Our next door neighbors' daughter is studying Japanese in middle school.
Her latest assignment was to cook a Japanese meal for her family, then
photograph the results. She wanted to make an udon soup, so she came
over to look for recipes in our cookbook collection. I'm the first to
admit that Japanese is low on my list of cookbooks, due to bad
experiences with early experiments in the cuisine. However, we found a
recipe for udon that involved poaching an egg in the broth.

Last night as I was making our dinner, the phone rang. "Cindy, Mom's
stuck in traffic and I've got to get dinner started. HELP!" I went
over to find one frazzled 14-year-old. We made the dashi broth from
scratch, something I'd never done before, and soaked the shiitake
mushrooms. She cut up the tofu, but found that the fish cake she'd
bought the night before was moldy. Luckily, her mother stopped by the
grocery store on the way home and picked up some surimi (fake crab) as a
substitute. We also loaned her some cheesecloth to strain the dashi,
and sake and dark soy sauce to finish off the dish.

After we had finished eating, the phone rang again. It was my student's
mother: "I'm bringing over some of this soup. It's wonderful!" And it
was. Dashi made from scratch is a whole lot better than the envelopes
of dashi-no-moto (think dashi bouillon) that turned me off 20+ years
ago. The soup was quite photogenic, which should make a good impression
on her Japanese teacher.

All in a day's work.
Cindy

--
C.J. Fuller

Delete the obvious to email me