Miso Soup

I think I have discovered my new sick soup.

I wanted to say something about my memories of Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup from childhood sick days, but I cannot. I begin to rant. This blog is not [supposed to be] about what is wrong with the world, it is about what is right with food, and cooking, and experiments in the kitchen.

Grilled Cheesus, how I love experiments in the kitchen!

Anyway, I did have miso soup once or twice when I was in third grade, and a girl in my class brought in miso soup for show-and-tell. It sure drove my carriage. (What does that even mean?) The umami of it all. That sweetly salty pungent miso flavor. That broth. The little seaweed bits.

For whatever reason, it is only now that I embark on the quest to find the perfect miso soup. Or at least, make the perfect miso soup. OK, just make some miso soup. I took ideas from all over the Internet, ingredients carefully imported via care package from Seattle's finest Japanese market (Uwajimaya), and my obsession with fat Udon noodles. I definitely took a good look at this recipe for miso soup with udon noodles, which featured an egg poached into the soup. Hey, when you don't eat land-flesh, you might as well get your B-12 where you can, right?

I must preface this with saying that I am not Japanese. I still don't know anything about Japanese cooking. It is also my understanding that green onions (scallions) are commonly used in miso soup. Alas, Whole Foods was not carrying green onions this week. (Really, Whole Foods?) So I used red. Very different. Still an onion. And I don't know if it's really all that common to use noodles in a miso soup - I always thought of it as tofu and seaweed and green onions in a delicious broth, but I finally found Udon noodles I like and I couldn't pass it up. As for the egg, I'd never seen that before, but I love poached eggs, and I love taking in all that good egg nutrition.

That said, this is my miso soup.


MISO SOUP
some udon noodles - however much you want to put in 4 cups of soup
couple of 3-6 inch pieces of kombu (dried kelp)
4 cups water
1/4 cup bonito flakes (these are dried flakes from a block of specially aged tuna. Mine came in little packets of about that 1/4 cup, so I used one packet)
3 tbsp miso (whatever kind you like - I used shiromiso/yellow miso)
6 oz tofu, cut into cubes
1/2 cup sliced green onions (or other onions, if you have no green)
few crumbles of wakame (a type of dried seaweed)
an egg or two



1. Cook your udon noodles according to the instructions on the package they came in. Mine took 11 minutes at a rapid boil, no salt. The brand I like is made in Australia by Hakubaku, but I cannot find it anywhere on the web. It is in a plastic-lined white paper package with a lot of Japanese characters on it, and in tiny letters at the top it says "The Kokumotsu Company" and underneath that in larger letters it says "Organic UDON" and has a drawing of a stalk of wheat. It is not the same product as this. Anyway, it's delicious, look for it in your local Asian market, in your grocery store, wherever. They get all fat and slippery when they cook. Just as they should. After they've cooked an appropriate amount of time, drain them and set them aside.



2. You can now make what's called "dashi," a kind of broth. Google it. There's a lot of info from people a lot more knowledgeable than I am. Start with some pieces of kombu. Another Asian market find. They are wide and flat and dry and brittle.



Wipe them clean with a damp cloth (I don't know why, but everyone says to do it, so I did) and put them in a pan with 4 cups of fresh, clean water. After 5-10 minutes they should rehydrate and become larger.



Put the pan on medium-high heat and sit tight nearby. It will take several minutes, but when the steam starts rising from the pan, you can take out the kombu. Set it aside, use it in something later, snack on it while you cook, make second dashi from it, whatever you feel like. But don't boil it.

3. You can now add the bonito flakes to the pan.



Give it a swirl to make sure they're all touching the water. Keep the pan on the heat and wait for it to come to a boil, and then take the pan off the heat. Let it sit tight for 10 minutes or so to allow the bonito to calm down and sink to the bottom.



Once that happens, strain the liquid through a sieve lined with paper towel (or a paper napkin) into a bowl. You can save the bonito flakes for second dashi, or discard them.

That liquid you have? See that? Smell it?



That's your dashi. I don't know how it smells to most people, but to me it smells like Maine. I could've held my face over that bowl of dashi for a long time and been quite happy. But then I'd never eat dinner, so I decided to soldier on.

