Creamy Smoked Salmon and Potato Soup

This tasty and pretty soup is a delicate shade of pink, highlighted with wisps of fresh green dill. 







Ingredients (serves 4 as a starter)
1 onion, sliced
500g potatoes in their skins
70g smoked salmon
1 x 150g pack of silken tofu
1 tsp olive oil
fresh dill
freshly grated black pepper

Method

• Caramelize the onion in the olive oil until golden brown.
• Meanwhile cook the potatoes in boiling water for about 20 minutes.  Drain and cool under cold running water.
• Break up the potato in the saucepan, add the onions, smoked salmon, tofu and dill.
• In batches, blend all the ingredients together in a blender with water to the desired consistency.
• Reheat to serve.

Spam, tofu and potato salad

This was tonight's spam dinner, and very tasty it was too!  Those of you who are sharp-eyed will notice a green olive in the bowl, that does not appear in the ingredients...  Yes, I love olives but they just were too much in this recipe.  The recipe is much better without them.

A note on the mayonnaise...  This should be a mayonnaise that you could enjoy on a teaspoon on its own, no cheap salad dressing here!  I recommend Hellmanns, sold in Japan under the Best Foods label.


Ingredients (serves 1)
New potatoes
100g spam, chopped
100g firm tofu, chopped
dollop of mayonnaise
good teaspoon wholegrain mustard
2-3 chopped garlic chives (nira in Japan)

Method

• Boil the potatoes, drain, then chop roughly.
• Mix the mayonnaise and mustard in a small bowl, then stir into the hot potatoes.
• Stir in the spam, tofu and nira.
• Serve warm or cold.

Spinach, Avocado and Tofu Smoothie

OK, so as from this last week, I'm on a bit of a health kick, and feeling really energetic all day as a result!

This very green smoothie really is filling! It also supplies about 20% RDA calcium, nearly 200% RDA Vitamin A, about 70% RDA Vitamin C and about 30% RDA iron.



Nutrition Data
Calories: 272
Protein: 13.1g
Carbohydrate: 17.8g
Fat: 19g
Fibre: 8.9g

Ingredients (serves 1)
120g spinach
1/2 avocado
150g soft silken tofu

Method

• Wash the spinach and tear roughly into the blender bowl.
• Add a little water and blend until finely chopped.
• Add the avocado and silken tofu and blend until smooth, adding water until it's a consistency you like.
• Drink immediately!

If you like spinach, you may also like to look at the Healing Foods Event - Spinach.
Also my previous spinach posts:
Spinach, Cucumber and Avocado Salad
Sesame Sauteed Spinach


Tips

• So now you have half an avocado that you need to keep without it going brown. Don't brush with lemon juice, but keep the half with the stone and wrap it in foil, making sure that the foil is pressed down well over the cut side. Store in the fridge for up to 2 days.
• If you don't want to drink it immediately, then store it in a vacuum flask. This keeps it cool and dark, so that you don't lose too many nutrients.
  

Yuba

It's time to introduce this little known food - yuba.

Yuba is sometimes known as tofu skin, but in fact is just the skin that is formed when you boil soy milk.

It can wrap fillings and be fried, or eaten on its own like this with a little soy sauce and ginger or wasabi. It's really creamy and delicious!

Kenchinjiru, Japanese Zen Buddhist vegetable soup

I got this delicious recipe from the excellent Just Hungry website. Very little was changed - just the type of stock (not having kombu dashi, I used niboshi dashi) and the quantities of vegetables - I didn't want to be eating it for the rest of the week! However I didn't scale it exactly by half, using the same quantities of tofu, konnyaku, satoimo and burdock (gobo)... My half quantities would serve 3 people. I just ate it on its own and it was filling, but you could have some brown rice with it. No nutritional information for this recipe, but it is very low in calories and fat and very high in fibre.

However, unfortunately this recipe is going to be difficult/impossible in Britain unless you live close to a very good Japanese supermarket and can get burdock root, or unless you grow it! And you're certainly going to have to use normal white potatoes! But I certainly recommend trying this kind of clear soy sauce soup with vegetables, konnyaku and tofu - it is very tasty and filling.

Toshikoshi Soba

In Japan, on New Year's Eve, it is traditional to eat soba (buckwheat noodles). This link explains some of the traditional beliefs about toshikoshi soba http://www.jpn-miyabi.com/Vol.12/toshikoshi-e.html.

I didn't eat soba on New Year's Eve, but I did have it for dinner tonight! This isn't a traditional soba recipe - this is just what I wanted to add to my soba... Again apologies for the photo, the colours really aren't coming out in artificial light.


