Japanese spa salad

This recipe is from the September issue of Vegetarian Times. They call it Tofu and Cucumber Salad with Sesame-Ginger Dressing, but I call it Japanese spa salad because it seems like the kind of thing someone would give you at a spa where you went to get "detoxifying" treatments and maybe do some yoga and meditation. It's a great summer salad because it requires absolutely no cooking and makes you feel refreshed. It's definitely not summer here, but I ate it for lunch today because it is so quick to make, especially if you don't bother with the recipe's dressing. (Just drizzle some soy sauce and sesame oil on it instead.)

The brand of soft tofu I have is Phoenix Bean, and it's made here in Chicago. I highly recommend it. It seems beanier than most tofu I've had. According to Yelp, one can go buy their tofu directly from the factory. I'm excited to go there sometime and try their other tofus.

This salad is satisfying without being filling, and it makes me feel light and energized.

Japanese spa salad

Makes 1 salad; multiply recipe as necessary

4 oz. soft tofu, sliced

1/2 avocado, sliced

2 inches cucumber, sliced

1/2 sheet nori, crumbled

1 tsp sesame seeds

Dressing (makes enough dressing for several salads):

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup rice vinegar

3 tbsp minced fresh ginger

1 tsp sugar

Mix dressing ingredients together. Arrange tofu, avocado, and cucumber on a plate. Sprinkle nori and sesame seeds on top. Drizzle with dressing.

Seaweed, celery, and tofu skin stir-fry

Please don't let the bad photo dissuade you from trying this recipe. I was too hungry to take my time on the pictures and got what I deserved. I got Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian last year, and he has recipes for several ingredients I had never tried before, most unusually seaweed (which he seems to be campaigning to call sea greens). I'm fairly adventurous, and I was very pleasantly surprised when I tried a seaweed salad in a Japanese restaurant for the first time, so I bought several kinds of seaweed when I was in Chinatown. They might also be available at Whole Foods and Central Market type stores, but they're dirt-cheap in Chinatown.
I don't know very much about seaweed, but there are several different kinds. Of course, everyone knows nori, which is used to wrap sushi. Kombu, or kelp, usually comes in brittle flat sheets and is used to make dashi, the stock used in miso soup. Hijiki, arame, and wakame come as small tendrils. Wakame is pretty salty, but none of the other ones I've mentioned are. I used half wakame and half hijiki in this recipe. Bittman says that arame and dulse can also be used. I've never encountered dulse, but he says it's a red seaweed native to New England. None of these are the kinds you find in Japanese restaurant seaweed salad. I don't know if that is easy to get fresh outside of Japanese restaurants. There are also sea beans, but I find them gaggingly salty.
In case you have trepidation about eating sea greens, you should know that I definitely didn't grow up eating them, but they aren't slimy or overly salty or fishy. They are high in iron, potassium, protein, and essential trace minerals like magnesium. (Not every one is high in every category, but most of them are high in at least one of those.)

Seaweed, celery, and tofu skin stir-fry (adapted from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman)

2/3 cup dry seaweed, some combination of arame, dulse, hijiki, and wakame (I used half hijiki and half wakame)
1 4x4-inch square of kombu, thinly sliced (scissors work well to cut it)
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1/4 cup onions, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp ginger, minced
3 stalks celery, cleaned and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
4 oz tofu skins, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted if you want

Put the seaweed in a 2-cup measuring cup and add warm water up to 2 cups. The seaweed will expand like crazy. It's pretty amazing. You should have about 2 cups at the end. If you've got too much, just toss a little extra in the stir-fry or add it to the next Asian-style soup you make, or dress it with some sesame oil, ginger, and soy sauce for a little salad.
Cover the kombu in plenty of water and simmer for about 15 minutes so it will get soft. Save the soaking water, call it dashi, and use it to make miso soup later. Reserve the kombu.
Heat the oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions, garlic, and ginger and cook until the onion is translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the seaweed, celery, kombu, and tofu skins. If the seaweed was well-drained, add a little water (not more than 1/4 cup), but if it wasn't, it shouldn't need more water. Cover the pan and cook for about 7 minutes. Stir in the soy sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Serve. I think this would be ideal served over brown rice, but I forgot to start cooking it, so I used black rice noodles, another exotic Chinatown find.

To make up for the bad picture at the beginning, here's a cool picture of some tofu skins before getting chopped and cooked.

Miso soup

I made miso soup for the first time on Friday. It was raining cats and dogs, so soup seemed appropriate. Plus, I had bought miso a while ago and hadn't gotten around to using it yet. I threw in some extras to make it a little more substantial than your standard Japanese restaurant miso soup. Beyond the dashi and miso, everything else is optional, and you can add any other fun extras you want. I don't know very much about miso, and I forgot to write down the kind I used. It was a light brown color. I know each kind has its own flavor but are to some degree interchangeable. Dashi is Japanese kelp stock. It traditionally has bonito fish flakes in it, but I didn't add them. This was my first time making or using it, and I also added some other seaweed to the soup itself. I had only had seaweed in the form of Japanese restaurant seaweed salad, but I bought a bunch of dried seaweed in Chinatown a few months ago and have decided to explore a little bit. So far, so good.

Miso soup (adapted from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman):
1 quart dashi (see next recipe)
1/3 cup miso
8 oz firm silken tofu, cut into small cubes
1/2 cup frozen edamame
1 carrot, cut into small rounds
1/4 cup dry hijiki seaweed, rehydrated in about 1/3 cup warm water for a few minutes

Heat the dashi in a saucepan over medium heat until it's almost boiling. Then scoop out about 1/2 a cup and mix it with the miso. Then add the miso mixture back to the dashi. Toss in the rest of the ingredients, including the water used to rehydrate the hijiki. Let it cook without boiling until the edamame is cooked to your taste.

Dashi (also from Bittman):
2 quarts of water
1 piece of kombu (kelp), about 4-6 inches (I'm a seaweed newbie, and the whole piece looked awfully big to me (about 4x10 inches or so), so I cut it in half, and it seemed to work fine.)

Put the water and dashi in a saucepan over medium heat until almost boiling. Bittman says it takes about 15 minutes. I wasn't paying attention to the time when I made it, so I don't know. I used one quart immediately in the miso soup and froze the other quart for the next batch of soup.

The next day for lunch I had leftover miso soup with spring rolls. I made a dipping sauce for the spring rolls this time: peanut butter, orange juice, rice wine vinegar, toasted sesame oil, and srirachi (Thai chili sauce), all to taste. I also tossed a couple leftover leaves of lacinato kale (aka dinosaur kale) into the soup. Both were good choices.