4. Return the dashi to a clean pan, on the stove, over medium-high heat. Take out a few spoonfuls - doesn't really matter how much - of the dashi and mix it in a separate bowl with your miso, until the miso is all dissolved-looking and it's pretty thick and uniform, but liquid. Keep that handy. When the dashi simmers, add however much already-cooked udon you want in your soup. Stir it to break it up if it clumped together while sitting, and let it simmer for 5 minutes. The udon and the dashi will exchange flavors, and the udon will get even fatter and slipperier.

5. While the dashi simmers, you can chop your tofu. It can be firm or soft, silken or not. I used firm. It was good. I just cut it in pieces that were large enough to provide some kind of feeling on the tongue, but not so big that you'd not taste anything else.



You can also hydrate your wakame. And believe me, you don't need very much. You see these crumbles?



After a few minutes in water they became this.



I think that's plenty for 4 cups of soup.

6. After the udon has simmered enough in the soup, stir in the miso-dashi thick liquid, the tofu, and the onions.



Simmer all that together, over medium heat, for 3 minutes or so.

7. If you want to use an egg, now is the time to slip it in. The trick to poaching an egg without it getting messy is this. First crack it into a small bowl, make sure the yolk is intact. Check your cooking water to make sure it's not simmering too fast, or it will toss the egg around. But it does need to be simmering, or the egg will cook very slowly and just get really firm and unpleasant. Take your bowl, with your egg in it, lower it down all the way to the water, and slip it right in. Don't plunk it in, don't drop it in, don't crack it in. And once it's in, don't mess with it for a minute.

8. Cover the pan, turn down the heat to medium-low, and wait a minute to a minute and a half. Then you can peek. Lift up the egg, wherever it's hiding, with a spoon and see if the white is cooked. If not, cook it longer. If so, it's ready to eat. I left mine on an extra two minutes and it cooked too much. Boo. When the egg is cooked, carefully stir in the wakame.



9. To serve it, just get some of everything in a bowl (don't be stingy with the broth!), and put the egg on top. If you had green onions, like I didn't, you wouldn't have to garnish with chives to make it look cute. Although you still could, I suppose.







I had trouble selecting a picture I liked, so there. Have a bunch.

My thoughts on this soup are this. Leave out the egg, use scallions instead of red onion. Noodles are fantastic, especially if you're ill and need noodle soup. The broth tastes amazing. Definitely good to make your own dashi. It doesn't take that long if you have in mind exactly what you need to do. Nothing about it is difficult. Miso is wonderful. Go get some.

In other news, I didn't do a video blog this time (obviously). It's a lot of work for so few readers. Maybe next time?

Pan-fried Trout

I ate some trout last night. It wasn't quite like the other times when I've made trout - I had no lemon, for one thing. Can you believe that Arizona - a state in which citrus grows as freely as mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest - does not sell organic lemons? At least, not at Whole Foods, which (sadly) is the only "natural" market I can find around Scottsdale. And for another thing, no sage. NO SAGE. In the desert. The desert. Really, Phoenix? Really?

But what am I, if not up for a challenge, eh? What's herby and sage-shaped? Basil! OK, it's not completely sage shaped, and the leaves are very thin... and a completely different flavor, but I'll try it all the same. You never know. Plus, that means I don't have to buy an herb, since it's growing in my living room.

To replace lemon, my first thought was, naturally, lime or orange. Apparently none of those, either. I'm sorry, I'm not keen on cooking pesticides (and consequently supporting the practice of pouring toxic chemicals into the ecosystem and farm workers) into my already probably-poisonous aquatic-raised dinner. Just the basics, folks, thanks.

What is available here? Now? TOMATOES! And they're acidic... and brightly colored... and they can slice up as nice as any lemon. And they'll be pretty all cooked in a pan. Mmm, fried tomatoes.

It was all a grand experiment, really - you can stick whatever you want in your trout. My favorite is still sage and lemon, but I did quite enjoy the hotness of the tomatoes, the way they got very soft and cooked and sweetened... maybe if I get a chance, some day, I'll cook trout with lemon AND tomatoes. And sage.

