Miso soup

Miso never has this much stuff in it, but this is my whole dinner, not just a starting course.

This happens all the time around here, things start growing if you don't get to them promptly, and you know what that means.

I was hoping you'd know what it means so you could explain it.

It means it's alive! 

But so is the miso. If you put miso on noodles it will start to consume it and turn your noodles into mush and rather quickly if you let it.

I never see daikon in miso soup like this but it doesn't seem like a bad idea. Low nutritional value, the root contains the active enzyme myrosinase a plant-defense against herbivores.

Cooked fresh peas, raw tomato, raw daikon radish, raw green onion

Cooked chicken breast, mushrooms heated through. 

Miso paste and water.

When I was a little bitty baby my mama would feed me bowls of miso in them old cotton fields back home. 

It was down in Louisiana just about a mile from Texarkana in the ArkLaTex area, let's just say Bossier City, the Pecan Grove. 

Now when them tofu blocks get frozen you can't put it into your miso in them old miso bowls back home. It was about a mile from Shreveport Louisiana well away from Barksdale Air Base with its old B-52s back home.

Miso in chicken broth

Miso soup, Brussels sprouts

Arts !

So called because they sprouted first in Brussels. 

Lie, it was Netherlands. Should be Netherlands sprouts but they were shunned there, being bitter, and picked up by Brussels who decided they could deal with that problem and develop cultivars that are not so offensive. I might have just possibly made that up.

Commercial chicken stock not shown, but it could have been water or beef stock or dashi. 

Sake also not shown used to deglaze pan, but it is a nonstick pan, so come on, used for a layer of flavor.

Flavored miso with sole and vegetables

This is a fiercely flavorful and satisfying soup. It includes scant vegetables, scallion, broccoli, and napa cabbage. Flavor elements enhance the tofu and vegetables then one meager teaspoon of miso is blended in. The heat is cut off and the fish fillet is gently cooked, changed slightly is more like it, by residual heat.

* 1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
* 1/2 teaspoon grated fresh garlic
* 1 teaspoon olive oil
* 1 scallion diagonal cut
* 1 small piece broccoli cut to spoon-size bits
* 1/2 cup sliced napa cabbage
* black pepper
* 1/4 teaspoon mixed dry chile pepper flakes
* 1/2 carton tofu, cubed

So there's that. Notice there is no salt. Soy sauce and fish sauce will take the place of salt.

Now for the broth. Ordinarily the impulse would be to use bonito flakes and dry komu seaweed to produce a typical dashi but that would be light and thoroughly seafood and this soup will be more robust so commercial chicken broth in a carton is used instead.

* 1/4 cup rice sake
* 2 tablespoons soy sauce
* 1 tablespoon Three Crabs fermented fish sauce. (A single smashed anchovy can substitute)
* 3 tablespoon sweet mirin
* 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce (tamarind)
* 3 cups commercial chicken broth

* 1 sole fillet.