Chicken noodle soup, whatever the reason maybe, is often eaten when we are sick. I have no idea why. I don’t think there’s any anti-cold medication in it, nor is it medically proven to cure illnesses whatsoever. I guess it’s simply the comfort of its flavor, clear soup, with healthy vegetables, along with the filling noodles.

I don’t like this soup. When I am sick, I would rather have udon noodles, which I guess is the Japanese comfort food. The other day, Nate had some belly issues, and he requested chicken noodle soup.

What I hate the most about chicken noodle soup is how the noodles gets so soggy, and it absorbs all the liquid, and becomes mushy soup-ish blob.

So I decided to deconstruct it to make the best chicken noodle soup.

For chicken, rub the breast meat with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast in a 375˚F oven for 20 minutes (even if the center is still pink, don’t worry since it will be boiled thoroughly at the end). Once the chicken cools down, cube it up, set aside.

For soup, cut onion, celery and carrots, sauté until translucent, add white wine (about a cup), cook the mixture down. I had leftover napa cabbage so I dumped it in the soup as well.

Then add enough chicken stock. I use store bought stock. People use the chicken for the soup that are used to make chicken stock as well, but I think it becomes tasteless, so I bought stock instead. Cook until vegetables are tender. You can add other herbs here, thyme, rosemary, bay leave, etc. Add salt and pepper.

10 minutes before serving, boil egg noodle (I use yolkless noodles) for about 8 minutes (package says 9, but I always like 1 minute less al dente).

3 minutes before serving, add chicken cubes in the soup.

Here is how you serve it:

First, lay noodle on a soup bowl.

Then add soup on top.

If you have leftover frozen wonton wrapper raviolis, you can bake them till crispy for additional texture.

This way, the noodles never get soggy!  This is more pasta dish than soup, but that’s ok.

It’s so easy to make, yet taste so gourmet. Since the chicken is roasted, it isn’t dry at all!

Next time you make chicken noodle soup, or any kind of noodle soup where you don’t want the noodles to get soggy, I recommend this method.

Over the last year, I have been desperately trying to get my hands on the Ghosts of the Great Highway LP by Sun Kil Moon aka Mark Kozelek from Red House Painters. If not familiar with any of his bands or side projects, most remember him as Stillwater’s bassist Larry Fellows in the Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous. He’s the one who starts the group sing along to the song Tiny Dancer on the tour bus. The album Ghosts is all things awesome starting with the first song named after the young undefeated Mexican boxer Salvador Sanchez. The song refers to many little known heroes who tragically died too young, like Sanchez.

Forgive the nerd out.

While searching out any re-releases of the album, I found that his private record label is called Caldo Verde which is a kale based soup my wife CH makes.

Caldo Verde is a Portuguese recipe that uses couve (aka kale, above), potatoes, onions, and often linguiça sausage. It is perfect as a starter or a late night meal. Really, it’s soul food. CH makes it when I’m feeling sick or if it’s cold out, and it always hits the spot (or as my mom would say, “Sticks to your ribs”). It is a perfect name for a record label.

Some people say that Caldo Verde is the quintessential Portuguese soup, created in the 1600s when the Iberians “discovered” the New World, and brought the potato over to Europe, from the Incans. The Portuguese combined this new vegetable with kale, garlic, and onions from their gardens with a final touch of extra virgin olive oil.

INGREDIENTS

1 kilo of potatoes (3 big ones)
200 grams of kale leaves (approx. 2 big kale leaves)
1 onion
6 garlic cloves
1 linguiça paio (smoked sausage)
Salt
Couple bay leaves
Olive oil

METHOD

1. Peel and cut your potatoes into little chunks and put them in a pressure cooker (if you have one. If not, stovetop is fine). Add enough water to cover them for 15 minutes.