Nutrition Data
Calories: 458
Protein: 34g
Carbohydrate: 55g
Fat: 13g
Dietary Fibre: 5g

Ingredients (serves 1)
60g dried soba (buckwheat noodles)
400ml of dashi (stock)
1 heaped teaspoon of red miso
200g firm tofu
50g cooked thick slice of gammon, chopped
1 teaspoon dried wakame seaweed

Method

• Heat the stock until boiling, turn down the heat to simmer and add the soba noodles. Cook for 5 minutes until al dente.
• Meanwhile, cube the tofu and add to the pan along with the wakame and chopped gammon. Stir in the miso and serve.
  

Is this really tofu?!

A friend recently gave me a souvenir from Sendai. Sendai is famous for beef tongue, but this was tofu marinated with onions and soy sauce to have the flavour and texture of beef. Delicious and very unusual!

Tofu and Wakame Miso Soup

It was about time that I put a recipe for my miso soup on here. Recently, a friend of mine gave me some homemade niboshi dashi which is a dried stock mixture of grated dried anchovies and grated kombu. It's best to use a fish stock for this recipe if you substitute, although I've used chicken gravy granules before successfully enough...

Servings for this recipe vary... I had it all for myself for breakfast, but depending on when you're eating it and what you're eating it with, it could probably serve up to 3 people!

Nutrition Data
The thing I would note most with this is that whilst miso soup is very healthy, and much healthier than many other food choices available, it is worth choosing low salt varieties of stock and miso. This nutrition data is only for the tofu and the miso, and with the assumption that you eat it all!
Calories: 146
Protein: 10.5
Fat: 7.2g
Carbohydrate: 10g
Dietary Fibre: 2g

Ingredients
400 ml of dashi stock (use the instructions according to your recipe)
6 pieces of wakame seaweed
150g silken tofu
1 heaped teaspoon of miso

Method

• I made the dashi by putting 2 rounded teaspoons of the homemade dashi in a saucepan with 400ml of water, and heating it to simmering point.
• Whilst it is heating, cube the tofu and add this, together with 6 pieces of wakame.
• Take out a tablespoon of dashi and mix the miso in this, then quickly stir it in just as the dashi is simmering.
• Serve immediately.

Note
If I was doing this properly or for other people, I would have strained the dashi before adding the other ingredients, but I don't usually bother when I'm being quick.

Mabo-doufu or Spicy Beef and Tofu on Rice

As always, I am cooking with minimum ingredients so this is my version of mabo-doufu, or spicy beef and tofu. Often recipes include sake, and chicken stock. It's eaten hot, served on steaming rice. This is a Chinese-Szechuan dish, very popular in Japan. This looks to be quite high in fat - I wasn't sure how lean my beef was, although I chose a pack that looked lean, for the nutrition data I probably overestimated the fat content, calling it 75% lean meat, 25% fat.

Nutrition Data (per serving, including rice)
Calories: 658
Protein: 33g
Fat: 34g
Carbohydrate: 66g
Dietary Fibre: 6g

Ingredients (serves 2)
1 tsp olive oil
1 teaspoon ginger paste
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
3 spring onions, snipped (reserve 2 teaspoons of green top for a garnish)
2 heaped teaspoon of spicy bean paste (toubanjan）/you could probably use a mixture of chilli flakes and sauce
200g minced beef/ you could use pork or TVP
2 heaped teaspoons red miso
300g of silken tofu, chopped into chunks
2 tbsp reduced salt soy sauce
100ml water
2 tsp of cornflour or potato starch mixed with a little water
400g cooked brown rice to serve


Method

• Cook the rice according to instructions.
• Put the olive oil in a small pan, with the garlic and spring onions. Fry over a low heat for about 2 minutes, add the ginger paste and spicy bean paste and fry for another minute until thick.
  
• Add the ground beef and fry until it changes colour. The beef will quickly produce more fat for frying. Stir in the miso paste.
• Stir in the water, soy sauce and tofu being careful not to break the tofu too much; cover and cook over a medium heat for about 10 minutes.
• Stir in the cornflour paste and heat for about a minute more until thickened slightly.
• Put the hot cooked rice into bowls, and top with the mabo-doufu. Sprinkle with the reserved spring onion tops.
• Serve immediately.
  

Onion Topped Tofu on Bean Sprouts and Leek

Many recipes come about not through planning of good combinations, but accident. Today I discovered that all these ingredients desperately needed using up, so...

Much to my surprise, it was delicious!





Nutrition Data
Calories 427
Protein 31.2g
Carbohydrate 31.7
Fat 23.9
Fibre 7.9g

Ingredients
200g pack of firm tofu
100g bean sprouts
1 leek, chopped
2 tablespoons of onion & garlic bruschetta topping (from Jupiter), or any other onion topping
1 teaspoon olive oil
Lemon zest to garnish (I keep some in a small bag in the freezer)

Method

• Stir fry the bean sprouts and chopped leek in the olive oil. Put on a plate.
• Wrap the tofu block in a double thickness of kitchen paper and microwave on high for 1 minute. Put on top of the vegetables.
• Heat the onion topping and spoon over the tofu. Garnish with lemon zest.
• Serve immediately.
  