By the way, have you ever tried frying sage leaves in butter or olive oil? No? Do it now.


PAN-FRIED TROUT

Flour
Sea salt
1-3 whole trout (however many you want to cook), gutted
Freshly ground black pepper
Bunch of fresh herb leaves - sage preferable, but you can experiment
Sliced tomato or lemon or orange
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp other cooking oil (I used coconut - sometimes I use 1-2 tsp sesame oil)

1. Combine some flour with salt and pepper on a large plate. Just a hefty pinch of salt, a few good grinds of pepper. Use your instincts. Rinse your very fresh trout, inside and out. It shouldn't be very slimy. If it is, it might be off. You can probably use it anyway, as long as you rinse off any slimy texture. Unless the smell makes you want to throw up, then it's most definitely not ok. Ideally, you should not really be able to smell the trout at all unless you put your nose quite close to it, and then it should be just a very small smell. Remember, buy trout from a well-chilled, busy fish market. A busy fish market almost always has the freshest fish.

Pat dry your trout with paper and put it on your flour plate.

2. In the meantime, put on a very large cast-iron or steel pan to heat up. Use the heat setting that provides a moderate amount of browning for butter. On most electric stoves, this is somewhere just shy of medium, as long as you let it preheat. On gas, it's probably higher.

3. Coat the fish well on both sides with the seasoned flour, and put some plain sea salt and pepper on the inside cavity. The inside won't be the direct recipient of hot pan bottom, so you don't want to put flour in there. It will just get gummy.



4. Cram some sliced up tomatoes/lemon/whatever in your trout cavity. If it's a small trout, like mine, you can cut your tomato slices in half to fit better, like I didn't. Stick the herbs in there too, next to the trout flesh. I put in a very small amount of fresh thyme with my basil, just to see what would happen.



Nothing noteworthy, as it turned out.

5. Add your oils/butter to the pan and swirl them around to mix. If your butter starts spitting and turning dark very quickly, your pan is way too hot. Take it off the heat and let it settle for a minute or so before putting it back on (at a lower heat). You can still add the trout, though, especially if you're using cast iron, since that stays hot a long time. Put some tomato/lemon slices around in the pan, and a few on top of the fish. And some herbs. Don't forget those.



6. Depending on the size of your trout, and the heat of your pan, you'll want to cook it on each side about 6 minutes, give or take. Take a peek inside the cavity to see if the flesh on the lower side is opaque. If it's translucent, leave it on until it becomes opaque. You can turn it over when it's white. I didn't wait quite long enough, so I had to turn it back over again, but fortunately trout is relatively forgiving.



7. When the second side is cooked, you have to do something about the back of the trout, which is quite thick and will not have had a chance to get close enough to the heat to cook through. I like to prop up the trout on the side of the pan, back-down, and cook about 3 minutes per side (prop on the other side after three minutes, in other words).



Don't be alarmed if parts are falling off your trout. This is good. If they look cooked (this goes for tomatoes in the pan, too), take them out. I think it looks tastier when it's falling apart and charred in parts.

And make sure the head gets sufficient heat to cook. Because you're going to eat it, or you don't deserve to be eating fish.

8. When the trout flakes easily, the skin wants to peel off, and it looks ready to eat, take it out and put it on a plate and admire it. Oh, I do love trout.



At this point, you can eat it. Pull the meat off the bones going with the grain, so you can leave the skeleton behind and not pick 8290348028340 pinbones out of your dinner. Be on the lookout though. But if you get one and crunch it up and accidentally eat it, that's probably ok. I've done it a fair number of times. Sometimes on purpose.

I'm not going to fib. My favorite parts of a trout are the eyes and brain. At least try them once, with an open mind. The trout is opening her mind to you, the least you could do is return the favor. If you don't think you can eat the head, don't even cook it. Just toss it to the cat.

If you're a glutton, have a very wee trout, or share a fish with someone else, what you're left with is this:



which you need to dispose of as soon as possible lest your pets get to it and drag it around the floor. If you have leftover meat, just refrigerate it and have it cold, or heated up, with some lemon butter or something. Put it on crackers with some interesting spread. Have a trout melt with swiss. Add it to your shrimp cocktail. Put it in chowder. Whatever you want.

