Fridge Foraging – Miso Soup
On a Saturday night, if my wife Marci and I have no other plans, we may hang around the kitchen with a glass of wine while I cook up a tasty meal. Sometimes I know exactly what to cook; I’ve thought about it and I’ve gone shopping for specific ingredients to make particular dishes. Other times I have no I idea what to make until one of us says we’re hungry and I start searching to see what’s in the kitchen. I try to come up with a multi-course meal based on what we have in the refrigerator. I call this fridge foraging.
It’s not that I’m trying to imitate cooking shows like Chopped, during which they give chefs a basket of disparate ingredients and they have a limited time to cook a dish. But I do like to challenge myself to see how elegant a meal I can create on the spot with the ingredients I have on hand. More often than not the day has been too busy, or I’ve been too lazy, and I simply haven’t thought about dinner. (I’ve written previously about garden foraging, but in late March, when I’m writing this, there’s not much coming up in the garden except scallions and chives.)
This past weekend we were hungry enough and I needed some time to cook, so we started with cheese and crackers, as we often do, with a bit of fig spread. I found Brie, Manchego, and a hunk of really good Parmigiano-Reggiano in the cheese drawer.
Miso soup, our second course, only took about 15 minutes to make. Miso itself can sit in the fridge for months without going bad, and I usually have pressed, spiced tofu at the ready, even if it is not exactly the correct type of tofu for miso soup. When I made some this weekend I was even able to use fresh garden scallions for garnish. The rest of the ingredients were shelf-stable, sitting in the pantry waiting to be used. The recipe for miso soup is below.
When fridge foraging I almost always find enough vegetables in the house to make some kind of a quick salad, and for some reason this past weekend we had a huge bag of radishes in the refrigerator. So I sliced them thin and tossed them with snow peas, sesame seeds, and cilantro in a sweet rice vinegar and sesame oil salad dressing.
In late summer, when tomatoes are ripe in the garden, bruschetta with slabs of warm fresh mozzarella often makes up the bulk of a dinner. While tomatoes aren’t as flavorful now, this past weekend I made them into bruschetta with a little bit of pesto, frozen from the summer harvest, to hide some of their dull winter flavor. It was especially good with grated Ricotta Salata in place of fresh mozzarella, capping them like an early spring snowfall.
While I rarely make dessert, our fridge-foraged meal was not large, and we wanted something sweet to finish it off. Often that just means a small bite of chocolate or a fig newton. But for some reason my mother’s summer fruit tart popped into my head, and while I wasn’t going to make a whole tart, tea biscuits served as the perfect base. I warmed them in the toaster oven with a few chocolate chips on top, after which I smeared the chocolate down and let it cool and harden. I covered it with sweetened, lemony cream cheese and a few bites of juicy fruit. The summer fruit tart cookies made for an excellent dessert for a small plates meal, one that I have no idea why I didn’t think of before.
Miso Soup
The only thing hard about making miso soup can be getting the ingredients. But those that are difficult to find can be found at an Asian grocery store or online.
The Japanese broth for miso soup is called dashi, which is made by soaking kombu (a dried seaweed) and bonito flakes (shavings of dried, smoked bonito, a type of tuna) for a few minutes. While I do have kombu in my pantry, I cheat and use hondashi, a soup stock base. Once the kombu soaks and the hondashi is added in, completing the soup is as simple as adding miso, soaked chopped wakame (another dried seaweed), cut tofu, and chopped scallions.
To make a vegan version, leave out the bonito flakes or hondashi, and I’m sure you will have a perfectly delicious soup. Enoki or other mushrooms would make an excellent addition.
15 minutes, makes 2, 1-cup servings
1 tsp. dried wakame
1 (approx.) 2 x 6-inch piece dried kombu, wiped with a moist paper towel
1 tsp. hondashi
2 Tbsp. white miso
2 oz. silken tofu, cut into ¼-inch cubes
1 scallion, thinly sliced
- Put wakame in a heat-proof bowl. Cover with ½ cup boiling water and allow it to soften for a few minutes. Chop into ¼ to ½ inch pieces and set aside.
- Boil 2 cups of water in a 2-quart pot. Remove from heat, add kombu, and allow it to soak for 5 to 10 minutes. Remove and discard the seaweed.
- Add hondashi to the pot and stir to dissolve to complete the dashi. Put the pot back on the stove and heat the dashi to just before boiling.
- Put the miso in a small bowl and add about a half cup of the hot dashi. Stir with a whisk to dissolve miso. Return it to the pot and stir to combine.
- Drain the wakame and add it, along with the tofu and scallions to the pot. Ladle into small bowls and serve hot.
What a great dinner! And I love the summer fruit tart cookies. That’s the best use I can think of for those otherwise tasteless cookies. Brilliant adaptation!
Thanks! The summer fruit tart cookies are quick to make, and as you know, with the chocolate and fruit and cream cheese, they are delicious. I’ll be writing about them – and your summer fruit tart, on which they are based – sometime in the next few weeks.