I wanted to make an udon soup dish and when I read that I need dashi I thought, don’t I still have some instant soup packages from one of my kokorocares.com deliveries left in the shelf? I pulled out the pack of Kyushu Dashi Hot Pot Soup from my winter box and when I red the ingredients list (flying fish, bonito flakes, shrimp and obviously more) I instantly changed my mind. No more simple udon soup but hot pot it was!
I got my induction cooker for the table out, put the four packs of concentrated soup base in a saucepan with the right amount of water and heated that up.
Of course I also got out a range of things to put in there and had prepared them:
🥢 Napa cabbage, the top of the head in one piece 😅
🥢 May turnip, sliced thinly
🥢 Carrot, cut into “flowers”
🥢 Spring onion, in 4 cm pieces
🥢 Spinach, chiffoned, to be used like a topping
🥢 Shimeji mushrooms, roughly separated
🥢 Smoked tofu with almonds, sliced
🥢 Thin pork meat rolls (from Spain!)
🥢 Chinese dumplings with tasty fillings
Yes, there were also udon noodles, and I decided to make this a little more Chinese by adding a punchy dipping sauce with sesame oil, soy sauce, vinegar and chilli pul biber.
I think the whole affair cooked for about ten minutes and by that time it was perfect so I turned the temperature down and called the family.
I don’t know how but this was sooooo good and so perfect on a cold almost wintery day! I really think it was the absolutely delicious soup base that made this, we finished it all in one setting. (I remember having a flying fish based soup product from Kokorocares before and I loved that too.) But I also have to give a honorary mention to the May turnip which was exquisite and the Spanish pork that had a great taste.
Are you familiar with Japanese, or better, Okinawan Fu? It looks like sliced white bread and in a way that’s what it is, but it’s made entirely of wheat gluten. In Japan it’s used to make all sorts of cooked dishes. I really should have taken a photo of the little bread slices before cooking them as it’s completely unrecognisable in my dish after I cut it into 1 cm cubes and soaked it in egg. We quite like it.
The dish I made is called Fu Chanpuru, which essentially means Fu with something mixed (in this case stir-fried). I loosely followed a recipe but replaced the sausage with rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, the fish based dashi with shiitake dashi (to make it vegetarian), and also added some chiffoned baby spinach and a little leftover shredded Napa cabbage.
As I had too many bean sprouts, I used the rest of them as salad with a leftover dressing of sesame oil, red wine vinegar, soy sauce and sugar.
At the end I decided that I also wanted a mashed up pickled plum with me rice, as I like the tangy kick from it. My husband opted for red cabbage kimchi instead.
First of all, so many new followers over the last week, that’s a bit scary, but welcome to my cooking adventures! 😅 My tastebuds like Japanese, Indian and East Asian cuisine and after falling in love with food at a Bangladeshi friend’s house I simply started cooking from recipes at some point and this opened up a new world for me. I hope I can inspire at least a few of you to try out either some of the recipes I keep trying myself, or to simply sample something completely new should you stumble across something that you have never tasted before in your supermarkets or even better on a market. I usually attempt to find a suitable recipe online. I’m also not afraid to substitute hard to get ingredients with local ones, reading up on what might be a good match. You have to work with what you can get or find in your fridge. 😄 I think most of my cooking is fusion food, where you combine products and ideas from different food cultures to make them your own.
The meal in the photo was a typical “what you find in the fridge” affair. There were many fresh vegetables that needed to go: okra, pak choi, napa and red cabbage, carrots, spring onion, half a jar of shiitake mushrooms, and also some soy mince based niku soboro (seasoned minced meat to eat with ramen or whatever you fancy). With this my son and I prepared the meal:
🥢 okra with ginger/soy sauce
🥢 Asian coleslaw with a sesame dressing
🥢 freestyle mixed fried vegetables with gochujang
🥢 niku soboro
🥢 Japanese rice
🥢 chopped peanuts and pine nuts were added as well
The tofu cubes tasted a lot like spicy smoked cheese, really nice! Our son shunned the mentaiko since he found out what they are 😆 but my husband loves them.
We compared the two different rolled up omelettes and I think everyone preferred the sesame version but the dashi one was a lot juicier which was nice too.