2. Chop your onion and garlic cloves.

3. Skin and cut your linguiça into bite-sized bits, like a silver dollar cut into quarters.

4. Cut your kale into thin narrow slices about a 1/4 of an inch thick by 6 inches long (so not too long).

5. Add olive oil to your pan and add the chopped garlic and onions.

6. Once the garlic and onion are lightly toasted, add the linguiça.

7. Once the linguiça is cooked, add ALL of the cut kale. Make sure to constantly toss that kale around the pan–you will begin to see the volume of the kale decrease significantly. I like to use chopsticks or a wooden spatula for this part.

8. Add salt to kale to your taste and leisure.

9. After 15 minutes, the potatoes should be ready to be pureed using a mixer (or blender if you are a badass). Don’t drain the water, puree the potatoes and water together directly in the pot.

10. Then add everything in the frying pan to the potatoes in the pressure cooker, with the bay leaves on top.

11. Let warm and add salt to taste. The soup should be thick but not too thick. I don’t suggest adding any more water, but add it if you prefer.

12. Once served, feel free to add some olive oil for a little more umph.

You are now ready to turn your turntable on if it isn’t already, sit down, slurp, and listen to the album in its entirety.

I visited my mom recently and she served me one of the best breakfasts I have had in a long time–tai chazuke. Chazuke is short for ochazuke, a common method of enjoying rice in Japan. A bowl of rice is topped with condiments and hot tea or dashi is poured over it. Tai chazuke is ochazuke topped with raw, marinated tai (sea bream).

My mom served the ochazuke in large bowls with sprigs of mitsuba and strips of nori (know your seaweed, please). The tai was marinated in gomadare (sesame dressing) that was salty enough to retain its flavor even with the dashi was poured over it. I lucked out and my mom sent me home with a pint of gomadare. SCORE!

Back in the Japanify kitchen, I was determined to recreate the delightful breakfast I had at my mom’s house. I remembered the tender, fresh wild suzuki (sea bass) that was available at my local fish market and decided that it would be perfect for my version of a gomadare chazuke.

It was so easy because I already had the gomadare in the fridge. But knowing I would run out soon, I asked my mom for the recipe.

GOMADARE CHAZUKE
Sashimi in Sesame Sauce + Ochazuke (Tea-Soaked Rice)

INGREDIENTS (2 servings)

1/4 pound sashimi-grade sea bream or sea bass
A few sprigs of mitsuba or a stalk of green onions (you can find mitsuba at the Japanese market)
A dab of wasabi
Dashi or tea (I recommend sencha, hojicha or genmaicha. Don’t use black tea. Make your own dashi)

Gomadare (Sesame dressing)
2/3 cup roasted sesame seeds (unhulled)
2 tbsp sake
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar

Steamed rice

METHOD

1. Grind sesame seeds well with a pestle to a powdery consistency.

2. Bring sake to a boil and let it cool.

3. Mix all of the remaining ingredients together with the sake and sesame seeds. This dressing will keep in the fridge for two weeks.

4. Cut the sashimi into thin slices.

See my post on how to slice sashimi.

5. In a mixing bowl add 3-4 tablespoons of gomadare. Combine with slices of fish. Mix very well. Make sure every nook and cranny of the fish slices are coated.

6. If you are using mitsuba, cut roughly into 1/2 inch pieces. Green onions should be sliced thin.

7. Heat the dashi or make tea.

8. Add a single serving of rice into a bowl. Top with half the fish in the mixing bowl. Garnish with mitsuba or green onions. Add a dab of wasabi to the side of the bowl. Repeat for the second serving.

9. You can enjoy the bowl of rice and fish with our without the dashi or tea. I usually like to eat some of my serving without rice…

…then at half-time I pour dashi over the rice and fish and enjoy for a different experience.

The breakfast at my mom’s house will be remembered forever because the experience extended to my own kitchen. It takes a lot for me to try something outside of my home and actually take the initiative to try and recreate it when I get home. By sending me home with a tub of her gomadare, it’s like she was giving me a boost.

My pal Washi just got back from Japan and brought me an entire BAG full of fun omiyage (gifts)! Little booties from Muji, a pack of Nagoya-style miso udon, and a can of… kan kohi (canned coffee)?

