Let me begin by apologizing for my absence. I know there is no excuse, but between the time change and my work hours shifting, cooking has not even taken a back seat, it has been stuffed in the trunk. But tonight I recommit to being Susie Homemaker and am trying my hand at a Japanese meal just for my Asian cuisine loving husband. At least I think it's Japanese. Most if the recipe items were found in the Asian food aisle and the recipe has "Otsu" in the title and ingredients like shoyu, mirin and soba noodles...
Somebody stop me, please.
I came across this little beauty in my new favorite cookbook Super Natural Every Day, and it looked something like this:
I think it's a bit unfair that not only is Heidi a wonderful and inspired healthy cook, she is also a professional photographer. Add those things up and what you get is a picture of a dish that looks artistic and
delicious. I guarantee my result looks nothing like the above. But I am getting ahead of myself.
While this meal was quite easy to prepare, mine being a Mediterranean household, I did have to shop for many of the ingredients. What the heck is Mirin? Can I just use white sesame seeds instead of black ones? Is there really a difference between Rice Vinegar and BROWN Rice Vinegar?
Since one of my pet peeves is when people switch up 50% of the ingredients in a recipe and then give it a negative review, I figured I better be exact. No misrepresentin' here!
And off to Whole Foods I go.
Sidebar: I love Whole Foods. I know I know, they are overpriced and bourgeois, but I love them all the same. I love their bulk bins, I love their butcher counter, I LOVE their prepped foods case. When I need meat (unmatched quality, at least in SD) or just a few things, WF it is. Plus I figured they were my best bet for Mirin, since heading to the Asian food market was too far out of the way.
Once I had procured my goodies, I headed home to tackle this unfamiliar recipe. It seemed straightforward enough, but when cooking a food I have never tasted before, I am usually at a loss. If I don't know what the flavors are supposed to be like, how do I know if I am on the right track? I figured, this time, I would just follow the recipe to the T and see what happened.
So I toasted my seeds:
Smashed 'em up real good in my mortar, added all the yummy oils and vinegars and came up with this scary but tasty pasty.
It was nutty, smoky, tangy and sweet. A little heat from the cayenne, salt from the tamari, and crunch from the seeds made it very interesting. I was getting excited to see how all this would come together.
The next step was to boil the soba and fry the tofu. I have never fried tofu, to me it takes all the healthy out of it, but since it was the only unhealthy part of this recipe, I figured we could splurge just this once.
Oooooh Boy. Fried tofu is good.
They look like french fries don't they?
So once the soba was cooked, I drained it and tossed everything together, threw together an Asian inspired salad and eagerly anticipated the pleasure that was about to enter my tummy.
Looks pretty good doesn't it?
Well it wasn't.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't horrible. But it wasn't as good as all those rave reviews led me to believe. Unless I missed something. Which I did, green onions, Whole Foods was out (???) but I subbed in tons of chives, trying to get a similar flavor. Maybe that was the key ingredient, but I find it hard to believe that green onions would have made enough of a difference to undo everything that I didn't like about this dish. The noodles were yucky (I've never had 100% buckwheat soba, maybe this is how they are supposed to taste), once the sesame paste hit the heat it took on an overpowering nutty flavor, and all the complexity of the raw paste that I loved disappeared and it just tasted like sesame seeds.
I was so sad. But at least I had my salad to enjoy, now that baby was GOOD. The dressing was so delightful I wanted to slurp it up like soup. So instead of leaving you with the disappointing Black Sesame Otsu recipe, instead I will gift you the much easier, much cheaper, much TASTIER recipe for Asian Ginger Dressing.
Enjoy!
Asian Ginger Salad Dressing
Ingredients:
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger root
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 toasted sesame oil
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1/3 cup soy sauce
3 tablespoons honey
Directions:
In a 1 pint glass jar or larger, combine the garlic, ginger, olive oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, honey, and water. Cover the jar with a tight fitting lid, and shake well. Remove lid, and heat jar in the microwave for 1 minute just to dissolve the honey. Let cool, and shake well before serving. Store covered in the refrigerator.
