Comfort pasta: Yaki Udon in a miso sauce

I'm not going to go into what life is like right now, except to say that this last month has been a shit-storm ... and then it got a whole lot worse.

There is a dire need for comfort food in my life right now.  Something comforting, high in energy, but also healthy enough to keep me going.  Unfortunately, there has been zero opportunity to go shopping, so the pantry is getting sparse.  Thankfully I have a garden full of growing things.  

Comfort food for me starts with pasta.  You can have the chocolate and icecream.  I'm keeping the pasta.  

When I saw the udon noodles hidden under the chickpeas, I knew that's what I needed.  Yaki udon (basically meaning fried udon) sprung to mind.  Yaki udon always has cabbage, a protein and a sauce.  Usually a specific kind of sauce... a sauce that got used up weeks ago.  Too hungry to think of a better meal plan, I decided to improvize.

I found a wedge of cabbage at the back of the fridge, cut off the bad bits and shredded up enough for one serving.  The garden donated carrots, cauliflower, and green onions.  But what to use to make the sauce?  I have miso on the mind right now... so why not give it a try?

The results were delicious; albeit not photogenic.

Yaki Udon in a Miso Sauce 

(serves one)

1/2 brick of udon noodles

drizzle sesame oil

1/2 cup of shredded cabbage

1 small carrot, sliced thin

1 floret of cauliflower, sliced thin

1/2 tin tuna, drained

2 Tbs sake

1/4 tsp soy sauce or soy sub

1/2 tsp honey

1 tsp + miso or soy-free miso paste (chickpea miso tastes best in my opinion)

one green onion, chopped into rings

• Bring a small pot of water to the boil and par-boil the noodles for about one min (this is a good time to chop the veg while you wait).  Strain the noodles and place to one side.
• In a small fry pan or wok, fry the veg in sesame oil on high, until starts to brown a little around the edges.  Stir in the tuna and cook another minute.
• Add the noodles and everything else except the green onion.  Stir well and simmer at medium-high until the sauce reduces.  Stir frequently.
• Just before serving, mix in the green onion.
• Enjoy!

Fast food:  All in all this took me less than 10 minutes.  That includes digging everything out of the cupboard and garden. 

Healthy treat:  All the ingredients are good for you.  The miso, honey, veg, even the tuna.  Of course, some of these ingredients are not so health in large quantities... the salt in the miso, the sweet in the honey, the whatever-it-is in the tuna... but truthfully, these are not large quantities.  Besides, it's comfort food. Any healthy that happens is purely accidental.

Affordable: 50 cent for the noodles (if you buy the expensive ones), Somewhere between 20 to 50 cents for the rest of the stuff.   Let's round up and call it a dollar per serving.

Cooking with allergies:  This is easily customizable to accommodate allergies.  I mentioned using the soy free miso and sauce, but you can change anything you want.  Gluten free?  Just use other noodles.  Vegan? Replace the honey and tuna with (vegan friendly sweetener) and tofu.

Pasta Day, one pot udon

Hey all,

I'm still around just very, very busy these days.

Family is taking top priority and most of our time.  But there is also the rush to get the garden ready and seeds in the ground growing.  Sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, alpacas and llamas all have their demands, and we love them all.  Last of all, there's the bit where we have to make the farm earn it's keep.  This involves marketing and selling, plus adding value where we can - for example preparing and spinning the wool into yarn.  This marketing part takes the most energy out of us - I grow and cook things, I find self promotion exhausting, but if I want to make this work, I need to at least try.

With all this going on, it's tempting to cancel the internet subscription for a few months while we try to catch up.  The internet is full of so much temptation  - what if I just spend a moment and look up this thing... and hours later all the conflicting opinions leave one more confused and unsure than when we started.  The internet is the tool of procrastination.  ... maybe just transfer to dial up agian... but then I would have even less impulse to blog... but is blogging simply procrastination or another form of marketing?  The former I think, otherwise I would go out and find readers for my blogs.

Lately I've had a huge craving for fresh vegetables and small fish.  Just simple meals that can be made quickly while I try to tend to other things.  I've been using spicy rooster sauce with dashi (broth made from tiny fish or seaweed) to make a really tasty broth for one pot meals.  Toss some fresh veg in the pot with half a block of udon or other noodle, then cook on medium till I remember it's there or it boils over, and it's done.  The little fish on the left are quick fried till crunchy.  They are oily and full of tiny bones, but oh so good.  If it's fried right, the bones are the same texture as the rest of the fish and it feels like eating an exhotic potato chip in your mouth, only worlds better.  Not certain what they are, but I suspect they are like sprats or maybe huge anchovies.  If you get a girl fish, they are full of thousands of eggs, the boy fish taste a little bit bitter but fry up chruncier.

