Japanese cooking techniques: non-miso soups
Icy summer soups make for easy eating when it’s too hot to cook.
The original recipe called for lettuce and spinach, but I had to try it with my latest leafy discovery: purslane—it’s not your ordinary weed!
From fairy tales to Shakespeare with humor
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on my own for the weekend and noodles are perfect when dinner is for one. I’ve never tried the niboshi dashi before, so using it to make kakejiru (broth for hot noodles) was a fine start. I made udon with tofu, green onions, and just because they looked so pretty in the store, some cherry tomatoes.☛ → ♪ night and day ♪
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iboshi are baby sardines (anchovies in some translations) that have been boiled once then dried. Compared to katsuobushi, stock made with niboshi has a fishier flavor. They vary in size from about 1.5″ to over 3″long with the smaller ones having a milder flavor. This stock is used in both Korean and Japanese cooking for miso soup, hot pots (nabemono), and strongly flavored noodle dishes. Some bloggers note that niboshi dashi is more commonly 
in the Tokyo area than in Osaka/Kyoto; and katsuo dashi is used more in the summer, niboshi in the winter.Ð → → → → ♥ ♥ ♥ ☛ happy valentine’s day! ★ ☆ ★ ☆ ☀
Ð → → → → ♥ ♥ ♥ ☛ happy valentine’s day! ★ ☆ ★ ☆ ☀
https://1tess.wordpress.com In Japan, chawan mushi is a very popular savory custard. There are even special cups with lids for preparing and serving the dish. The traditional recipe is made with dashi, eggs, and chicken, shrimp, and mushrooms plus seasonal ingredients like gingko nuts, mitsuba, yuzu citron, kinome, or lily buds. This recipe is a variation…
Success!!! I posted about ebi-shijo (shrimp quenelles) quite a while ago, but I was very disappointed in the way they turned out. A suggested that she had eaten ebi-shinjo that were much simpler, so I approached the re-make of this recipe with that in mind.
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I think the biggest problem with the original recipe is that there is just too much liquid.
I didn’t care for the chewy texture of the mushrooms, so I left them out.
I wanted smaller dumplings, so I didn’t boil them wrapped in parchment, nor did I try to deep-fry them. I think these dumplings would have held together in the hot oil, and I may try that some other time; they would make a nice appetizer! Shizuo Tsuji, in his book :Practical Japanese Cooking, has a recipe for crab balls in a clear soup (with a variation for shrimp) which looks interesting—his technique uses plastic wrap to keep the (large) dumplings smooth while cooking in the boiling water.
The shiso flavoring was overwhelming in the original recipe, so I used some lovely garlic chives from my garden just for color.
In Japan, it’s traditional to eat a soup with rice cakes on New Year’s Day. I made a very simple version, but after doing some on-line research, it’s apparent that there are many delicious variations that I’d like to try.
A meal we won’t forget:
Tess's Japanese Kitchen 
