Miso, chicken, vegetable soup

Frame 1

Jiggly, Jello-like, chicken aspic broth base.  This is what distinguishes home-made chicken broth.  The chicken bones were crushed with pliers exposing the marrow to the broth.  Pressure cooking guarantees every molecule of chickeny goodness is extracted in a short period of time.  No more of this boiling for hours.  I'm not even sure that's necessary to get out the marrow.  I suspect it passes readily right through the bones, but I'm not sure.  No root vegetable, no aromatics, no spices and absolutely no salt.  Just chicken juice.  But, every last bit of chicken broth including the pan drippings and fond resulting from prior roasting, thus taking advantage of the Maillard reaction.  Don't believe me?  Go on then, look it up for yourself.

So there's that.

Frame 2

Four pound bucket of sweet miso.  Only a few tablespoons was used here. This hasn't been fermented for very long -- only  a few months. Contains less salt than long-fermented miso -- fermented at least a year up to four years.  The longer miso ferments, the more salt is added along the way.  This results in miso too strong for my particular taste.  You might like it better.  They all taste different depending on the grain used to ferment and the length of time spent fermenting.  Presently, I like mine mild.   I bought this Four pound container because I'm tired all the one pound containers sliding around my refrigerator.  I expected it to last all winter.  It's lasted less than a month.  Therefore, I've ordered eight more pounds.   But I started running out before my new order arrived, so I opened two cans of garbanzo beans, drained them, and mixed them into the remaining miso in the bucket hoping the miso would inoculate and miso-ify the garbanzo beans.  I left the bucket on the counter. I think it worked, but I'm not sure.

Frame 3

Soup ingredients include a home-grown tomato given to me by friends, and a small handful of noodles also given to me by friends.  Inn't  that nice? Lots of baby spinach, celery, onion, garlic, and more jalapeño peppers.

Frame 4

Oh noes!  A herd of chia rams are cirkalin' mah soupz !

Here's a thing about miso I read in a book.

Maybe, possibly, sort of, could, might, subjunctively, perhaps, mayhap, prevent radiation sickness. No shit. A hippy wrote the book so it must be true ! 

Dr. Shinichiro Akizuki, director of the Saint Francis Hospital in Nagasaki, devoted his career to researching the use of food as preventative medicine.  Blah blah blah, lots of stuff about him.  When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Dr. Akizuki's hospital which was located on mile from the epicenter of the blast, was left in ruins.  Luckily he and his staff weren't there.  Throughout the following two years, the doctor and his staff worked in daily prolonged contact with radiation fallout victims in the environs and highly radioactive.  But neither he nor his associates suffered form the effects of radiation.  This caused much interest.   He hypothesized it was due to eating miso daily, but didn't have a solid scientific answer.  In 1972 other Japanese scientists who were doing agricultural research and stimulated by Dr Akizuki's writings discovered that miso contained dipicolinic acid, which is produced by miso and natto microorganisms, it is an alkaloid which chelates heavy metals, such as radioactive strontium and discharges them from the body.   The discovery recieved front-page coverage in Japan's major newspapers.

That's nuth'n.  They're always going crazy, and I mean CRAZY, about these types of discoveries.  They tend toward national manias.  Natto is a perfect example of that.  There was another study about natto being a perfect life-prolonging super food, and the whole nation went NUTS over natto.  Everybody was suddenly trying to eat some every day, going around with natto breath.  Created a shortage.  If you want a laugh, look at a few YouTube videos of people experimenting with eating natto.  It's fermented beans, with a seriously stringy, goopy, slimy, off-putting texture and a perfectly horribly smell of the cleanings of a hamster cage stuffed into a wet sock worn by a marathon runner and dropped into the pit under an outhouse then dragged off by a Sasquatch who used it to wipe his bum.  Westerners can hardly stand it.  They run.  The people in the videos are eating it all  wrong. They're hilarious.  You don't just scarf it straight like that, you put it on top of something else, like rice or vegetables.  The loons.  They go at it right from the container, then make themselves ill.  I want to try some, just for fun.

Anyway, here's an anecdote.  The authors of the book received a letter from a reader saying their mother just underwent six weeks of radiation treatments for cancer.  The doctors said she'd be very ill and uncomfortable from the aftereffects of the radiation.  The letter writer gave her mother miso soup and other miso recipes and she experienced almost no aftereffects.  The doctors sneered at the suggestion that miso helped, and doubled over laughing at the very idea.  OK, I definitely made up that last part. 

No comments:

Blog Archive