Yummy Wakame Weblog

Soup’s up! Come and get it while it’s hot!
Hey, remember a while back when I was whining about not being able to find any vegetable stock here in Japan? Well, I just arrived home from my hols and guess what was sitting on the table waiting for me! Yes, that’s right, my prayers were answered – a big huge can of veggie stock, all the way from Brighton! Olivia went to all the trouble of tricking me into giving her my home address, just so that she could surprise me with this yummy present! Furthermore she had enclosed a looooong, lovely, very chatty handwritten letter (I didn’t know you young ‘uns knew how to write!) in the parcel … along with a fluffy little surprise for Benjamin! Thank you Livvy! Hugs and kisses back to you, too!

SHARE A SCARE … WITH MISTY!
Some of our older girls (40+) will remember this one. I remember how excited I used to be, waiting for the weekly issue to arrive in the bookshop. Now you can read Misty in full, online!

Europe and Italy
A must-see!

Don’t you wish you had this much time on your hands?
Even though “The Queen is Dead” is certainly the most brilliant album ever ….

THANK YOU MY HERO!
You know who you are …. thanks again!

Cross-cultural camera

How photography bridged East and West – quite a nice little online exhibition, courtesy of the wonderful American Museum of Photography.

HELL HATH NO FURY …
The ultimate revenge site. Not safe for work, or for those of a sensitive disposition!

REMEMBER YOU’RE A WOMBLE!
Bear with me, young ones. I’m in a strangely nostalgic mood recently. This always happens to me as autumn approaches. Yesterday I worked with a delightful young man who told me that he was from Wimbledon …”Oh, do you know the Wombles?” I asked. “Not personally,” deadpanned he. Unlike him, you won’t understand what I’m on about, but the Wombles of Wimbledon Common were amongst the first environmentalists (which probably explains why they never caught on in Japan), and were hugely popular in my Antipodean childhood. We all had our favourites. Can you guess which mine was?

HERE I COME!

Fresh from Cait and Miko’s diner with some yummy wakame recipes for you! Wakame (pronounced like wah-kah-may) is a cheap and highly nutritious sea vegetable that is consumed on a daily basis here in Japan, most often in soups. I was running out of ways to cook and eat it, and it was while I was doing a google search for wakame recipes that I first came across Olivia’s site – a fortuitous discovery, as it happened. I never did find any interesting wakame recipes in the end. But nowadays I just bung it in everything. It goes especially well in stir fries. Don’t cook the wakame, as it will lose its nutritional value. Simply soak it for a bit, and then add it to soups or stir fries at the end of cooking.

Here’s a favorite in the diner:
Chop a quarter of an onion and one clove of garlic and saute in canola oil until soft. Add a bag of bean sprouts and a very finely chopped green pepper, and saute for a short time (don’t ever overcook bean sprouts!), together with some beef stock powder or preferably fish stock if you can get it. At the end of cooking, add several strands of soaked and drained wakame. Mix and season to taste. Serve with a bowl of plain boiled rice. If you serve this dish with a bowl of miso soup, you will have a complete and virtually vegetarian meal that is not only healthy, but very very cheap!