Foodstuffs

Since people have submitted a (barely) adequate number of verses for my jazz experiment, I'll bless you all with a terrible food update. This one will center on weird but normal for Japan ingredients like aburaage, fried tofu:

I've cut it up into bits so as to put into miso soup, but it also affords you the opportunity to see the sickly white color of tofu. The outside is that yellow color and has a weird packing foam like texture, but it's pretty good.

I also sometimes put this in miso soup. It's made from fish and probably some other stuff, but it has a rubber like texture. I forget what it is called, and the package doesn't say, but it's pretty common in soup and such.


Don't forget your sea vegetables. This is wakame, 若布, a kind of seaweed. The characters literally mean "young cloth," which I suppose is kind of weird. Here it's in its dried form. I keep a bag of the dried stuff so as to put in, you guessed it, miso soup, but it's common fresh, too. I just can't use very much of it by myself, so it's better to keep the dried stuff with its seemingly infinite shelf life.


You can't really tell from the picture here, but this is the wakame after being put in some warm water for a few minutes. It becomes soft and slippery and great for soup, salad, vinegared stuff, whatever.


Here's some nori strips. That's another kind of seaweed, the kind that is wrapped around sushi. It's also good for on top of some kinds of noodles or rice or just to eat like chips. These little strips are for putting on top of stuff, though. The kind for sushi comes in bigger rectangular sheets, and there's a triangle-cut kind that is for making onigiri, rice balls.


I don't have any kombu, the only other type of seaweed I can think of off the top of my head because I don't know how to use that. I think sometimes they candy it, actually. This is some pickled uguisuna, for which I can't find a translation, so it's probably either a variety name or a regional name. Uguisu, 鶯, means Japanese bush warbler, and na, 菜, means vegetable, so there you go. This stuff is pretty good. What's weird is Japanese people will always ask me if I can eat Japanese pickles, after they ask if I can eat natto and sashimi, but unlike those foods, I've yet to find a Japanese person who actually likes pickles. Some people will eat them, but nobody really seems to like them. I'm a fan and make my own out of daikon sometimes.


And here's the star of the show, miso! It's made from soybeans in what actually seems to be a pretty simple, if long, process. Apparently, you basically just smash the beans, make the bits into balls, and add some salt and koji, some sort of microorganism. Then you leave it for a few months and it turns into this. Some people may have had it. I think it's probably available, at least in the form of soup, in the US, but just hasn't caught on. I don't know why. It's got a great salty flavor and it's not like we're going to run out of soybeans any time soon.

Miso is one of the essential Japanese flavors, and all sort of stuff is flavored with it, from ramen to snack foods to pickles to fish. Japanese people generally seem to love it and can't live without their daily intake of it as soup, at least around here. It is actually derived from a Chinese food called djang, as I recall, but only sort of distantly. Djang refers basically to a kind of sauce which is made by fermenting various stuff, often fish or vegetables. The Japanese took the idea, removed all the spices and applied it to soy beans because that's more wabi or maybe sabi. I'm not up on all my Japanese aesthetics.

What else can you do with soybeans? This:




Natto, straight out of the supposedly-but-not-actually-recyclable box!




Natto always seems to come with some kind of sauce, called tare, in convenient little packets. This particular one is shiso, which translates as perilla, I guess. It's a kind of leaf with a sort of astringent taste that they often use as an edible garnish for certain kinds of food. There's also a little packet of soy sauce that you mix in, as well, but I didn't film that.




Mix it on up and eat with rice. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and movies. That's what Friday nights are for.