Wakame Salad Recipe for Cheats

Victoria — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Here's another Japanese recipe for cheats. I have sort of made up the recipe myself. You can serve it as a salad / appetiser, but I usually just eat it on its own. It's really easy to make, I call it my 'instant noodles', and it is served cold, which makes it great for summer or for lunchboxes that you don't care to warm up. And most of all, it is incredibly healthy, low-fat, and yet delicious! (And it's vegetarian too! If you skip the Bonito, that is.) Main ingredients:

2 bundles of buckwheat noodles (this recipe makes 2 portion). This is the brown noodle you can find in a Asian/Japanese grocery store. It is supposed to be supremely healthy.
1 packet of Wakame (Japanese dried kelp) approx 5g
200g sliced celery stalk

For the garnish

Many many sesame seed for sprinkling
1 packet of Bonito (Dried tuna flake) approx 5g - Optional

For the dressing

Approx 2 tablespoon of Sushi Vinegar. Both plain and seasoned ones are fine.
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon dark soysauce
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil

Here's how to make it:

Pour Wakame into a cup and add some water, and then leave it to soak for about 10 mins or more
Boil and cook the noodles (usually about 5-10mins). When the noodles are soft and look done, remove from stove, and take the pot to your sink. Run the noodles over cold tap water until it is cold. Obviously don't let it fall out of the pot! You can use a colander if it helps. The idea is to get the noodles cold. Use ice if desperate. Then leave the noodles to drain.
While waiting for the noodles to boil you should have chopped up the celery stalks.
Toast the sesame seeds by dry frying them on a frying pan (no oil, no water), until one or two start to pop. It is quite important to use toasted sesame seed, as they are so much more delicious! You can toast them in a huge batch and keep in an air-tight container for future use.
Now mix the dressing ingredients up in an air-tight container, cover up and then shake it like cocktail till all the sugar dissolves.
Put your noodles in a big salad bowl, drain the wakame and add it to the bowl, add the celery as well. Pour dressing over it, mix well, now you can sprinkle the toasted sesame seeds, and crown it with the bonito!

The bonito is only optional. However when used it does add a another dimension to the salad, and it makes the salad look all the more impressive if you are serving it to guests. Just have to note that they get soggy really quickly, so you should only add them right when you are serving. The ingredients might look daunting at first, but they are rather useful basic Japanese ingredients which you could use to make many other dishes or use them in fusion with your regular cooking. Also all of the ingredients in this recipe except for the celery, are ingredients you can keep in your cupboard for a long time, which makes this recipe great for times when you are caught without anything in your fridge. You can also substitute the celery with other salad type ingredients. Play around with it! I make this for my lunchbox as well. You can keep it for a day or so in the fridge.

Tamagoyaki Recipe for Cheats

Victoria — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Tamagoyaki is the traditional Japanese omelette that you sometimes find inside sushi rolls. It's that sweet yellow thing that perhaps you didn't know was actually eggs. Basically it is eggs with lotsa sugar carefully cooked and rolled up in a special square pan. You would normally need a square pan, and some Japanese ingredients like mirin (sweet rice wine), and dashi (stock made of seaweed and tuna flakes) to make the tamagoyaki. I've found a lazy way to make tamagoyaki to impress my British friends, and they can't seem to tell the difference. That should be good enough for most of us, just don't serve it to a Japanese! So here's what you need:

Eggs x 3
Sugar - 1 heaped teaspoon, more if the tamagoyaki is to be wrapped in a sushi roll, and less if eaten on its own, or more if you are sugar addict
Soysauce - 1/2 teaspoon. Don't worry if you don't have this. It doesn't make much difference.
A non-stick frying pan that isn't tiny (abt 20cm diameter maybe)
Some vegetable oil (if your non-stick pan lies about being non-sticky)

Here are the steps:

Mix the eggs, sugar and soysauce in a bowl. Don't beat the eggs, just stir till sugar dissolves.
Heat the pan on medium to low heat, oil it with abit of the vegetable oil just slightly. Careful not to add too much oil, otherwise you'll end up with fried eggs.
Pour approx a third of the egg mixture to cover the pan thinly. Tilt the pan if needed to get the egg mixture to spread evenly.
When the mixture looks slightly done, but not completely done, roll/fold the mixture from the back of the pan (furthest from you) towards you. Then push the whole thing towards the back of the pan again for the next layer.
Pour some more egg mixture to cover the pan thinly again. Repeat the rolling. It is important to push the rolled egg to the back of the pan when you are done rolling at each stage so that the next rolling can continue in the same direction. That will become obvious when you are doing it.
Repeat until you have no more eggs left. Try to keep the last layer prettiest.
If you want to use the tamagoyaki in your sushi roll, you'll have to wait for it to cool first, then slice it up. That's when I gobble up the unsightly corners (since we used a round pan instead of a square one) which are quite delicious.

This is very simple to make, and there are many ways you can play around with the recipe, such as introducing other ingredients to the middle layers while rolling the egg mixture. I have tried adding seaweed flakes which worked out quite well, or diced/sliced ginger, or spinach, or cheese. Play around with it! I'll put up some pictures when I have the chance. Meanwhile, you can just google for tamagoyaki to see how it should look like.

Epicurean

Wakame Salad Recipe for Cheats

Tamagoyaki Recipe for Cheats