Since starting the new routine, we’ve been eating a lot more fish than before. I’m attributing that to the fact that I’m spending more time browsing for recipes so I’m prepared for my Thursday and am fired up by all the options I’m uncovering.
Meatless Monday
For the first two weeks of this I was thinking ahead, with a number of alternatives to choose from. For some reason last Monday seemed to catch me by surprise (perhaps it was the public holiday on Tuesday? The back-to-work on Wednesday?) and I felt completely uninspired by the thought of having to shop on a non-market day. I put a call out online and Daniel came back with this suggestion for a simple soup.
Usually you’d make this soup with pork/chicken stock and put in slices of thinly sliced pork into it, but I reckon it would work just as well without it.
You’ll need vegetable stock, silken tofu, peas (frozen will do), seaweed, and 2 eggs.
Cut the tofu into small cubes. Heat up the stock until it’s boiling, then turn down to simmer. Put in seaweed and peas and let them cook through – you don’t want them green, you want them kind of dark green and mushy to bite. Then the tofu goes in and let that warm through in the soup. Finally, beat the eggs, and then slowly put in into the soup in a thin, steady stream. You want the egg to congeal into threads.
The soup, a dish of Chinese broccoli or similar vegetable, and a bowl of rice, and you’ll be happy.
Let me know how you go if you give it a go.
This appealed to me straight away, however I was too lazy to make some vegie stock (I know! How lazy can a person be?) so I decided to use some red miso paste. Thinking about miso put me in a slightly more Japanesey frame of mind, so I picked up some enokitake when I popped into Minh Phat for the tofu. In the end, I skipped the eggs for a couple of reasons. For a start, I figured that the miso, tofu and enokitake provided enough protein and the eggs might be a richness too far. I was also unsure of how the eggs would affect the miso – I love the way miso soup separates and develops little grainy clouds and thought the eggs might bind it a bit too much. No scientific basis for this fear, but I decided to skip them anyway.
It was good to give the rice cooker another workout and the soup served over the rice was a really satisfying – and super simple – meal.
