easy recipe: miso soup

Miso Soup! Get ready to cook something wholesome for yourself!

You will need a little bit of all of this:

Sliced diakon
Sliced turnip
Sliced sweet potatoe
Sliced ginger
Sliced shittake mushrooms
Natto (found in freezer section of Japanese grocery store)
Chinese cabbage
Sliced green onions
Firm silken tofu
Seaweed of some kind
Low sodium chicken broth or water
Miso (I use different combinations all the time)
Gomasio (blended roasted sesame seeds and salt, 50:50, will keep a long time in fridge)

Other things you can add to soup: yellow onions, broccoli, meat, fish, kale, carrots, noodles, etc. Hey, empower yourself, yer the cook, add what you want!

While farting around on your computer, doing your daily (hourly?) internet check-ins, simmer ginger, diakon, turnip and mushrooms in a little bit of broth. Once somewhat tender, add sweet potatoe. While letting this simmer, rinse the slime off of the natto. Rinse rinse rinse forever. (You will want to do this, unless of course you like natto... personally I'm not ready for its big taste.) Then chop up about half the packet of natto (the rest goes in the fridge, not the garbage) and add to soup. Of course if you haven't already done this, add more broth. (When it's all said and done, I usually use an entire tetra pack of broth, which is about 1 litre.)

Now scoop into a separate little bowl, a couple of spoonfuls of miso and hot broth from your soup pot. How much you add will depend on your flavour buds, but I like about 2 scoops. Using a fork, mash into a thin paste that will easily stir into your existing soupy potion and then scoop it in. After this point, don't allow your soup to boil anymore, because you want to keep the miso and natto goodness from being cooked to death. Add sliced green onions and some chopped cabbage, then give a stir. Add a tbsp or so of seaweed and then stir. Then finally, add about half the pack of cubed tofu and gently mix.

Sprinkle with gomasio! Voila! Eat your heart out!