I read it aloud, “ゴールド すっぽん スープ” aka Gold Suppon Soup.

“Turtle,” Washi translated.

Turtle soup? IN A CAN???

More specifically, this is soup of the snapping turtle aka soft shell turtle aka Trionychidae aka suppon. According to Wiki, these are fierce (and really creepy-looking) creatures known to amputate people’s fingers and hands. Suppon is considered an Asian delicacy, and is rich in nutrients, promotes healthy skin, and most commonly known for its penis-performance enhancement (think Viagra, au naturel).

In talking with Hideko (who has always been too weirded out to try suppon herself), she says that this soup is often enjoyed in nabe (stew) and the culinary history of suppon dates hundreds (thousands?) of years.

Wait, this gets better.

Washi turned this can around to reveal these numbers.

920707. You do the math. Yup, the expiration date is indeed 07/07/92!

Reminiscent of when I found that old bottle of vanilla extract in my mom’s kitchen cupboard, this can of suppon soup had been sitting in the back of Washi’s parents’ pantry for decades. Let’s assume that this can of turtle soup is, all told, at least 25 years old (given that it has at least a five year shelf life).

AMAZING! Washi says that his parents had an entire case of these cans, and they could not remember where on earth it came from.

[Start penis jokes now]

This packaging is awesome though. It’s just a little can, about as high as a standard coffee cup, about as wide as an empty toilet paper roll.

You can get corn soup in these kind of cans in Japan, sometimes from vending machines even, but suppon soup is new to me.

I love the playful typeface, which reminds me of the bygone days of Tora-san. The bottom part of the can basically says that the company chooses their own turtles for their soup, and how best to prepare it. Soup made of carefully curated turtles, yay!

The instructions on the side of the can tells me how to serve this soup. Boil, add scallions and ginger; use as the base stock for nabe; or add into a pot with an egg and rice, to make zosui (porridge).

Murakami, the company that makes this, is headquartered in Tokyo.

They still sell their canned turtle soup on their website (whoa, it’s approx. $95 for this gift set! NOT CHEAP!).

In researching suppon, I came across an old post by former Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. He wrote about his “favorite restaurant in the whole wide world,” a Kyoto restaurant specializing in suppon, called Daiichi. They serve courses of suppon in a number of different ways (stew, soup, zosui); it all looks so special.

These posts are from 2003, so who knows if it’s still his favorite restaurant, but he did post about Daiichi twice that year. Check out the comments in this post–some are just hilarious (“I just received a horrific email that highlighted that you people are actually eating dead babies. That is just absolutely disgusting and inhumane.“). DYING.

Here is also another post of a suppon feast by Kyoto Foodie with gorgeous photos. Looks like you can eat most of the suppon. He gives a bit of the culinary history too.

I have yet to try my can of Gold Suppon Soup. It’s a little daunting to just crack it open and start experimenting with it on my own. Plus, I love the fact that it’s 20+ year old, and a part of me wants to just keep it intact forever. Maybe I can pass it on to my own kids someday.

[Insert more penis jokes here]

I was recently on a little Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras for a friend’s wedding. This conch soup was made for the bride and groom the day after their wedding and served at a big family brunch.  Friends had caught the conch and picked coconuts on the island for the broth. It was served hot with big chunks of yucca, plantains and carrots.

Last month, I took a relaxing trip to Pt. Reyes with one of the best books I have read this year, the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was another one of my favorites this year). Although I felt like I kind of knew what Pollan’s deal was from hearsay, I fully understood the logic and practicality of his views by actually reading his book – packed with clear and often, hilarious prose.

What does this have to do with making miso soup? Well, I am huge fan of American cereal and a huge fan of the simple, Japanese breakfast. After reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma though, I noticed I was slowly phasing out the former from my diet. The fact that cereal is mostly comprised of processed grains and corn, I was beginning to feel that it was a bit overpriced for what it was– without giving me the benefits of a miso soup-based breakfast which is doesn’t leave me feeling overly stuffed and then really hungry barely an hour later.