The basil was alright. It didn't benefit from frying like sage does. In a bite with tomato, it was very good, as basil and tomato always are together. It didn't argue with the fish. But it didn't get chummy with it either. (Get it? chummy? salmonids? Yarr.) I'll stick with sage, if I can ever find it here. In the desert.

I really need to get used to living in Phoenix. I can't expect the same types of foods to be as readily available as they are in Seattle. Maybe for my next post I'll focus on something a little more Arizona. Saguaro pudding or something. Hey, that's a thought...

Rock Cod and Heart of Palm Salad

Who doesn't think of hearts of palm when they think of Alaskan rock cod??

Obviously everyone but me. Actually, I just had a bunch of things left over, in the cupboard, whatever, and sort of threw together a meal. Simple and fast and healthy and tasty. Well, relatively healthy. Butter's wholesome, right?

This is my favorite way to cook cod/rockfish/snapper (probably because it's really the only way I know how. hmm). I always make a dry rub of some sort, put it on the fish, and then cook it slowly in a pan with some butter or olive oil. Squeeze a bittie lemon at the end, and voila! Pretty easy.

Dry spice rubs are incredibly easy to make, and if you have a dozen or so herbs and spices in your possession you can do just fine. Improvise. I often like to use smoked paprika as a base, but I don't always have some. Dried thyme (not powdered) is one of my favorite components... I usually have about 3 or 4 herbs/spices, and then nearly match their volume with sea salt, and some black pepper. You can use cumin-oregano-chipotle, or thyme-coriander-mustard-pinch o' allspice, or oregano-thyme-smoked paprika-red pepper flake, or really whatever you think would go well together. "Sweet" spices like allspice should generally be used in very small quantities, hot spices like cayenne or chipotle in moderate quantities, and dried herbs like oregano and thyme in large quantities. If you want it to be super duper tasty, use fresh thyme in place of dried. It just occurred to me that I have a pot of fresh thyme sitting out on the deck, and that some of it is still perfectly usable, and I used dried. Oh poo. Such is life... More for a later date, then.

As for the salad, it really had no inspiration. I made an Italiany-type "vinaigrette," and I'm not sure if I can call it that because it contains no vinegar, only lemon juice. What's that? My linguistic ignorance is showing?

Oh yeah, I made the vinaigrette for the hearts of palm that I wanted to eat, because hello, hearts of palm... vinaigrette... duh. And then I had this arame seaweed that I rehydrated and put in there because it was interesting and nutritionally valuable, and leftover cooked emmer farro, and some celery for crunch. It would have been nice over a leaf of romaine, or with some chopped up parsley in it, but I didn't have any romaine, or parsley. I got kalamata olives out with the intention of using them too, but as the salad came together, I realized I didn't really want them there. Maybe I'll try them in a bit of it tomorrow for leftovers.

Oh. And I thought I would mention this, because it's not necessarily an obvious point. For salad dressings, any Italian sauces, or un-sauteed garnish of food requiring olive oil, extra virgin olive oil is typically used. The difference between extra virgin and regular olive oil is that the former is the most unrefined form of olive oil available. Virgin olive oil has not been chemically treated during production, and extra virgin olive oil is "extra" because it is selected specifically for flavor. Smell a sample of regular olive oil and one of extra virgin olive oil and you will detect a difference, and it's not subtle. The taste of a good extra virgin olive oil is really worth a few extra $$ per bottle, and it really is crucial in a raw application such as a dressing. If you still really don't care about the flavor, just go with vegetable oil, because it tastes more or less the same as regular olive oil, at a much lower price. FYI, the reason olive oil is chemically treated is to significantly lengthen its shelf life, preventing early rancidity (to which extra virgin is prone if stored a long time) and increase its smoke point (the temperature at which heated oil begins to smoke and create carcinogenic free radicals).


