Cooking Real Japanese
03 February 2009
Since I got back to Tokyo after Christmas holidays I’ve been digging myself deep into my Japanese language studies again. Having finished the basic grammar textbook before I left, I have now started with a whole lot of new topics in my lessons, with a stronger focus on refining my expressions for more natural speech, and enhancing my pool of kanji to improve my reading skills.
All excited, I went to the book shop and bought a pile of magazines in Japanese, as well as a book titled "Reading Real Japanese", filled with short stories of contemporary Japanese writers in their original version, but with reading aids for the kanji signs (they usually only appear in children’s books) and explanations of all difficult passages in English. Even like that the stories are still quite a toughie for me, but I am (even if at slow pace…) eager to read them, and diligently write down all the new vocabulary.
Reading magazines, equipped with my wonderful "denshijisho" (or electronic dictionary) allowing me to decipher new kanji characters, is more of a diverting thing. Of course, at the current stage I am not quite into economic analyses, but rather the latest gossip about celebrities and fashion, preferably with lots of pictures and short and simple bits of text.
But my favourites are, unsurprisingly, cooking magazines, of which there are plenty. I browsed quite a few of them at the news agent, and not all of them seemed to be to my taste, some of them being too "messy" in their appearance, some also including too many "western style" (or something like that) dishes, which I am not exactly looking for in Japan. But then I spotted a beautifully illustrated, strong-paged magazine by Japan’s "home-style-cooking" celebrity chef Harumi Kurihara, of whom I already own 2 books, and whose recipes I admire for their simplicity, the taste yet always hitting right the spot. This magazine ("harumi", vol. 10, winter 2009) was exactly the right choice for me.
At home I took my time to study all the recipes bit by bit, and marked quite a few that made my mouth water. Among them the "Sesame Miso Soup", which for once I prepared exactly following the instructions, without any alterations (very unlike me – I usually can’t help adding my own personal touch to everything I cook). The soup was sensational! I should just have trusted Harumi’s recommended measures – I was unsure if 1/4 of a liter would be enough for 2 and made about double the amount, which I now know is waaay too much, unless you want to eat the soup as a single main dish. It is just so rich with all the sesame in it…
It was hard to actually take an appealing picture of this, but I assure you, the soup was delicious!
Sesame Miso Soup
| serves 4 |
| 500ml dashi |
| 3 tablespoons miso paste |
| 80g toasted sesame seeds |
| 200g silken tofu |
| some shredded nori leaves and shichimi to garnish |
In a non-stick frying pan, slightly re-toast the sesame, then grind it well using pestle and mortar; it works best using a "suribachi", a Japanese mortar that is grooved on the inside.
Prepare the dashi broth.
Keep the dashi at a temperature just below boiling and add the miso paste; stir well until dissolved. Stir in the ground sesame, and rinse the mortar with some of the soup to fully catch the sesame remaining there. Coarsely dice the tofu and add it to the soup. To serve, garnish with some shredded nori leaves and shichimi to taste.