You may have noticed at this point that Z and I are absolute fiends for Asian food. Noodles, hot pots, sushi, Pad Thai, Korean BBQ... we love to eat. We also love to make our own recipes, somewhat. Last week, we went shopping together to gather the ingredients for an Oden Hot Pot from our Umai Crate. Here's how it went:
We got some hard boiled eggs, some smoked sausage...
some endive and daikon...
Some extra firm tofu, and...
The Oden broth mix!
We only vaguely followed the recipe provided in the crate...
First things first, we washed ourselves, our ingredients, and our cookware, then we began to cut things up. And by we, I mean Z, because Z is the best prep cook ever.
Here we see the endive and daikon cut together!
These are nice big cubes of tofu. Z did a great job!
The oden broth
That's how it looked inside the pouch! It smelled great, too!
Next, I put some water in the pot (I kinda couldn't figure out if they really meant only 1 cup of water per pouch, or if we'd want more so I added 2 cups or so). I got that up to a light simmer and added the daikon and endive to (eventually) boil. We wanted everything to go along with each other, so we started our veggies early. In the future, I'll probably add the endive with the meats & tofu, but here I added it early.
Veggies in a hot tub!
Next, we needed to get our proteins together to chuck into the pot - summer sausage and tofu may not sound like a fantastic combo, but they were amazing together!
These were nice, hefty chunks of sausage!
Once everything was prepped, I dumped it into the pot with the water, sprinkled in the Oden packets and let it simmer away!
I wasn't sure how all of this would work, but I was hopeful as I hunted down a lid.
The lid I grabbed was... maybe a size too big.
It worked, though, and the condensation only hit the burner a few times!
I hope this video A) works, and B) illustrates just how cool this was!
Wait... guys... is that... is that a FILTHY CASUAL YOUTUBE CHANNEL?!
YOU KNOW IT! I finally bit the bullet, since the upload was taking a million years on the blog, so I set up a YouTube for it! Now, there may not always be new videos, since I'm not a YouTuber, really, I'm a blogger, but I might throw a video or two up on there every so often ;)
But how did this food come out?
I mean, look at it!
It's beautiful!
I would change very little about this - all of the veggies and meats went together beautifully, the eggs maybe got a little overdone, so maybe I'd actually hard boil the eggs in the broth rather than place pre-boiled ones on top, the tofu was perfect, the daikon was boiled down to a really soft, turnip-like texture that I really dug, and everything was wonderful. I'd maybe add a little more water, since the broth was super salty, and I think it'd taste great with something bitter and something very sweet - like umeboshi and a nice sweet carrot or some sweet corn... and maybe I'd add those konjac noodles, too, for a weird, almost crunchy texture, but overall...
I loved this and would 100% make it again.
If you have proteins, veggies, and broth (of any kind), you, too, can make one heck of a meal! Just keep in mind the order of operations for optimal ingredient cooking: Crunchy but needs to get softer goes first, then soft but needs to heat through, then crunchy but needs to stay crunchy, and finally garnishes! You can add spices as you go, but the basic rule of thumb for that is to consider whether or not you want it to dissolve. If it needs to dissolve into the liquid (like a bouillon or a curry powder or salt) then it goes in early. If it's okay as-is or if you might add more at the table, it can go in later (like pepper or something like that).
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