HEART OF PALM SALAD

2 tbsp lemon juice
1 clove garlic, pressed
big ol' pinch of dried oregano (not powdered)
big ol' pinch of thyme (not powdered if dried, and minced if fresh)
giant ol' pinch of salt
a few generous grindings of black pepper
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 14-15 oz can hearts of palm, drained and cut into 3/4-inch pieces
3 tbsp dried arame seaweed, rehydrated in a bowl of water for 15 minutes and chopped a bit
1 rib celery, cut into 1/8-inch slices
1 cup cooked brown rice, emmer farro, or spelt or wheat or rye berries

1. In a medium serving bowl, whisk up the lemon juice, garlic, dried thyme and oregano, salt, and pepper. If you don't have a garlic press, you can finely mince the garlic, but get it as tiny as possible and smash it a little before or after chopping it. Garlic flavor is in the garlic juice! If you have a fresh lemon you can squeeze for the juice, then fabulous. But as I usually need more juice than is economically feasible to get from a bunch of lemons... I do go for the bottled stuff. If you do that, make sure it's fresh (not old), and not from concentrate. I like the Lakewood brand, which uses Florida lemons. It seems to have the best flavor.

2. While whisking, slowly drizzle in the olive oil and keep whisking until it's all mixed up. It's fine if it separates a little. It should be pale and slightly opaque.



3. Dump all the other ingredients in the bowl with the dressing. Mix it up. Mmmm.

ROCK COD

1 rock cod, true cod, rockfish, or snapper fillet, about 1/3 - 1/2 pound
pinch o' dried or fresh thyme (not powdered)
pinch o' dried oregano (not powdered)
pinch o' mustard powder
pinch o' paprika
big huge pinch o' sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp buttah
lemon wedge

1. So you have your fish fillet. Rinse it a bit, in case it's fishy, which it isn't, because you bought it the same day it was packed. But rinse it just to be safe, and pat it dry on a paper-towel-lined plate. Run your fingers along the fillet lengthwise, both directions, both sides, to feel for bones. If you feel some (they are like little hard nubbins), take some kitchen tweezers/pliers/heck-even-shears and pull them out (pull in the same direction as the bone). Nobody likes finding bones in their fish.

2. Get your dry rub all ready. Put the thyme, oregano, mustard, paprika, salt, and pepper all together in a wee bowl and mix it up until it looks pretty much... mixed. That was pretty easy.

3. Sprinkle the dry rub all over the fish, on both sides, and pat it in. You can even rub it in, because, after all, you didn't make a rub so you could sprinkle.



4. Heat up your butter in a stainless skillet, 10 inches is fine, over medium-low heat. You can probably do this earlier, like before you make the rub, but you don't want to risk the butter burning before you're ready for it. Don't be tempted to turn up the heat too much, because the fish will not be happy. This is a slow fish.



5. When the butter starts to brown, lay your fillet down in the pan. Don't worry if the skinny bit comes up the side a little, the fillet shrinks some and it's in there long enough to cook through. When you put the fish in, the pan should hush you a little. Not a lot, as in "SHHHHHH! This is a library!" but instead like, "shhhhh... go to sleep..." Take its advice and turn the heat down to low-ish.



6. When the fish just begins to flake and has the palest of browns on the underside (a 3 minutes, maybe), turn it over. Don't be sad if your fillet turns into several fillets at this point. Nobody really cares that much.





7. You will know when the fish is done. It starts to fall apart. If you poke it, it feels tender and kind of soft. Looking at a cross-section of a flake, it's completely opaque.



8. Take the pan off the heat and tent some foil over it, and let the fish rest for 5 minutes or so. I used this time to make my heart of palm salad, but my fish was only kind of warm when I ate it. Which was fine with me, but maybe you like getting your tongue burnt. I don't judge.

9. Put it on a plate with the yummy juice that released into the pan, the browned butter solids and whatever else is in the pan. Squeeze some lemon onto it. The leftover buttery fish juice is great if you have some french bread to dip into it, or if you're a plate-licker.





The best part is, because you didn't smoke up the house by cooking butter over high heat, nothing burnt onto your stainless pan and it's super-easy to clean.

