Love You...Love You Not...

Though the clam soup experiment had a small part taken from Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Cookbook, I decided to try an entire recipe from the book since I'd just remembered I had a bunch of dried soybeans lying around. And so, I ventured into the recipe of Soybean Lover's Rice to see if it would win me over.

In preparing it, I had high hopes as it smelled awfully enticing as it cooked away. Alas, it turned out rather bland. =( The soybeans had no soy flavor though they did have a nutty taste from toasting them which also added a bit of crunch to them. All is not a loss though. The soybean rice is actually fine as the rice accompaniment (like white rice) to main dishes yet is still able to not overpower those same main dishes. Likewise, I could see using this as the base to build on to add more flavorsa nd ingredients much like the Japanese rice dishes that are chock full of goodies (chestnuts, konnyaku, mushrooms...) and are eaten as is.

Clammy Experiment

In contemplating a new dinner menu to create for some friends, I thought it would be nice to start with an Asian-style clear clam soup similar to what I've had at our local favourite Chinese restaurant.

I started off with a bunch of asari clams. Ok, that's a good start for clam soup. ;) Now what? After much contemplation, I decided to use a chicken broth base slightly watered down to reduce the saltiness and so as not to overpower the delicate clam flavour. To add a bit of the taste of the sea, I boiled a piece of konbu seaweed until...well, the broth tasted a bit like the sea rather than chicken. ;) I'd taken this bit of knowledge from Hiroko Shimbo's cookbook which says seaweed bring out the sweetness of the clams. To continue my experiment, I decided to add some sliced ginger, a few dashes of sake and then the 1.5 dozen clams. I boiled them just long enough for them to open up before adding some thai basil and white pepper to the pot. There was no need to add salt since the broth was already salted and the clams are naturally salty (woo salty!!).

The experiment seemed excellent on the first taste test of the finished product. Alas, dinner was not yet so the clams ended up sitting around too long and got touch. =( On top of that, the soup became strangely bitter AND the ginger steeped too long in the broth and made the soup really spicy. Yikes! What a complete disaster it turned into! However, I still deem it a success as it did actually taste good when it was just done. ;) To make it more like the Chinese restaurant's version, I should add some snow peas and chopped Chinese celery to the pot for some crunch, green color and of course added flavour. Most importantly aside from all this, be sure to de-sand the clams first!! ;)