Vegetarian Oden

There is not much to say about tonight's oden.

I tender-prepped the daikon for 10 minutes in gently boiling water (about as gentle as if you were cooking pasta).

 The simmering liquid of the oden was as follows:

1 liter stock (I used 400 ml which were left over from making the ganmodoki earlier, plus 600 ml water and one paper tube of instant kombu dashi - about 2 teaspoons full)

1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon mirin
2 teaspoons light-colored soy sauce (usukuchi shoyu)

I put that into the donabe and added a piece of Hidaka kombu (about 2 by 5 cm).

When the liquid started to boil, I put in 2 hard-boiled eggs, the daikon and thick chunks of carrot. After 10 minutes, I added the ganmodoki.

 

Sorry, the kombu is not at the bottom of the donabe as it should be ;)

I also had prepared mugi miso dengaku sauce (kind of ;) ). I will talk about that another time.

I preferred this mustard to that sauce, though I had some of the sauce as well:

 

  (I had meant to buy Japanese mustard, but got this Korean mustard by mistake. The packages look very similar. Now that it's in the house, it must be eaten up...)

This is what my bowl looked like:

The green smudge on the egg is from the kombu.

Ben said: "What has happened to the tofu balls? They feel hollow." It was a bit as if there was some hollow space below the crust which had filled with the simmering liquid. Really, I have no idea how that came ;)

I had thought about making kale rolls to put into the oden, but when I saw the kale at our supermarket, I doubted that I would be able to wrap anything in these leaves:

(Sorry for the blurry photo.)

Too late, I also hit upon the idea to put potatoes into the oden ("hit upon" means found it in my cookbook in this case). Next time. Or I might look around if I can find chikuwabu.