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!

Recipe: makes 4-6 bowls

2 cups of dashi broth or vegetable broth

3 tablespoons of miso

a hand full of dried wakame, soaked in warm water

1 pack of shimeji mushroom

1 cup of chopped cabbage 

2 carrots sliced thinly 

1 small onion

green onions

If you want to use dashi broth, add water, a big sheet of konbu (dried kelp) and a teaspoon of salt into a pan and bring it to boil and simmer for about 30-60 min. (you can also buy dashi flakes/powders, but make sure to buy the ones without MSG and only natural). 

In dashi broth, add cabbage, carrots, onions, and wait until they are cooked. Add miso paste and make sure the paste is all melted in the broth. Add wakame and chopped green onions and stir.