Just Soup

It's been a while since I've posted anything resembling a recipe, so I'm going to fit one more in before we finish out the year.

Before that, I would like to apologize for our lack of a Christmas post. I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas! Ours was really nice. Nat had to work during the day, but we hosted a potluck with our English conversation group for dinner. Nat made meatballs and her pizza bread. I made my tomato bisque, with some minor alterations (addition of some finely chopped mushrooms and substitution of one Japanese leafy vegetable for another). We still haven't sent out our Christmas gifts or cards yet, but know that they will be on their way...someday.

There was lots of good food at the potluck. As always, there were leftovers, which are just as delicious!

The next few days were mostly lazy, on our part. Yesterday, I walked to the local convenience store to pay the internet bill. You can pay your bills at the convenience store! Isn't that convenient? You can also pay for Amazon.com orders at certain convenience stores and have packages shipped there as well. Amazing! I ended up being lazy the rest of yesterday and buying dinner at the convenience store as well.

Today, though, I made soup. It's somewhat my generic soup, but we had some kumquats on hand and I decided to use a few to flavor the broth (mmmmm!). As long as you keep a regular stock of tomatoes, onions, garlic and keep your spice cabinet stocked like I do, all you should need to leave home for this are the kumquats and some sort of base. If you don't keep some sort of soup base on hand, that is. If you do, all you'll need are the kumquats.

The result is a delicious bowl of soup!

Just Soup
(Today's variation includes kumquats!)
(feeds 3 or 4)

Ingredients:

• 1 Tomato, peeled, diced and mashed
  
• 1/2 a medium onion, chopped fine
• 3 cloves of garlic, chopped up however you like to chop up garlic (I like the bell-shape you get from slicing it, but Nat likes to smash it for stronger flavor. I go back and forth between methods. If you like, you can too!)
  
• 5 Kumquats, washed (if you have extra, you can eat them whole - peel and all)
  
• Soup base (I used 2 chicken "consomme" cubes which are quite a bit like bouillon cubes, but you could easily replace it with a can of broth or some sort of vegetable soup base.)
• Olive oil
• Water
• Salt - to taste
• Pepper - to taste
• Ground sage - to taste, though I think I used about a teaspoon...I think
• 1/2 tsp. Turmeric
• Oregano - a couple dashes
• A good pasta for soup (smaller pastas like orzo or alphabet noodles are best, but spaghetti or angel hair can work if you break the noodles down into small pieces before adding them to the soup)

Directions:

1. Make sure you're thinking loving, happy thoughts. This soup needs to be made with love, even if it's not in the ingredients list.
   
2. Peel two of your kumquats, mash and remove the seeds. Add the kumquat juice and pulp to your mashed tomato and set aside.
3. Saute your onion and garlic in olive oil until they start turning brown (I usually do this in my soup pot to cut down on dirty dishes).
4. Add mashed tomato and kumquat to the pot, stir a few times and start adding water. I usually use the adding water step as an opportunity to clean out my ingredient bowls and not waste the last bits (get the last of that delicious mashed tomato off the sides and into the soup!). I just fill up my pot to a reasonable level, but since there are several types of cooking pots out there, I doubt that is going to help you much. This recipe should make three bowls of soup, so use as much water as would fill three and a half bowls (to allow for evaporation and pasta absorption). You can always add more if necessary. If you are using a liquid soup base, use that much less water.
   
5. Bring to a boil.
   
6. Slice two crosses into each of the three kumquats you have left. The cuts should be just deep enough to cut beyond the peel and each cross should be on opposite sides of the fruit. Add these to the soup.
7. Add salt, pepper, sage, turmeric and oregano and let cook for about five minutes and taste the broth to see if you need to add anything. (I keep a small sauce dish on hand for this purpose).
   
8. After you have the flavor right, add your noodles and continue cooking until the noodles are tender.
9. Remove the three whole kumquats.
   
10. Serve and eat.
11. Do NOT spill all over the counter!

Okay, so you may spill it all over the counter if you really have to, but just remember that you're going to have to clean that mess up.

I didn't spill this soup, but last week's chicken noodle was almost a waste.

I shall leave you with a picture of Toshiko and me from our Christmas party. Toshiko's the one in Christmas socks.

Kotatsu and Clear Soup with Japanese Clams

Today, I armed myself with new recipes and went to the grocery store. I was determined, today, to prepare some sort of seafood for dinner, be it octopus, clams, mackerel or ishitai (striped beakfish). Luckily, I had little choice in the matter, as most of the other aisles were still being stocked. There wasn't any ishitai (it's not one of the most common fishes we get here, but I see it in the grocery store once every few weeks). We can't get some of the ingredients for the octopus recipes I had on hand (dill or cloves) so I put that on hold until I can figure out some good substitutions. Mackerel was...well, I forgot my list of fish names written in kanji (the Chinese characters in the Japanese writing system), so I couldn't tell what fish was mackerel. We'll try this again some other time. Clams it was. I also managed to pick up a small bag of bay leaves. They were actually at the store this whole time, but I only just realized what they were. Part of the problem was that they were labeled in French, since the Japanese borrowed the French name of the herb (laurier). For those who don't know, a bay tree is also known as a laurel. I have been aware of the dual name of the bay/laurel for a long time, so I felt a little foolish that I hadn't realized what "laurier" was earlier. Especially since there was a picture of the leaves on the bag.

After dropping my groceries at home, I grabbed an umbrella (it's started to rain) and headed back out to go to our household goods store, Komeri. I picked up a cord for our kotatsu. A kotatsu is a low table with a heating element underneath. The top of the table is removable so that you can place a kotatsu blanket over the rest of the frame to keep the heat under the table. People then sit with their legs under the kotatsu to keep warm in the colder months. We have two of these. We didn't have any cords for either of them. So I picked one up and headed home. I would have bought two, but I wasn't sure if I had the right thing just yet.

On the way home, the sun was shining, and I tried a different route. Walking by the bay, I saw some flying fish jumping out of the water. It was pretty cool. I didn't have the camera with me (Nat had it for English recitation competition, which she may or may not write up a blog about later), but I have some pictures from the last time I was by the bay. Today was definitely more photogenic

When I got home, Nat was there! Yay! Apparently, today is some sort of holiday and her only duty at work was to attend the English recitation competition. So work was only a half-day!

Today's dinner was Japanese pumpkin cooked like acorn squash (that recipe with the brown sugar and butter and sometimes walnuts), clear soup with Japanese clams and sushi (if you get to the grocery store early, you can buy whole, uncut sushi rolls for much cheaper than the pre-cut ones).

For the soup, I basically used the recipe by Setsuko Yoshizuka at About.com, except I used green onion for the "garnish" and added some grated myoga. Mmmm! I spilled a little too much sake in it, but it was still pretty good.

For those wondering what myoga is, it's this stuff to the left, here. It's the sort of flower bud/sprout thing. Not the clams. It's sometimes called myoga ginger or Japanese wild ginger. I don't know if it's actually related to ginger or not. For the soup, I grated it really fine and let it simmer in the broth.

Supposedly, much of the myoga plant is toxic, but this part is considered safe. Still, I'm told that telling someone that they eat too much myoga in Japan is like asking someone if they ate paint chips as a child in the USA. We're going to play it safe and only eat a little bit...rarely.

We found a casserole dish. I don't really know why it's here. It doesn't fit in our microwave. We don't have an oven. I can't wait until I know how to get to the thrift store (or "recycle shop", as they call them here).