PROS: each dish delicious in its own right. Relatively healthful, with lots of fun textures. Easy cleanup.
CONS: the dishes didn't work together as I'd hoped. The lemon on both of them competed with each other and made me wish I'd had the two on separate occasions.

Lobster

I'm going to be horribly cliche here. I went to Maine, so I cooked some lobstahs. Maybe it's not cliche. Maybe there's a good reason for it.

In any case, for a lobster rookie, cooking them is not a difficult task. Alarming, maybe... but difficult? Hardly! As long as you have the right equipment.

First of all, you have to go to your family's cottage in Maine and drag out the old lobster pot. It's huge. About four times the size of a regular stockpot. Lobsters don't like to go in pots and will try to sabotage your efforts, but if the pot is large enough they really don't have much of a choice. If your family doesn't have a cottage in Maine, sucks to be you. you can probably still cook a lobster if you can find the right pot (make sure it has a lid).



Your next step, obviously, is to get ahold of some lobsters. One lobster per lobster-eater is the way to go. Unless you have two very small dogs who plan on eating lobster as well, in which case they can split one. To get lobsters, go to Simpson's Seafood off Route 1 just south of Wiscasset. It's the home of Superfresh. If you can't get there, they ship.



After you get your lobsters, what's left to do but roll up your sleeves and get down to business?





LOBSTER

1-5 hard-shell lobsters
~1 tbsp good sea salt
2 oz (half a stick) butter
4-6 slices fresh, crusty bread
1-2 lemons in wedges

1. Put a few inches of water in the bottom of your lobster pot. 2-3 inches should do it. Put it over high heat and cover the pot so it heats faster. We want this sucker hot.

2. Put the butter on a low simmer in a little pan. Instead of clarifying it, brown it. Over the course of lobster-cooking, you should be able to easily achieve this goal. But don't let it get black, or it will taste kind of like burnt butter. Or a lot like burnt butter. It will take a long time to brown if you keep it on low heat, which you should do. The butter is browned when... well, when you see that it's starting to brown. Not that hard.

3. When your pot of water comes to a boil, add the salt and stir it to dissolve. You don't want undissolved salt sitting on the bottom of your pan, as it will corrode aluminum and damage stainless steel.





4. As soon as the pot comes to a rolling, hardy boil, it's ready for lobsters.



Take them out of whatever they're in (you can leave the rubber bands on their claws) and drop them right in headfirst. Quickly. The shock of going from cold to boiling hot kills them instantly. Cover the pot immediately.



5. Leave the lobsters in their bath for 20 minutes. You may hear a high-pitched whine at some point. No, the lobsters aren't screaming in pain. They are dead, and steam is whistling from out their carapace. Kind of like a kettle.



6. While the lobsters are steaming, slice up your bread and wedge up your lemons. You'll be glad you did.



7. After your time is up, turn off the heat to the lobster pot and fish them out with tongs. Place them directly in a cold-water bath or colander with running cold water. This stops the cooking process and allows you to handle them.



8. You might want to put the cooked lobsters on a rimmed baking sheet or pan. When you rip them apart to eat them, they release a lot of delicious lobster broth. But as good as it is, you probably don't want it all over your table or shirt.





9. Eat up. You might need some tools. Something to crack the tougher parts (like the claws), and something to pick out the more delicate parts (like the legs). These help:



You can eat just about anything on a lobster. If I were you, I probably wouldn't eat the shell. Or the "vein" (intestine) running down through the tail. The green goopy stuff is the tomalley (liver), and it's delicious. Suck the juice from the legs. And anything else that gushes out when you rip something off.

Due to the distraction of the author during feeding time, she is unable to bring you pictures documenting the best ways to eat a lobster.

I will tell you, though, dip the lobster meat into the browned butter and squeeze a little lemon on it. Also dip the bread in the browned butter. You're in for a treat. But all you'll have to show for it is a bunch of mangled lobster carapace pieces. C'est la vie.

PROS: easy. cheap ($4-$5 a pound). deeeeeelicious.
CONS: it stares at you before and after you cook it (but it doesn't judge.) Also, lobsters are detritivores, which means they eat whatever's lying around. And you are what you eat...


PS: I got a new Canon 50D. I loves it.