The beauty of miso soup is that you can pretty much throw in any kind of left-over leafy greens to give you a great start to your day.

So let’s get to making the actual miso soup, using the dashi from my post last week.

1. Put three cups of dashi in a pot. If you use wakame, make sure to soak the wakame in some water for at least 10 minutes, while you heat up the dashi. I like to experiment and my latest favorite wakame substitute is watercress. I just dump a handful into my dashi and heat on medium until the watercress is wilted.

2. You can also add any other kinds of veggies that entice you (I have used Napa cabbage, regular green cabbage, broccoli, potatoes, onions, etc). I also usually slice up a shiitake and sprinkle it in.

3. Bring down the heat to low. Cube tofu and add into mixture.

4. Make sure that the soup is not rolling – you may even have to turn off the heat.

5. Add about two tablespoons of miso slowly into the liquid. Make sure the miso doesn’t clump up by either straining the miso into the liquid or slowly melting the miso into the liquid by breaking it up with chopsticks.

6. Turn off the heat if it isn’t already off.

7. Ladle soup into bowls. Bowls should preferably have lids and they should be capped when served.

8. The point of a lidded bowl is that when the eater opens the lid, a waft of the miso soup’s blissful, aroma will fill his/her nasal passages. Its lid will also keep the soup warm and lock in the flavor.

In a nut shell, miso soup is just about cooking some veggies in dashi, adding some tofu and adding the miso into the mixture in the end right before serving. Once you get the the hang of it, it can be ready in 10 minutes.

This is my typical breakfast nowadays.

I have to say, I don’t miss my cereal one bit… yet.

Last week I was invited to dinner at the Farm on Adderley in Brooklyn and by chance there was a special dinner going on, so we signed up for it! The butchers from Fleisher’s in Kingston, NY were hosting the prix-fixe meal at a handful of communal tables in the back room. Their shop supplied all the meat and the shop’s founders, Josh and Jessica, spoke about their dedication to local, sustainable meat.

Sometimes I love how small the world is (or maybe just living in New York) because I happen to be reading the book Cleaving right now, and Josh and Jessica are two of the main characters. They are as cool in real life as in the book and I hope to visit their shop someday soon. The menu was delicious but quite pork heavy- there was even bacon in the dessert! My favorite course was the butternut squash soup (above) that had a juicy pile of pork in the middle.

Since moving back to California, I’m trying to branch out more and find new places to eat all over the Bay Area. A few weekends ago my parents and I took a nice drive out to Pescadero, a quaint little town out on the coast, just south of San Francisco. We had an awesome Umamiventure out there a few months ago to a goat milk farm, remember?

I had recalled someone mentioning Duarte’s Tavern, saying that it’s one of the oldest restaurants in California, and that they serve a bombass cioppino. Of course it had been on my mind ever since.

One thing about my family is that we have always traveled far and wide for good food. When I moved out to NYC, I noticed how infrequently I left my neighborhood to eat- it’s so easy to get caught up with the day-to-day that you don’t leave your comfort zone very often when it comes to feeding yourself. The idea of Umamiventures came from the family tradition of driving anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour for a good meal- this way, eating is an event on its own, not just something to do in passing.

Reading up on the history of Duarte’s, I learned that they have been owned and operated by its namesake family since 1894. Today, the third and fourth generation of Duartes oversees the restaurant, which won the prestigious James Beard Honorary Award as an “American Classic”. How awesome is that? In this day and age, “family owned” is such a rarity.

In visiting Duarte’s, it’s like a time warp- the wood paneling and beige walls all create a no-frills, cozy, cabin-esque setting. It is a tavern, afterall.

We seriously wanted to order the entire menu. We practically did. So much fresh seafood!

Although they do have a menu of the day’s specials, we thought we should go with their signature dishes since it was our first time there.

They are well-known for their artichoke dishes. This is the cream of artichoke swirled in with cream of green chile soup- they are listed on the menu separately, but our server (who we loved) told us we can order it half and half. Genius! The flavors surprisingly went so well together, and the flower pattern is so lovely.

