Eats

Posts about restaurants, recipes, groceries and more

Spicy Kabocha Coconut Soup

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Spicy Kabocha Soup

We had some friends over the other day and played a “How well do you know ______?” game. We had 10 questions and each person had to answer for the other people in the room. One of the questions was “What is ______’s favorite food?” One of the people guessed “soup” for me. While the correct answer is “pizza,” I do enjoy a good soup.

When I shared the Mapo Tofu recipe a few weeks ago, I invited folks to offer up their favorite recipes and I’d take a stab at making them with vegetarian ingredients.

Cascadian Pugs sent me a recipe for Thai Coconut Soup. The original recipe came from St. Innocent Winery, a beautiful vineyard west of Salem, OR. With the exception of the chicken stock, the recipe was already vegetarian, but I tweaked it to utilize some of Japan’s local ingredients.

For example, the original recipe called for butternut squash, which I replaced with kabocha (Japanese pumpkin). Kabocha can be found in the U.S. (quite readily in Oregon) and are small-ish, green winter squash. They’re naturally sweet and make a great snack all by themselves when cooked. I also substituted the cayenne pepper for seven-spice chili powder (shichimi), which adds some unique flavors like orange peel and nori (dried seaweed) to the mix.

This turned out fantastic! I halved the original recipe, only because I didn’t know how to convert the original 2.5 lbs. of butternut squash to grams at the grocery store. 🙂 This batch yielded two thick, hearty servings. If you like your soup a bit more “soupy,” you could stretch this to four servings by streaming in additional broth during the blending process to get the desired texture. Enjoy!

Spicy Kabocha Coconut Soup

Ingredients
Prepared ingredients

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil
1.25 pounds Kabocha Pumpkin, peeled, seeded, and cut into chunks
1/2 diced large yellow sweet onion
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp minced fresh peeled ginger
1/2 teaspoon shichimi (seven-spice chili powder) or cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 cup vegetable stock (or vegetarian chicken stock)
1/2 13.5 ounce can coconut milk
Toasted pumpkin seeds for garnish – chopped

Prep

  1. Chop and set aside. You can combine some ingredients in the same container:
    • Onion
    • Kabocha
    • Garlic and ginger
  2. Measure and set aside:
    • Shichimi
    • Sea salt and curry powder
    • Vegetable stock
Cook
Stages in the cooking process.

Cook

  1. In a large skillet or stock pot, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat.
  2. Add onions and cook for about two minutes until they begin to soften.
  3. Add the garlic and ginger. Cook and stir until the onions turn translucent.
  4. Add shichimi and 1/4 cup of the stock. Stir and bring to a boil.
  5. Stir in the kabocha, salt and curry powder. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring every couple minutes.
  6. Add the rest of the stock and increase the heat to medium-high. Cover and bring to a boil.
  7. Lower the heat to medium-low and simmer for 20 minutes. Stir every five minutes, mashing the mixture each time until smooth.
  8. Add the coconut milk and simmer for another 10 minutes.
  9. Remove from heat and add to a blender, or use a stick blender, to puree the soup until smooth.
  10. Reheat and season with salt.
  11. Garnish with toasted pumpkin seeds.

Naan makes a nice side to this or, to add additional protein, you can cube firm tofu and serve the soup over the tofu. This recipe is also great cold, perfect for a summer meal.

Care Package

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Box

About 10 minutes before leaving the house for our weekend trip to Fukuoka, the doorbell rang. It was the mailman with a care package from home! Huge thanks to Cascadian Pugs for finding some things we’ve been missing and adding a few surprises as well.

I managed to unpack the box just enough to throw a few train/plane snacks in the backpack before heading out the door.

Jerquee Wild
We’re wild for Wild-flavor Jerquee!

Among the goodies within:

Three cheers for Pugs and some hard-to-find treats from home. Thanks again!

Mapo Tofu

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Mapo Tofu

Cooking is something I always wished I had more time to do. I love to collect recipes and try new things, especially modifying existing recipes to make them vegetarian-friendly. With all my free time here, I finally get to spend some time experimenting with new recipes.

The first known recipe is thought to be from an Akkadian tablet circa 1600 B.C., transcribed to a clay tablet that could be passed down through the family or shared with neighbors. That clay tablet gave way to paper, index cards and eventually the internet.

Still, word of mouth is a great way to get new recipe ideas. What do other people love to make? Leave a comment and maybe your idea will be the basis of a future blog post!

