Not Quite Emergency Dinner

Regular readers of this blog will know that I love discovering new emergency dinner recipes – for my purposes defined as something quick and straightforward to cook that can be made easily out of things already in the cupboard and will prompt me to cook when either I don’t have the energy for something more complex or when the something more complex has crashed and burned – and especially examples of that genre that can be upgraded to something a bit more fancy or filling as energy or inspiration allows. I’m also greatly in favour of the kind of pre-prepared ingredients that you can keep in the cupboard to use as a base or a jumping off point for cooking something more adventurous or nutritious. I much prefer to buy one pre-prepared item – fresh pasta parcels or a jar of sauce or paste, or frozen dumplings or frozen veg – that I can then base a whole dish around than buying a complete ready-made meal to put in the oven or microwave. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t use them – they serve a purpose, I just wouldn’t want to get dependent on them.) Strangely the older I get the more I resent meal kits, which seems like they should be the perfect half-way house between those two things but in reality almost always turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth, a false economy. 

The other night, I saw a gentle and, well, I can only call it an extremely appetising film. (The Zen Diary) The film centred around a widowed author, who’d been a novice Buddhist monk in his youth, writing a book about the food he’d learned to cook there. There’s a lot of food in this film. Lots of cooking, growing, foraging and preserving vegetables. This is a film to eat well ahead of seeing, because I was absolutely ravenous by the time it finished. I was supposed to be having the rest of a packet of popcorn cauliflower that I had in the fridge, but whatever I’d originally planned to eat with that just wasn’t going to cut the mustard. It did occur to me that battered popcorn cauliflower wasn’t a million miles away from how you’d prep veg for making Katsu curry, and that I had a couple of packets of katsu curry sauce that needed used up. So I made some rice – just enough for one – and cooked it with a handful of frozen edamame – I was too hungry to make proper Japanese sticky rice, but it did get both boiled and steamed – cooked the cauliflower in the oven, and heated the sauce. While looking for the sauce in the cupboard a wee jar of Japanese pickled cucumbers – bought after several failed attempts at pickling my own cucumbers in an attempt to confirm if it was my skills or just a thing that lots of people liked but that I didn’t – so I plated it up neatly and served it with some pickles on the side. It was ridiculously good. Obviously I was both hungry and in the perfect mood for the kind of food that I’d made, but even so, there was no logical reason for it to be as good as it was, clearly it was just a combination of factors coming together perfectly. I’m delighted to have found a new dish to make that is a nice half-way house between something I find delicious to eat but really fiddly to make, and something shop bought that tastes comforting but uninspiring. Also I was pleased to discover that it was my own pickling technique at fault – it could have gone either way, I don’t like gherkins – but as I enjoyed the pickled cucumbers I’m going to take another run at making my own. I was planning on having another go at growing my own cucumbers this year, and if that goes well, I’ll have enough to justify faffing around with pickling! 

Wagamama Adventures

Sneaking in before the end of the year, I have one last challenge post to share. I’d picked out three recipes from my Wagamama recipe book – partly as a give this book one last try to see if it’s actually worth it’s shelf-space – when I compiled my list for this year, and when I tackled the first one at the end of October I thought, cooking all three of them and writing them up would be a fund Nablopomo post to make! Given the date on this post, you can probably guess how well that went, but I’ve managed to get them all cooked before the end of the year, so I’m going to count that as a win overall!

First up on the list was Yasai Donetabe, unfortunately this was everything I feared from one of these recipes. There’s a lot of ingredients, a lot of really specific prep to do and in the end it was just fine. Not brilliant, not terrible, just fine. I don’t even have that much to say about it, it was just underwhelming, an awful lot of effort for a decidedly average stir-fry. A not very auspicious start to my project.  

Next up was a dish I knew rather bettet. Yasai Cha Han is one of my favourite dishes off Wagamama’s restaurant menu. When I used to referee roller derby, it was my favourite post-match, pre-train dinner, if the game was in Aberdeen. Tasty, filling and easy to eat on a train, if I was cutting it fine and needed to do takeaway. When I was making with list of recipes to try this year, I knew this one had to be on that list. Given how faffy so many of the dishes in this recipe book are, I kept putting it off, what if I spent ages making it and then it was disappointing? After many a disastrous attempt at béchamel and carbonara, and how close my attempt at ice-cream came to being custard, I’m also a bit way of any dish that involves adding eggs to an already hot dish. But having been thwarted in my attempt to go to Wagamamas on my recent trip to Aberdeen, I dug out the recipe and was surprised by how deceptively straight forward it seemed. Essentially it’s just rice, button mushrooms, tofu, baby corn, mangetout, spring onions, soy sauce and eggs. How hard could it be?