Sesame Fried Tofu with Mushrooms and Salami

This is a very filling and tasty main meal - it will definitely set you up for the rest of the day! It could be made into a vegetarian dish by adding some kind of chilli sauce to the topping.

Nutrition Information
Calories 746
Protein 42.9g
Carbohydrate 73.1g
Fat 34.6g
Fibre 8.5g



Ingredients (serves 1)
1 pack (200g) firm tofu
1 tablespoon each of water, and mirin
1 teaspoon of soy sauce
20g salami, chopped
30g mushrooms, chopped
70g brown rice
30g cooked edamame (soy beans) or green peas

Method

• Start to cook the rice and prepare all the ingredients.
• 15 minutes before the end of rice cooking time, heat 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in a frying pan.
• Meanwhile, slice the tofu lengthwise so that you have two large, but thin slices. Wrap each slice in kitchen paper and microwave on medium high for 1 minute to drain it.
  
• Add the tofu to the pan, and leave on a medium heat for 3 minutes until golden brown without disturbing it. Turn the tofu onto the other side and fry for another 3 minutes.
• Remove from the pan and place on kitchen paper to drain some of the oil.
• Fry the salami in the remaining oil, then add the mushrooms and stir fry until just tender (about 3 minutes).
  
• Add 1 tablespoon each of water and mirin, and 1 teaspoon of soy sauce. Mix in and heat rapidly until the sauce has reduced.
• Put the hot rice mixed with edamame or peas on a plate, arrange the slices of tofu, and top with the mushooms and salami.
• Serve immediately.
  

Goya Champuru

My all time favourite food! This picture was one I took a couple of Christmases ago... Goya champuru is really easy to cook, and goya is a very cheap vegetable in summer. It's just beginning to come down in price to under 200 yen for a large goya now, so I'm starting to eat it more again. In the summer, it's only about 70yen.

Goya is also known as bitter gourd. It's very high in vitamin C. Usually vitamin C is destroyed when you heat it, but with this vegetable it isn't.

Unfortunately, goya/bitter gourd/nigauri is going to be hard to come by in the UK as it needs hot weather to grow, you might be able to find it in a Japanese supermarket...

This is my recipe, I don't use oil or fatty ham in my version... I also use a lot of goya, and it's very filling! It takes about 5 minutes to cook!


Ingredients (serves 1)
1 goya
200g pack firm or extra firm tofu, drained
1-2 teaspoons of soy sauce
60g of parma type ham, or smoked salmon
1 egg

Method

1. Halve the goya lengthways and scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon. Slice into 1/2cm semi-circles. Put in a saucepan
   
2. Wrap the tofu in about 3 sheets of kitchen paper and microwave on high for about 2 minutes to drain. Cut into 12 cubes and add to the saucepan.
3. Pour the soy sace over the tofu and turn the heat to high. Add the ham or smoked salmon and stir fry until the liquid has just about evaporated.
4. Crack in the egg and stir everything thoroughly until the egg has set.
5. Best served immediately, although I often cool it and then take it to work for lunch.

Note: Apparently if you put the cut goya in a colander and sprinkle with salt and leave it for 15 minutes before washing, this removes some of the bitterness. I skip this step! In Okinawa and Hawaii, they often use Spam and oil to cook it, which also counters the bitterness. I love the taste of goya and often eat it raw during the summer.

Tofu Vegetable Scramble

OK, this is a lot more delicious than it looks! I had this for lunch today before a training afternoon - good for keeping your energy levels up!






Nutrition Information
Calories: 440
Protein: 40g
Carbohydrate: 27g
Fat: 23g
Dietary Fibre: 8g


Ingredients (serves 1)
1 medium carrot (about 60g)
1 leek (about 90g)
1 x 200g pack of firm or extra firm tofu
1 egg
olive oil for sauteing
1 - 2 tbsp of dashi stock or other stock
about 1 teaspoon each of soy sauce and mirin (the mirin could be omitted)
lemon zest or spring onions to garnish
any other vegetables you like!

Method

1. Drain the tofu of as much water as you can. This can be done quickly by wrapping the tofu block in 3 sheets of kitchen paper and microwaving on high for a couple of minutes.
2. Saute the vegetables and crumbled tofu for about 5 minutes over a medium heat.
   
3. Stir in the stock, soy sauce and mirin and continue cooking until most of the liquid has evaporated. Then add the beaten egg and spring onions if using and cook whilst stirring until the consistency is like scrambled eggs. Garnish with lemon zest.
   
4. Serve hot or at room temperature.