A post-mortem on yesterday's oden

The weather report for this weekend spoke of rain and low temperatures. So I had decided to make oden for dinner on Saturday.

Unfortunately, yesterday I was in a bad mood for food-unrelated reasons. So contrary to what I had planned, I did not take photos of making the oden. While having dinner, though, my mood cleared up and I regretted not having taken photos. So today, I decided to write quite a lengthy post-mortem of yesterday's oden.

Yesterday's oden contained:

Carrot chunks
Daikon half-moons
Potatoes
Konnyaku
Store-bought ganmodoki (I had finally found them frozen at Nishi's Japan Shop)
Fuku-bukuro (filled pouches of abura age, tied shut with kampyou ribbons)

Funnily enough, I had met my Japanese teacher at Nishi's when I had bought the ganmodoki. When I told her that I had to make the oden without fish products because my husband is a vegetarian, she wondered: "Oden without fish? Is that even possible?" ;)

But now a word about the fuku-bukuro. We blanched four abura age sheets, patted them dry, cut them in half and pried them open. The filling was:

2 dried shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, rehydrated and cut into thin slivers
100 g enoki, trimmed and cut into 2.5 cm lengths
half a cup (125 ml) of shirataki noodles, blanched and cut into 2.5 cm lengths

I still have the other half of the pack of shirataki noodles left. This time, I used this kind:

This is a product from Thailand. What I like about these shirataki noodles is that they come gathered in bundles which are tied with a knot. This makes it easy to lay them out lengthwise for cutting after having blanched them. I simply had to untie the knot.

And this time, we didn't try to make decorative konnyaku braids, but we simply cut the loaf in half horizontally, made shallow cuts diagonally on back and front, and then cut the slab into smaller rectangles. I liked the result much better than the braids - the last time we made braids, they were much too thick. This time, the konnyaku was less chewy and had acquired more flavor from the simmering liquid.

This is the konnyaku we used (the remaining half of the loaf):

 I thought I should have hard-boiled some eggs as well, but Ben remarked that it was way too much stuff to put into the donabe already.

My cookbook had said to tender-prep the potatoes before peeling them and putting them in, but as they were going to simmer for quite a while, we peeled them beforehand and cut them in half. While we were having them, Ben asked if the Japanese cuisine really makes use of potatoes. I told him: "Yes, of course, but as far as I know, Japanese potatoes contain less starch than European ones and thus are eaten not so much as a stomach filler (like rice or noodles), like we do in Europe, but rather as a vegetable."

But the stars of yesterday's oden were these (at least in my view):

 

This time, I had not made mugi miso dengaku sauce. I had my oden with the Korean mustard I have mentioned in an older post, and the yuzu kosho and the kanzuri in the picture above.

My Japanese friend had brought those from Japan for me :) She had never heard of kanzuri, though, before I asked her if she could get that for me. I told her that it was a specialty of Niigata, and she said that her brother lives in Niigata. Possibly she got it on paying a visit to her brother.

I was surprised how mild the kanzuri was. Yet I found it very tasty :)

And the yuzu kosho is really hot and I liked the citrusy taste of it :)

Yum - I like oden :)

My current gardening projects

This is an old wooden cart. I had Ben and Esther sand it and paint it white. Then I asked Esther to sow some seeds in it. This is how it looks about three weeks later:

 

At the back is komatsuna, and mitsuba in front.

The same cart a few days later:

 

We will have to eat the komatsuna soon. Some plants have started to flower, and there seem to be caterpillars of some kind that have gnawed on a few leaves.

Furthermore, I had two mini greenhouses of this kind:

 There is shiso (aka jiso and ao jiso) in this one. But it's not coming on so well.

 

I suspect the climate in this greenhouse was just too humid, because many of the seeds became covered with mold after the first night.

  But some started to germinate anyway. I'll give them a bit more time while giving them water only sparingly.

Unfortunately, the cat kicked over the other mini greenhouse. There was green mizuna and purple mizuna in it. I could save only a few seedlings, which Esther and I transferred to a balcony box.

 When I look at them now (the picture is from Thursday), I believe they are doing quite well in that box.

It always helps when I don't have to do it alone and Ben or Esther (or both) are there to help (or do the work without me).
I have no green thumb at all - I'm no good when it comes to living plants :(

Yay! Store-bought onigiri!

Yesterday, we had kiriboshi daikon and hijiki no nimono. As always, about a coffee mug full of both was left. So today, I was planning to throw that into okonomiyaki dough.

A few minutes after the local supermarkets had closed, I thought: "Hmmm. Maybe mushrooms to put on top of the okonomiyaki in the pan would be good." So I pinged Ben, who was on his way home, and asked him if he could pop into a certain Coop supermarket close to his office before he got on the bus home. He did and got eryngii :)

He also got an appetizer for me :)

 

Onigiri filled with spinach and shiitake (on the left) and with teriyaki salmon (on the right).

(Never mind the cans of Beck's Beer. I just used them to lean the onigiri against them.)

Both were very good. But the left one didn't taste much of shiitake. It was flavored with wasabi. I was surprised to find that wasabi goes well with spinach :)

I have to apologize that I haven't been posting here as often as I should. There sure would have been enough to post about. I promise to do a post about my gardening projects soon.