Last night’s dinner was inspired by one of Viktoria’s students. Mapo tofu is a Chinese Sichuan recipe that gained popularity in post-war Japan as a less-spicy, sweeter interpretation. It’s as ubiquitous in Japanese homes as macaroni and cheese in the U.S., so much so that “instant mapo tofu” is available in the grocery store. Much of the flavor and rich color comes from tobanjan, a spicy chili bean sauce.

Traditional mapo tofu recipes have oyster sauce and ground meat (pork or beef), so here’s a vegetarian take inspired by this recipe from Viet World Kitchen.

Mapo Tofu (makes 3-4 servings)

Ingredients

1 cup textured soy protein flakes (resembling ground beef)
1 package super-firm tofu
soy sauce
tobanjan sauce (spicy chili bean sauce)
sugar
extra virgin olive oil
cornstarch or flour (for thickener)
boiled water
whole peppercorns
4-5 medium-sized shitake mushrooms, finely chopped
fresh ginger
green onions

Note: When I make stir-fry recipes, I like to prepare the ingredients in advance, especially when using a wok. These recipes cook fast, so there’s not a lot of time to chop, measure and mix along the way.

Prepared ingredients for mapo tofu
Prepared ingredients for mapo tofu

Prep

  1. Put the textured soy protein in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Let sit for 10-15 minutes until tender, then drain the water in a colander or strainer. Mix 3/4 teaspoon of soy sauce into the drained textured soy protein.
  2. Drain the tofu and cut into approximately 1-inch cubes. Cover with boiling water. Let sit for 10-15 minutes until tender, then drain the water. (Note: I used a pre-fried tofu, so I didn’t need to boil it, but fresh super-firm tofu will work fine.)
  3. Reserve 1 1/3 cup of boiled water for making the sauce.
  4. Finely chop the shitake mushrooms and mix in 3/4 teaspoon of soy sauce.
  5. In a frying pan, toast the whole peppercorns over medium heat until fragrant. Let cool slightly and grind roughly with a spice grinder or pestle/mortar.
  6. Mix 1 teaspoon of sugar with 1 teaspoon of soy sauce.
  7. Grate/microplane about 1 teaspoon of fresh ginger. Combine with 3 tablespoons of tobanjan sauce.
  8. Dilute 1 tablespoon of flour or cornstarch with three tablespoons of water.
  9. Slice 2-3 green onions on a diagonal cut.

Cook

  1.  In a wok or skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of oil over medium heat.
  2. Add the chopped mushrooms and textured soy protein to the pan and sauté for about a minute until mushrooms start to cook down.
  3. Add the ginger and tobanjan. Mix continuously until combined. The mixture should now have a deep red appearance.
  4. Add in the sugar/soy sauce mixture and stir to combine.
  5. Add the tofu and stir to combine.
  6. Add the 1 1/3 cup of reserved water to the pan and bring to a rolling simmer. Cook for about 3 minutes to allow flavors to meld. Taste the sauce and add more sugar as desired.
  7. Add the green onion to the pan and combine.
  8. Stir in the flour/cornstarch mixture and simmer until the sauce begins to thicken.
  9. Stir in the ground peppercorns, remove from heat and let sit for about five minutes before serving.
Mapo tofu served over brown rice with a side salad
Mapo tofu served over brown rice with a side salad

Serve over rice and enjoy!

Popcorn

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Popcorn

Sometimes, in this world of modern gizmos and interconnectedness, I find myself excited about doing things people have been doing for centuries. Tonight, cooking popcorn over an open flame can be added to that list.

We found a small bag of kernels at a store in Tokyo a couple weeks ago, but without our modern popcorn popper, we had to beckon back to our ancestors’ method of popping the corn. So, of course we start with the internet for some basic instructions.

Really, it was just 1/3 cup of kernels, about 1 1/2 tablespoons of vegetable oil and medium heat in our handy dandy Le Creuset saucepan. But seriously, I got giddy when that first kernel popped and listened as each of its siblings exploded in puffed perfection.

Hello Natto

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Natto

In our never-ending quest to try all that Japan has to offer, I present to you… natto.

It’s been sitting in our fridge for a week while I’ve tried to figure out what to do with it. I thought I’d start out easy and use it as a filling in gyoza. Technically, natto is a soybean that has been fermented with hay or grass bacteria. However, I’m quite certain based on its quantity of ectoplasm, that it has some relation to this guy.

