Light Japanese Fare Tonight
I took a couple of liberties with the recipes here, but I had a definite taste for Japanese-style food.
First, I wanted to make Hot Spring Egg on Asparagus. This calls for a very soft-boiled egg, like you could produce in a well-known Japanese hot spring. However, our eggs are fresh from the backyard chickens, so would not let go of their shells readily, so I settled for light hard-boiled. The fresh asparagus was lightly blanched and dressed with a mixture of extra virgin olive oil, mayonnaise, and sushi vinegar.
For the soup I liked the idea of Cabbage and Bacon Miso Soup, but, being Jewish, bacon does not cut it. I then used a nice smoked trout instead. In addition to the trout, the soup contains sliced cabbage and kombu/shiitake/katsuobushi dashi and miso.
Next, we had "Tatsuta-age" Deep Fried Chilean Sea Bass. The recipe called for mackerel, but fine, Japanese mackerel is not available to me, so I went to visit our local fish-monger and came away with some very fresh Chilean Sea Bass belly. First, parboiled bamboo shoots were sliced to bite-size and marinaded in mushroom infused soy sauce, and grated ginger, then coated in corn starch and deep fried. The sea bass was prepared in the same way as the bamboo shoot. The sea bass was dusted with Bhutanese sansyo pepper, and the bamboo shoot was dusted with aonori.
Finally, we enjoyed some quality Japanese rice, sprinkled with black sesame seeds.
Enjoy,
Rich P