rolled egg is tamago yaki and the green beans are just beans - but dressed with sesame oil and black sesame seeds - which make all the difference!

The soba noodles are cooked for 4 minutes then washed(!) and then they go into a dashi flavoured soup.

 

The meal was AMAZING!! I still can't believe Haruko produced all this in our kitchen and with ingredients from our pantry (mostly anyway!). It was DELICIOUS!!

It is the custom to eat soba noodles for New Year in Japan. It is apparently because soba noodles are very easy to cut (bite) when you eat them - which symbolizes how we all need to cut the bad things from our life before the new year begins!

We finished just in time to walk down to the lake for the 9pm kid friendly NYE fireworks show.

We loved the kid friendly fireworks - good enough for us to welcome in the New Year too - and a fitting finale to the awesome meal Haruko had served us!

This morning we set ourselves up for good things, health and fitness wise, for the year by doing the Mt Ainslie walk. 2025 has been such a challenging and disrupted year that we found it hard to fit in our weekly mountain walks. This year we want to get back into all those lovely healthy routines again.

But it is always so much more enjoyable coming down the mountain than going up!