"Cindy Fuller" > wrote in message
...
> 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

Cool Neighbor

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Yakitory! Uh Oh!