Spring Salad with Carrot Ginger Miso Dressing

I've made this salad on the 4th day into he cleansing. I make different variety of dressing with ginger, miso and sesame paste all the time. With vinegar makes delicious salad dressing. Without vinegar, you can marinade meat with it and it just works every time. You can't go wrong with this combination. 

Now I made carrot and ginger soup, naturally I added carrots and onion in the basic three ingredients. I never measure before I make it, so every time it's different. This particular batch I made turned out really good. I really must be in a "zone".  

I went pretty much all the way Japanese with this salad. I chose mizuna, daikon, wakame, shiso leaves and also radish. I think all these ingredients are available in many regions here in the US. If you can't find these, replace them with any fresh leafy, herby, rooty and seaweedy things and you are all set. The dressing works with anything really.

 My kids really dig into salad when I make this type of salad dressing and this one was a big hit - sometimes I add mayonnaise as well, which is my son's favorite. 

Quinoa and Black Bean Risotto

Day 3 of the cleanse (we actually did the cleanse this last week for 6 days. I'm posting the recipes one by one). Here's item No. 3 for my cleansing diet menu - quinoa and black bean risotto. We eat quinoa quite often. I usually cook red quinoa and make salad or some sort of patty cakes. But I wanted to try something new and different for a change. James was a little cranky. The cleansing has been mentally tough for him. He was craving for his fish, meat, sweets, etc... and knowing he couldn't have those for the next 3 days was making him grumpy. 

I was ready for this. I knew he wouldn't last long with only soups and salads. I was browsing through some recipes online and saw quite a few risottos with grains. So this is my take on something in that area. It turned out that this is one of the tastiest things I've ever made according to my husband. Not bad at all! That was nice to hear from Mr. Grump.

I made two slightly different versions just to see how they turned out since I've never made a risotto with quinoa before and wasn't following any particular recipe. The dish in the first two images, I made more for my husband who wanted a  more "filling" dish. So I used portabella mushrooms and a generous amount of half-mashed black beans. In the third photo, I used oyster mushrooms instead and used a smaller number of un-mashed black beans and more vegetables. They were both good. The latter is much lighter even though I used all the same ingredients except the mushrooms. 

This dish could be a salad if it was cold and soup if it had more broth in it. But making it into risotto makes it a bit more like a hardy comfort food.

At this point on my third day into cleansing, I really don't feel a big change in my diet. If anything, it's making me more conscious about healthy and natural eating and that's just greeeeat! 

So far, so good : -) 3 more days to go... and 3 more recipes to be posted...

Carrot Yam Ginger Soup

This is item No.2 on my cleansing diet menu for Tuesday (I started cleansing on Monday). Simple and delicious carrot ginger soup. The kids love carrot soup. But obviously not as much with lots of ginger in it! I LOVE ginger. I get my hands on ginger any chance I have when cooking - salad, soup, dessert, meat balls, fish balls... anything. I also munch on way too much pickled ginger at Kaiten Sushi restaurants. 

I guess I was way too pumped up with the idea of cleansing.  I made my first batch with about 3 tablespoons of freshly ground ginger into only 2 cups of carrot soup. That was quite a lot, a little bit too much for me and way too much for the kids. 

So I made another small batch of carrot soup and ended up mixing both of the batches together to smooth it out and make everyone happy. I added a bit of cream in the kid's soup. I was REEAlly tempted to add some cream and parmesan cheese in my soup and cheat a little with the kids, but I remained strong. 

And the kids and I had a nice cleansing lunch together... 

Vegetable and Seaweed Miso Soup

 

I'm on a cleansing diet this week, trying it out with my husband and a friend. I tried a liquid cleanse last year for a few days and that's the only kind I've tried in many years. This cleanse is not to lose weight so much, but to clean the body system and get healthier and more energized. 

