Tonight’s dinner was vegan Shiitake Miso Soup & vegetable fried rice with lots of different exciting pickles! Home made grated purple carrot and ginger Japanese style pickles, Daikon (Japanese radish) and Ume (pickle plum). Pickles are great way to make your dishes really colourful and interesting. You can also buy these in good oriental super markets.
I made this home style Miso Soup with mixture of dark and light Miso paste and it has lots of potatoes in it too! When you get Miso Soup in restaurants, it’s often very bland and has hardly any thing in it (tiny bits of tofu pieces and hardly any sea weed). You can potentially put anything in your broth but the key ingredients are normally sea weed, onion or spring onions. I started making the base of the soup from piece of foraged sea weed we got from Scotland. It’s really fun foraging sea weed and it’s amazing how many edible variety are around in the UK.
Fried rice was made with sesame oil and vegetables: onion, carrots, cabbage and spring onions. It was flavoured with soya sauce, sweet chilli sauce and fair amount of pepper. Topped with delicious crispy sea weed and pickles.
It may seem like it was a lot of work to make this but it was actually pretty easy and took only about 30 minutes. We had left over rice from the night before (fried rice is best made with old rice), pickles were pre made and making a base for Miso Soup is actually simple. Just simply put Kombu or edible kelp in a cold water and gently let it come to boil.
miso vegetarian 