I like this little Korean ceramic pot, it's the perfect size for making one person meals.  Oven and stove safe, makes it really flexible.  I eat the meal right out of the pot because the pot retains the heat and keeps the food warm - I'm a slow eater so it's nice not having to eat cold food - and it has a little lid that I can put on top of the food if I get called away in the middle of a meal, which is more often than you would think.

The only thing with these ceramic pots is not to change the temperature too drastically.  So one should really wait for the pot to cool before rinsing it in water.

Affordable, yep.  One only needs a small amount for this kind of meal to fill up on, and it will accommodate whatever is in the fridge or garden at that time.  Between 1 to 4 dollars depending on what goes in the pot, a lot less (as in under 50 cents) if I use homegrown veg and a more simple starch like rice instead of pasta.

Fast Food: as in it takes very little actual prep time to toss everything in the pot, yes I think it qualifies.  Though, because I'm using a ceramic pot, I don't like to start it on high, so it takes a while to heat up, but also because it's not on high, I don't need to wait around and stir it.  It's very forgiving.  Start to finish, 4 or 5 min of prep and 10 to 20 min of cooking, depending on what you put in the pot.

Great for an Emergency meal, you know the kind when you are dizzy with hunger and need something healthy and satisfying in a hurry.

This is one heck of a lot healthier than may of my goto emergency foodstuff.  It satisfies my need for veg, warm meal, and starch.  The only thing it needs with it is some added protein, thus the fish or a hunk of cheese.  Very accommodating to what veg are in season at the time.

I know, I know pasta day was yesterday, but we can fudge it a bit, this is the internet after all.  We can pretend that my timezone hasn't caught up to the rest of the world yet.

Soup and Salad for recovery

I am finally on the mend from this rather nasty flu.  It came on very strong Christmas Morning and since then, I've basically been existing on herb tea and cough syrup.  But now the fever is gone and all that's left is a cough.

The first thing I wanted to eat when the fever broke was soup.  Now I'm normally not a soup person.  Soup does a funny thing to me when I eat it.  About five minutes after eating soup, my body goes all shaky and squiggly line vision things which can last for up to half an hour, then suddenly all my limbs feel like they are made from bricks, my head feels like the skull is falling apart, and my vision goes sepia-black-tunnel.  I always assumed this is to do with blood sugar spiking and plummeting, but it doesn't make sense because I'm not diabetic and it only happens with soup.  But there you have it, another example of how I'm unusual.

And now you know why it was so unusual for me to want soup.  Maybe want is too kind a word here.  My body basically told me it's tomato soup or nothing.  Then I remembered that Jamie Oliver has a tasty looking tomato soup recipe in his book Food Revolution.  It's actually very easy.  I'm not going to write it here, because the only significant changes I did to it was to add dried tomatoes instead of fresh and to put a splash of cream in it.

Since I always feel better less weird when I eat soup with something, especially carbs, I decided it needed croutons.  Never made croutons before, but I saw someone do it on TV once.  Basically, cube some bread, fry it in a generous amount of oil, salt and pepper.  Add garlic, chopped herbs and cheese towards the end.  It's very tasty.

But the soup needed something more...so I asked my body, what else is it craving?  For some reason it said anchovies.  Anchovies?  What kind of body do I have here?  Oh, that's right, a weird one.  sigh, anchovies.  ...  oh, there are anchovies in some salad dressing, like caesar salad... and I already have croutons.

I used the recipe for Caesar dressing from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution website.  Instead of yoghurt, I used Fil Mjolk cultured in cream for the dressing base.  This is by far the tastiest Caesar dressing I can remember eating.  It's so tangy and fresh compared to the mayo based dressings.  Possibly a bit healthier too.  What I like best about it is that it only takes a few drops of dressing to coat an entire bowl of lettuce.

And that's the first meal I ate since Christmas Eve.  Possibly the best tasting soup and salad I've ever had.  I also didn't get all my usual soup-weirdness, which is nice.

Today with the leftover soup, I think I'll make oven baked wedges from potatoes and yams with just a drizzle of olive oil and some rosemary.


Affordable: About a gallon of soup for under $10.  I really don't know what the going price of soup is these days, but take into account this is one of the best tasting soups I've ever had.  Also, I didn't have fresh tomatoes in the house, so I used the more expensive dried ones in their stead.  So I'm going to go, for what you are getting, yes, it is affordable.