Overall I'm a healthy eater. But I also drink lots of coffee and "some" red wine. This is the reason why I wanted to do the cleanse to take a little break from addictive substances like caffeine and alcohol ; )

I love soup and salad. Most of the Japanese food I make is undoubtedly super healthy. I was raised by a health nut. My mom is a health freak. Everything she eats, she has to say why it's good or bad to eat.  So when I was researching this cleansing diet, it struck me that that's basically what my mom already cooks and says to eat all my life. Lots of veggies, fruits and... seaweed. I should really thank her for her super duper healthy cooking and helped me to be the healthy person that I am today. I could and should practice more traditional and heathy Japanese cooking at home for my kids' sake. I'm in a cleansing zone!

So here's item No.1 on our cleanse menu. Miso soup with wakame, shimeji mushroom, cabbage, carrots and onion. My mother made this kind of miso soup at least once a week while I was growing up. Wakame is a type of seaweed that's used all the time with Japanese and Korean cuisine and adding it into miso soup is one of the most typical ways of eating it. Honestly I cannot remember a single day there was no wakame in my miso soup at the dinner table when I was growing up.

 Any Japanese household will have miso in their fridge. I buy organic and low sodium ones. Miso can be used for making soup, salad dressings, marinading, pickling or sataying food. It's just the greatest versatile paste ever invented. Highly recommend having it at home.

This soup is filling. I'd normally add tofu for the kids, but I'm also off tofu this week...

I'll be posting item No.2 and more shortly... Happy healthy eating!

Making Sweet Mandarin Orange Jello with the Kids

A few day ago, it was one of those days that I didn't really have a plan for the kids. We've been so busy that I actually liked not having a plan and doing whatever at home with the kids all day. 

I asked the kids what they wanted to do. Their suggestions were appreciated but also rejected. I was in the mood for more calm activities than what they had in their minds. My son didn't want to color, play with puzzles or study Japanese letters. I asked him if he wanted to squeeeeeze some juice out of the oranges with his hands, and he agreed.

At this point, I still hadn't made up my mind about what to make with the orange juice. I didn't want to waste the skins either and made some marmalade to be used for many delicious things later. I used to watch my grandma made candied orange skins or marmalade all the time. We had lots of kinds of oranges around the house since they were grown locally in southern Japan, like Satsuma. Satuma is the old name of Kagoshima where I'm from. My grandma is one of my inspirational cooks. She never wasted anything and preserved lots of fruits, vegetables and seafood. She ate what was available aka. locally grown and harvested things. Anyway, these mandarin skins were a little too thin for candies though....

I bought some old jello containers at a flea market a while ago that I haven't really used yet. Easy enough and a fun thing to do with the kids - we were going to make JELLO!

 I used agar agar since that's what I happened to have in the house. I tasted the juice and it was really sweet. I was getting into a good rhythm here and decided to take the jello to the next level by making three layers. The top is the orange juice we squeezed, the middle is with strawberry - we used the jam I made last week, and the bottom is with milk. I wanted to use coconut milk, but my son didn't want me to do.  He says he doesn't like coconut. Well, hope he'll pass this inconvenient phase for my sake.

   

I quickly realized that making three layered jello was slightly more challenging that I thought. The timing to pour layers during the cooling process is tricky. I left the orange/first layer too long before I poured the  strawberry/second layer, so they didn't stick with each other as you can see in the photo above. I also made the first orange layer a little too hard. On the second attempt, their layers were done properly.

That's it. A pretty good laid back day with the kids and jello at home. 

Creamy Cauliflower and Potato Soup

I regularly buy cauliflower and also tend to leave them in the fridge untouched a little too long. I actually have a few vegetables like that.  Now the fridge is getting overcrowded, it's time to clean up. Time to make some soup with neglected veggies. This time, it is cauliflower, green onions, celery and potatoes. The soup  turned out nicely thick and creamy because of the red potatoes I used, but also because I added some left over rice which we always have around the house.

A nice, easy and quick way to clean out the fridge. I'm satisfied today.