Not very hard at all apparently. I think this is a contender for the most straight-forward and satisfying recipe I’ve tried from their book. You cook the rice separately and leave it to rest while you stir-fry the vegetables and tofu. Once the veggies are cooked, add the rice – I recommend doing this in batches so it mixes through nicely – add the soy sauce, cook for another few minutes to get the rice nice and hot, and add the whisked egg, stir-frying vigorously for several minutes until the visible egg looks set/cooked. Serve. Absolutely delicious. 

Due to the twice cooked rice it isn’t an ideal bulk cook, but it was so quick and straight forward to make that I could easily half the recipe and just make enough for a quick lunch or tea before or after work. All the ingredients are things I usually have in the fridge, and if I don’t can pretty much guarantee can be picked up at the nearest supermarket on the way home from work if I’ve got a hankering. Definitely one I’ll be making again!

For part three I decided to make a change of plan. So originally, I’d planned to make Moyashi Soba for my list, but after my disappointing first recipe, I decided that this one was just too similar and picked another one from the vegetarian section that looked tasty. I picked Pumpkin Curry, I’ve made various curries involving curries over the year, and they’ve all been successful, to the extent that I think part of my reasoning for not picking it when I was making my initial list at the start of the year was that I didn’t really need another pumpkin curry recipe. However it was pumpkin season when I made the other recipes in this post and I had a couple of little pumpkins in the house so it seemed an ideal choice as a recipe that used something I had and needed to use up seemed like a recipe that would get cooked. Unfortunately life happened in November and the pumpkins got used for other recipes and the recipe didn’t get made. However, as the end of December loomed and I had this post two thirds written and taunting me, this seemed like an easy win for getting in one last new recipe. Also I’d bought a giant sweet potato for lasagna that I didn’t get to make – apparently there’s a shortage of frozen butternut squash this year – so in the absence of small pumpkins I substituted it. 

If I have one real complaint about the Wagamama recipes it’s their tendency to use small amounts of lots of different ingredients, which probably makes complete sense when you’re making things to order in a restaurant and you want it to be the same experience regardless of what chef’s on shift and which branch of the chain you’re sitting in. I do generally find things like six button mushrooms and four baby sweetcorn kinda cute and silly – those being ingredients that are pretty much fridge staples so I know I’ll use them up. But four 2.5 cm cubes of tofu? Really? Needless to say I just used more veg and left out the tofu because I’m not opening a packet just for that. 

This was the first recipe that I’ve seriously tackled one of the many Wagamama sauces they list at the start, and despite the fact that I definitely made it ‘wrong’ – I realised halfway through that it wasn’t one of their ‘bung all the cold ingredients together in a jug and combine’ sauces and had to improvise – but it turned out pretty tasty despite that, though I still need to try it the ‘correct’ way too. The recipe more generally turned out pretty well, not the instant success of Yasai Cha Han, but promising enough – and straightforward enough – that I’d be willing to give it another try to finesse it, before deciding if it’s getting a slot in my regular rotation of recipes. 

Missing Sushi

One of the things I miss most after moving to the Highlands, is Japanese food. I had been thoroughly spoiled in the Central Belt always being under an hour away from decent Japanese food.

One of my friends likes to entertain her work colleagues when we’re meeting up for sushi dates, telling them that she’s going for sushi with the friend that introduced her to sushi – and that said friend does not eat fish. Which is funny and also true. I don’t eat fish.

The first time I ate sushi, it was at Yo Sushi on Oxford Street and the friends I went with encouraged me to eat the veggie options and work up to the raw fish. I ate and loved the veggie options and chickened out of the raw fish, but I was determined so I went again when I was back in Glasgow, gave my friend the same advice and savoured all the veggie options while she fell head over heels for the raw fish element. Somewhere along the way I became a vegetarian and she was diagnosed with coeliac disease and sushi became our go to dinner choice because it easily accommodated both our dietary requirements.

Anyway…

I love and miss eating sushi on the regular – the M&S veggie sushi option is better than nothing but all too often a disappointment – and then I realised that I could just, learn to make it myself! I could get the ingredients and the kit fairly easily, learn to roll sushi – I got a book from the library and where that failed youtube came to my rescue – and then make myself cute little bento boxes of sushi for lunch. (Tasty and Instagrammable!)

I started out with sushi balls which are apparently the easiest to make, and while the first few fell apart a bit when eaten, I got the hang of compressing them properly and the later ones in the batch could be safely dipped in soy sauce without collapsing.

