more miso, please.

Ever since my last going-out-for-sushi excursion, I’ve been wanting to make my own miso soup. How hard can it be? Miso paste, dashi, some fun tasty things like tofu/seaweed/shitakes/green onions.

All I needed were the ingredients to make dashi: bonito flakes and kombu seaweed. So off I went to United (where I procured salmon for gravlax not too long ago) thought it ended up taking me two visits because they were out of stock for me to make stock. I only wish I knew where to buy bonito flakes in a larger, less cutesy (small individually packed packages) format. Where does the industry go shopping for Japanese ingredients? I certainly can’t complain, though, since I found the stuff in LondONT.

an at home dinner date

Ever since dining at Casa Tapas and Zumaia (which has sadly closed its doors recently), the boy has been itching to recreate some of the lovely food. Namely some sort of red-pepper-goat-cheese concoction, and a garlic-saffron-tomato soup. Last Thursday, I definitely wasn’t going to complain if he wanted to whip up a feast of sorts. Served with lovely grilled potatoes from the George Foreman and a small plateful of kalamata olives, we washed down the meal with some of the boy’s wine (he’ll need to do another order soon, that’s for sure).

Note the proud display on the recently acquired dining table. (mostly) Functional, though a little rickety, and not the most aesthetically pleasing thing. But (mostly) functional. Which is fantastic!

cornmeal crusted bread & potato and leek soup

Ten whole dollars worth of smoked salmon was consumed within a six hour span on Friday – make that fourteen dollars, actually, as the prompt grocery purchase was spawned by a super sale. Decadent? Definitely. The first encounter was during lunch: smoked salmon draped on cream cheese on the boy’s homemade bread pan bread. Yes, the boy baked again, much to my delight, and did something to the effect of this:

1 cup milk
1/3 – 1/2 cup water
1 heaping tsp yeast
1 1/2 tbs brown sugar
2 3/4 cup all purp. flour
1/4 whole wheat flour
1 heaping tbs cornmeal
1 tbs butter
1 tbs olive oil
3/4 tsp salt

Throw ingredients into the bread maker (on the dough cycle) – once the cycle is complete, take the dough, and thoroughly crust it with more cornmeal. In the meantime, warm the oven briefly so it is slightly above room temperature: this allows for the bread to rise in an ideal environment. Place the dough into a bread pan, into the oven, and allow it to rise until it is about 1 in above bread pan. Then, she is ready to be baked at 350F for 30 min or so, until crust becomes golden.

The rest of the smoked salmon was consumed during dinner – some more on toast, but more interestingly, some in the potato leek soup I tried to improvise. As a straight up potato leek soup, it faired okay, though I am of a belief that mediocre potato leek soups are easy to come by. I’m unsure of how to zing the soup, but certainly, duck stock will not be used next time: a little bit of a waste, since the stock itself was indiscernible (another grocery run will arm us with chicken necks and backbones again).