Fried oysters- a unanimous favorite at the table. The plump oysters were just slightly floured and fried.

The shrimp salad. Get it with the olloliberry vinaigrette, it was awesome!!!

Fresh half dozen Fanny Bays. One of my favorite oysters, ever, I was so excited to see them on the menu. They didn’t taste so great, they may have been a day or two too old, but we slurped them down anyway.

Chilled artichoke hearts with aioli. Little cold hard diamond-shaped pieces of love.

The famed Dungeness crab cioppino. What made this so spectacular was the lightness of the soup- just tomato, carrots, celery and herbs. It was neither heavy, nor salty, so it really highlighted the crab. They make everything on the menu from scratch, and it was comforting to know that the soup didn’t come out of a can.

The meal all went so well with my Mission Brewery Blond Ale.

Their pies are also extremely famous thanks to Grandma Duarte. She has passed on, but the legendary pies continue. This is the strawberry-rhubarb.

The peach cobbler, which I loved. Look at the floating biscuit!!!

The Original Umamiventurers. You know we will eat anything if it involves wearing a bib.

I was able to sneak a shot of the actual bar/tavern area. So old skool and saloon-like, with the dark walls and dim lighting.

This was probably one of the most delightful meals of the year for the Akabori crew. We will definitely be back for the fried oysters, the cioppino and try some of the other dishes next time (we’ve already decided on the pork chop with apple sauce and baked oysters). Yes, this is how we roll! You can certainly make a day out of going here, and saunter the shops of Stage Road. I highly recommend it!

DUARTE’S TAVERN
202 Stage Road
Pescadero, CA
T: 650.879.0464

I was inspired to make this when watching Jacques Pepin make it on his show the other day. He just made it look so easy- it’s a raw vegetable soup for god’s sake! No pots and pans- just your knife, peeler and food processor. It’s a lazyass cook’s call from heaven.

I’m working at a Spanish restaurant right now that serves both the red and white gazpacho, and I asked the chef what’s in both of them. I’ll make the white one soon, but for this traditional one, she just rattled off these ingredients:

Count the ingredients: EIGHT. Just eight. That’s 8. There are a number of gazpacho recipes online that have like a gajillion ingredients for this lovely Spanish summer soup, but for mine, I used only eight!

Approximately for about 4 servings:
- 2 Tomatoes
- 1 Cucumber
- 1 Green pepper
- 1/2 Onion
- About 2 teaspoon Salt
- 2 tablespoons Olive oil
- 2 cloves of Garlic
- 1 slice of Bread

The biggest pain was peeling and seeding all the vegetables- but whatever, get a peeler. I wasn’t sure if I should peel the pepper and tomato, so I did it anyway. Pitting the tomato was sad cause all the yummy juices flowed away, but oh well. I could have put it through a sieve, but this is a column for the LAZY!

Jacques suggested using a spoon to seed the cucumber.

Chop all the vegetables up- just in a way that they all fit into the food processor. At first, you want to puree only the vegetables!

I finally figured out how to use the processor, which truth be told, scares the shit out of me. I’ve never owned one before, and I’ve always wanted one, but it’s an animal!!! It pureed all the vegetables in a blink of an eye! But keep it going for a few minutes, until you get the smoothness you want.

I actually put in too many vegetables cause the soup kept spilling over when it was pureeing. Oops. Next time I’ll reduce the ingredients.

After all the vegetables are pureed, you want to then add the bread. The bread I had offhand was stale so I soaked it in water. Then also add the olive oil and salt.

I pureed everything for a total of about 7 minutes. Just keep doing it until you get the consistency you like, adding salt and more oil if you wish.

I put this in a nice teacup and garnished with fresh parsley.

I brought this over to Christi who would have liked it chunkier. My mama thought it needed more heat, so wanted me to add paprika or something. I’ll try that. I thought it was too garlicy. Will keep researching!