Slimer from Ghostbusters... a distant relative of natto?
Slimer from Ghostbusters… a distant relative of natto?

As usual, I wish I’d taken more pictures of the unboxing process as the packaging itself was impressive. Sealed in a styrofoam box, I feared the worst. Natto has a reputation of being stinky and slimy. As I opened the box, I took a good whiff. The smell didn’t bother me at all. We’re greeted with a small packet of hot mustard and another small packet, which the internets tell me contains a fish-based sauce, so I tossed that.

Then the natto.

It’s covered with a layer of wax paper, which when peeled away reveals the true nature of the beast.

Natto, or to summon the 8-year-old boy in me, "snotto"
Natto, or to summon the 8-year-old boy in me, “snotto”

Apologies for the close-up. It seemed necessary.

I tried it by itself first. Not an overwhelming flavor, but certainly not anything I’d want to eat plain. It has a maple-esque flavor as an aftertaste, which might be why it’s a popular breakfast food in Japan, spread on toast or rice. After mixing it with the hot mustard and some soy sauce, it was actually kinda good.

Then I touched it.

Slimy indeed. I tried to use a spoon to fill the gyoza wrapper, but the natto stuck to it. So, I’d take a pinch with my fingers and stuff it in the wrapper. I looked like a first grader elbow-deep in rubber cement (do they still let kids use rubber cement?) as the sticky strings connected my fingers to the beans for a good 12 inches. When I washed my hands, the water mixed with the sticky made a slime that required a lot of washing and a strong stomach.

It came in a three-pack, and I’m not disappointed. Natto spaghetti is also very popular and I found another recipe for natto veggie burgers. Can’t wait to give ’em a go!

Update: So, after eating the natto gyoza, I’ve had a change of heart. There’s something just… off about it. Not sure I’m quite ready to be a fan of natto quite yet.

The Things We Eat

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Sweet potato slider

I’d make a terrible food blogger. Last week, we made a miso hummus with naan in a lovely presentation. Today I made sweet potato ravioli for lunch using gyoza wrappers. A splash of shooyu and a drizzle of sriaicha made it look fit for a menu photo.

However, by the time I think about photographing these gorgeous dishes, they look like this:

An empty hummus bowl
An empty hummus bowl

You’ll have to trust that there was hummus in that bowl at one point and it was SO delicious that it was finger-cleaned once the naan was eaten.

One of the most common questions we received before leaving was “what will you eat?” We both follow an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet, meaning we eat eggs and dairy, but fish, chicken, etc. are out. The Japanese have a seafood-heavy diet. Sakana (fish) sneaks its way into places you’d never expect to find it. Unagi (eel) and ebi (shrimp) are also common.

My somewhat flippant answer was some variation of “probably the same things we eat in the US?” Eating out is definitely more of a challenge, but we’re not tourists. We live here and cook at home the majority of the time. The produce is excellent and tofu was already a regular part of our diet at home.

It’s not without its challenges, but a little creativity goes a long way. For example, hummus usually has tahini in it, adding to the creamy texture. We swapped in miso paste instead. It gave a unique-in-a-good-way flavor to the dip.

We did capture some amazing meals:

Veggie gyoza
Veggie gyoza
Sweet potato slider
Sweet potato slider with all the fixins
Miso Soup
First homemade-from-scratch miso soup

We’ve also made:

  • Black bean sliders
  • Soba noodle stir-fry
  • Soba noodle spaghetti with walnut meatballs

The cooking process itself has some challenges as well. We procured a gas stovetop, the common cooking tool in Japan, which has two burners and a toaster drawer, but no oven. This makes baking impossible, but presents another opportunity for originality. We’ve seen some pre-baked pizza crust and might try to make frying pan pizza in the near future.

The most frustrating one has been the lack of cooking spray. The aerosol cans can’t be brought on the airplane, but we didn’t expect that we wouldn’t be able to buy it here. It’s just not used.

“Non-stick pan” is now a dirty word in this household as we’re scraping eggs off of our frying pans most mornings regardless of the amount of oil used. Every opportunity for internet includes some variation on a search for “how the heck do I get my eggs to not stick without cooking spray!?!?”

We are definitely those weird people at the restaurant who take pictures of their food, so hopefully there will be more yummy things to share along the way!