Vegan?  Get rid of the cheese from the soup and croutons and the soup is easily made vegan.  Go with a different salad though, because of the Fil Mjolk, cheese, anchovies... &c.

Healthy: yep.  Not just is it a lovely, large selection of vegies, we also know exactly what went into making our own soup, so no preservatives or anything.

The soup could have been Fast Food, except for the fact that all I have is a blender with plastic walls.  The soup took 5 min to chop everything and only 20 min to cook.  I had to wait a few hours for it to cool down before blending it, but with different tools, it's super-easy to make this in under half an hour.  With all the left overs in the fridge, one can quickly takes some out and heat it up.  In fact, since this soup sits so well with me, I think I'll make some more next week and take it in my bento box.

Bento: one pot beef-yaki

I found some flank steak on sale and thought it would make some fantastic beef bento dish (which I can't remember the name of - probably something-yaki which means something-fried).

The recipe is from the book 10 Minute Bento. I don't normally eat beef because it gives indigestion, however, when it's cooked this way with sake, something changes in the beef making it easier to digest.

I put some more of those daikon pickles (really starting to like them), but there was still something missing.  So I put some tiny tomatoes on it, and look, a lovely christmas coloured lunch.

Allergies:  I substituted the mirin for vinegar, the sugar for honey and the soy sauce for rice based soysub.

Affordable?  This is about 2 oz of beef, so basically you are getting a lot of flavour for a small portion of meat - my favourite kind of meal. It also tastes good with other red meats like goat or lamb, depending on what you have at hand.   But make sure to slice thinly and across the grain or things get tough to chew.  Other ingredients include frozen peas, onion, veg, rice... although I don't remember how much the cost of the beef was, the rest of the ingredients were about $1 to $1.50.

What I really like about this recipe is that it is fast food.  The book suggests we can make this in 10 minutes, however, that's only if you are super-mum.  Prep took about 5 min, cooking and assembling, 15 min.  But 20 minutes for a complete and completely delicious bento is well within my happy range.

As for Healthy: I'm going to go with yes.  Meat is full of all sorts of things that are good for your body, and having it in small quantities like this is great.  Though I thought while eating it, I wish I had put a bit less rice and a lot more veg in it.  Next time I'll try a different way of assembling the dish that includes more veg.


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Pasta Day - Japanese noodle soup

Japanese noodles (dry udon I think) with dashi broth, ume pickled plums, green onions and spicy sprinkles.

Probably not the most impressive pasta dish in the world, but excellent for soothing an upset stomach.

I used Kombu Dashi which has no fish in it (basically you simmer some seaweed), so this version of noodle soup is vegan friendly.  Probably the most expensive part of this dish is the ume at about $1.25 each, but it wouldn't be any good without it. All the other ingredients come in at under a quarter, so in total, $2.75 per bowl.  Not the most affordable, but for how calming this is on the tummy, well worth it.

Chocolate Avocado Pudding - Raw foods and easily made vegan

Oh the mighty avocado, what can I say about you?  Except... I really think you suck!  I mean, you're slimy,  you are green, you sort of act like a fruit, but you aren't sweet at all.  I can never tell when you are ripe.  The only thing you are good for is for sticking toothpick in and making a tree thing grow.

I'm not a fan of avocados.  

So maybe I can be forgiven for being sceptic at the idea of combining chocolate with the slippery avocado. 

Then a friend told me about this chocolate pudding recipe I had to try.  I thought  why not.  It's been over a year since I attempted to eat an avocado, so why not give it another go.

chocolate avocado pudding with avocado heart

 The link to the recipe I used is: Chocolate Avocado Pudding Recipe.  The 6Tbs of milk (which can be vegan milk substitute to make this a vegan friendly treat) adds up to just over 1/3 cup.  But I used half that and got a nice consistency.

There's no cooking, so good to serve to raw food people.  Just get stuff into blender, blitz.  Try and get stuff out of blender into bowl without eating it all.

stick some sticks on the pit and put it in water like this, should make a tree.

My thoughts on this recipe: It's very, very rich!  Exactly the right consistency  but a bit sweet for me.  Given the age of my blender, it was a bit difficult to get every bit of avocado blended.  But all in all, not a bad dessert.  

Affordable cooking?  Not really but not terrible. About $1 for the avocado, another dollars worth of maple syrup, and almost a third dollar of other ingredients .. given that it made enough for one, or possible two people, it seems a bit steep. 

As far as chocolate puddings go, it is a pretty healthy alternative.