Brown Seaweed Salad

Found my local Super H-mart a little while back and had picked up some deli made brown seaweed salad. It tasted pretty good with all of the flavors being light in a lightly sweet pickling brine. I compare the brine close to the recipe that my mom taught me to make sweet dill cucumber pickles but not quite as sweet.
Anyway...after a quick search on the internet, I found out that konbu and wakame are considered brown seaweeds. Since I already had the konbu in the house, I figured it would be a simple matter to pick up the wakame and make this salad myself.
Well...things aren't always what they seem. The wakame rehydrated to a nice lightly crisp green about the color of lightly steamed spinach. I had trouble with the konbu. The konbu leaves tend to rehydrate with a layer of mucus that is hard to separate from the leaves. Also these uncooked leaves are a bit tough and chewy. Not knowing what else to do, I went ahead and made them into the salad. I hoped that the vinegar would neutralize the mucus from the konbu leaves. It really didn't. Now the mucus doesn't take away from the salad's taste but it does make it daunting to want to eat it due to the texture. So back to the internet for more research.
The few recipes that had both the konbu and wakame as salad indgredients don't say specifically what to do about the konbu. These recipes ASSUME that you've used the konbu for making dashi and that means it is already cooked and tender. So...if you want to use konbu in a salad you have to cook it first. I am presuming that this will remove the mucus as well as make the konbu easier to chew. I'll have to look in to dashi recipes as to how long I should cook the konbu.

Home made Pokky

I was at my local euro-style market and noticed some thin, lightly salted breadsticks. It occured to me that these sticks were about the same diameter as a pokky stick. So the light bulb came on and I purchased the package after realizing that I had a package of unopened chocolate chips at home.

A call for an old time tradition revival

In talking about bentos to my mother, she was reminded of an event in her youth. You see when she was young, some rural towns would arrange a box lunch social. The young ladies would make a box lunch for the event. These lunches would be bid upon by the attending gentlemen and the winner of the lunch would also spend the time eating it with the lady who made it. I know in those older times it was a way for each lady to show off her cooking skills and perhaps gain a husband (or at least a boyfriend) out of the event.

Perhaps with all this interest in bentos, which are effectively box lunches, why not try to arrange to do something like this again. Surely there is some way that it can be done in this day and age.

Bento Lunch update

I can see why bento lunches are becoming so popular. For one...they can save you money as you try to use up your leftovers. Secondly, I found it fun trying to make something look pretty.

Here's some of the things I used to make my first few bentos.

Here I cut up a couple of apples. One was a macintosh and the other was a granny smith. I planned to switch the cutouts together and did so as I ate the finished products.

Then I sliced up some cucumbers and cheese

And here is some other ingredients I planned to use.

And finally....here's the finished products.

In the small box, I've made some shaped rice balls since I already had the molds and there is a left over hunk of steak under the pickles. As you might notice...I like pickles so I used a fair amount of them in these two boxes. (Actually...it's only 2 but I sliced them so it looks like more than that. Just call me a pickle puss ;D )

Post-AWA cooking experiment

Well...Anime Weekend Atlanta had a very informative seminar on bento making with what you've got on hand in equipment. I missed the one on Friday that talked about the food selections due to lack of information. But that's neither here nor there. The one I did attend on Saturday got me fired up enough to do more than just think of crafting a bento. So today's the day and I will craft my lunch for Monday out of the leftovers tonight.

Well...I kinda have already gone overboard in purchasing fresh fruits/veggies to make this thing. At any rate, I started prepping my meal items as soon as I've gotten home. I took a few quick digital photos of the items and will post them soon. (just as soon as I can figure out how this blog handles photos and the like.)

OK...in the meantime, here's the link to all of the photos I shot at AWA. I proudly note that the most important part of my husband's costume (the guy in the red outfit with the shades...yes, the Visitor  ;>D) I sewed up myself and it turned out pretty well.
AWA-2009 Picture Album

Parchment Paper

If you like to bake, then this is the gadget for you. Parchment paper can be used to line baking pans and cookie sheet. It's meant to keep the food from sticking to the bottom of the pans. And that it does. But the biggest benefit of using parchment paper comes from the clean up time. It saves you from soaking and scrubbing baked on anything since it's stuck to the paper and not the pan. You can find rolls of this stuff in the household goods aisles of your local Wal-mart. Some big chain supermarkets may also carry it but usually at higher prices than the Wal-mart.

Assemble your own Rice Noodle Soup

Ingredients
1-2 packages Spring Roll Wraps or rice or bean thread noodles.
2 large or 1/2 lb baby carrots julienne
1-2 packages Noki mushrooms
2-3 boneless chicken breast, shredded
1-2 cans whole water chestnuts, julienne
1-2 can bamboo shoots
3-4 stalks green onions julienne
fresh bean sprouts
Chicken broth

Prep the vegetables and place them in separate containers. Heat up the chicken broth. Cook the chicken breasts and let cool enough to handle. Shred the chicken breasts. Once ready to assemble, lightly damped the spring roll skin then chop the skin into strips. Place strips into your bowl. Add chicken and chosen vegetable in to your bowl and cover with chicken broth. For using rice or bean thread noodles, cook according to the directions on the package.
First attempt: cut up the vegetables while I had chicken tenderloins cooking in boiling water. Once the tenderloins had cooked through, I fished them out and put aside to cool. Using the same water I’d cooked the chicken in, I blanched my chopped vegetables separately and placed them in microwave safe containers. Now with the chicken and veggies out of the way, it was time to cook the bean thread noodles. I added chicken and vegetable base to the water I still had left over from blanching the chicken and veggies. Bean thread noodles have no flavor of their own and so take up the flavor of the water they are cooked in. It took about 6-7 minutes to cook a small bundle of noodles. I had to add more water and bases to the pot while cooking the 8 batches of the bean thread noodles. Each batch of noodles were placed in individual containers. I made the final stock with the remaining cooking water added to more water and soup bases. Now back to the chicken and veggies. With the chicken cooled, I chopped it into strips. I used the microwave to reheat all the veggies and chicken before serving.

Notes: The enoki mushrooms didn’t seem to work real well for this recipe. They turned slimy. Will try sliced white button mushrooms for the next attempt. Green onions too, didn’t fair real well with the blanching and reheating. Perhaps I should just julienne them and not blanch them. Overall, this first attempt went over pretty well. I offered plain egg noodles in addition to the bean thread noodles. I had plenty of bean thread noodles left since I forgot to announce their availability to the late comers.