My second attempt was in making sushi rolls of the conical variety which seemed a manageable step up in complexity. However this was stymied by the fact that I’d accidentally picked up nori strips rather than sheets so they were too narrow for my purpose. And honestly for most practical purposes as far as I can tell, as they’re about the width you want a maki to be but not long enough to actually hold one together. Perhaps cut into even thinner strips to hold pressed sushi and it’s topping together? I’m not sure you could even make the little sushi boats – whose proper name I’ve forgotten – with them. So the experiment went on hold until I could get hold of some nori sheets.

Once I’d acquired more sensibly sized nori sheets I cooked up another batch of rice – much better consistency this time, and I suspect using actual sushi seasoning rather than making my own from the recipe book helped – and took another run at it. My sushi cones were less than successful, but after some trial and error with the sushi mat I think I’m beginning to get the hang of rolling maki – I have a tendency to over load my nori with rice and not leave room for the filling. But with practice I’m definitely getting better at both general rice handling and also at properly portioning out my rice. My rolls are still chunkier than I’d like but I can now make futomaki that I wouldn’t be ashamed to take to work in my lunchbox even if I’m not quite ready to serve them to anyone else yet!

I may however, need to invest in an actual sushi knife, either that or a whetstone, as apparently I don’t own a single knife sharp enough to be able to cut sushi rolls in an easy or neat fashion!

June Ingredients

This month has been quite successful on the trying lots of new ingredients. I managed to try five different ingredients this month – it would have been six but I couldn’t track down konbu powder. As I’ve been averaging one new recipe a month at the moment, I picked out one that included lots of different new ingredients that I either thought I would like or have eaten previously and know I like. White miso and tofu ramen with chilli garlic asparagus, had the advantage of being the kind of recipe that both looks and sounds exactly like something I would love, and has a pretty straightforward recipe. I love Miso/ramen soups but I’m always a little nervous of making my own, at least ones more complex than packet ramen with veggies and protein thrown in.

Edamame Beans
I had a bit of an adventure getting hold of these. The recipe blithely tells you that most major supermarkets stock podded and frozen edamame beans, and while that may be true in the south of England, here in the north of Scotland that is really not the case. I eventually tracked some down in the little Sainsbury’s (who actually proved to be a saviour for the recipe having many of the specific items that much bigger supermarkets did not) in the next town over. They are rather tasty lightly pan-fried as in this recipe, but overall I think I prefer them boiled. I love edamame beans, and I think I might make them a freezer staple as a more exciting alternative to peas. One of my favourite Yo Sushi dishes is a dish that appears to be essentially edamame cooked with sea-salt and spring onions so I fully intend to get myself some sea-salt and attempt to recreate it. Perhaps even with spring onions straight from my garden!

Soba Noodles

I generally prefer Udon noodles when I’m making or eating Japanese noodle dishes – my dad calls them worms, but the thick unctuous texture that puts him off, is my favourite part about them. Soba noodles do however work perfectly in ramen and these ones had a pleasingly whole-wheat flavour that I enjoyed and what worked particularly well in the soup.

Tahini Paste

I bought this with intent to make something from my Middle Eastern cookery book, but it turns out that it makes a good addition to soup base. I know some people who use it as a healthier alterative to peanut butter, but on its own I find tahini paste to be a bit overwhelming. I really like sesame seeds, but to me it tastes like when I’ve been cooking with sesame seeds and accidentally gone overboard with them? Perhaps I just bought the wrong kind, it was after all ‘light’ tahini paste

Soy Milk

I can’t speak to how well this does or doesn’t work as a milk substitute, but my goodness it makes a lovely miso soup. I suppose it shouldn’t really be a surprise that soymilk should work really well with soybean paste, but nonetheless it was a pleasant discovery that even before I had added any tofu – there’s a lot of soy in this recipe – noodles or veg it was strangely more-ish. I’ve only ever made miso soup with hot water; perhaps making it with soymilk instead – or perhaps going 50/50 – might be the key to more enjoyable miso soup. Also it has a decent shelf life, so once I have more shelf space I might take to keeping a carton of the cupboard kind for emergency miso soup!

White Miso Paste

My previous experiments with miso paste have been…uninspiring, but even before I put it in the blender to make the larger paste; it had a pleasingly mild taste. (I got some on my hand; I am not a tidy cook.) I still have some left over so I feel much more confident about making a basic miso soup with just the paste, some spring onions and a little tofu. Quick, cheap and easy lunches ahoy!