It’s lovely out right now. Drippy, gray, and blustery. Maybe most people hate rainy days but I love em’.

I’m on my fifth cup of tea and listening to the hollow patter of the heavy raindrops hitting the roof and echoing through the attic. The air smells metallic and has a weightiness to it that hangs heavy on my shoulders. I should avoid contact with anything soft such as the couch right now or I might just collapse right into it and never get up.

It’s days like these when I want nothing more than to sip on warm broth. Sometimes I wish I’d catch a cold just so I can watch movies on the couch all day while wrapped up in a giant fuzzy blanket and sipping on a bowl of chicken broth with rice and swirls of cooked egg.

This tsukimi nabe was made to be enjoyed on a day just like this.

Tsukimi means “moon-viewing” and is a reference to the addition of an egg to the soup right at the end of cooking. The bright yellow yolk symbolizes the full moon. With a rich broth full of tender vegetables, it is a wonderful meal for a dreary day.

I started by placing all my ingredients in the donabe. If you don’t have one it’s no problem; you can make this in any lidded pot, I’ve even made a soup like this in a baking dish covered with aluminum foil and baked in the oven.

Layered on a bed of napa cabbage are clusters of shiitake mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, carrots, yukon gold potatoes, soft tofu, and a sprinkling of scallions.

The broth is just water flavored with white miso, mirin, fish sauce, soy sauce, and hondashi, which is a dried form of dashi stock.

You pour the broth over everything else and turn the heat up to simmering with the lid on. After about 15 to 20 minutes, check the potatoes and carrots with a small knife, if they’re as soft as you like them then it’s done! The last thing to do is turn off the heat and crack an egg or two over the top, then just clamp on the lid for a few minutes to let the eggs set.

The eggs in this nabe were still runny in the middle and when broken open they added a creamy richness to the hot broth.

The great thing about this dish is you can use whatever vegetables you want or have on hand, as long as there’s a soft egg cracked on top it’s still a tsukimi nabe!

Tsukimi nabe

This "moon-viewing" hot pot features golden-yolked eggs cracked over a hot and satisfying soup of vegetables and soft tofu.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Yield: 3 to 4 servings

Ingredients

• 1/4 of a large napa cabbage
• 4 to 6 shiitake mushroom caps
• a small bunch of enoki mushrooms
• 2 chopped carrots
• 1 to 2 small yukon gold potatoes
• half a block of soft tofu
• 3 large scallions
• 3 cups water
• 1 tbsp. white miso
• 1 tbsp. hondashi
• 1 tbsp. mirin
• 1 tbsp. fish sauce
• 1 tsp. soy sauce
• 2 eggs
• sesame seeds and togarashi to garnish

Cooking Directions

1. Press the extra moisture out of a half block of soft tofu.
2. Cut vegetables into bite size pieces and arrange over a bed of napa cabbage in the donabe, break off pieces of the tofu and add in as well.
3. Heat water and miso in the microwave or over the stove until warm, whisk to break up miso completely. Add the other liquid ingredients to the broth.
4. Pour broth into donabe and cook on medium high heat with the lid on for 15 to 20 minutes or until potatoes and carrots are tender.
5. Turn off the heat and crack eggs over the top of the soup, put lid on and wait a few minutes for the eggs to set before serving.

After photographing, I topped the soup with some toasted sesame seeds and a sprinkle of spicy togarashi seasoning. I could really just drink that broth straight out of a mug though, which I may just do since there are plenty of leftovers and it’s still drippy out.

What is your go-to comfort food for a rainy night?

December 6, 2011 Alayna Discussion, Recipes 5 comments

If you recall, I’ve reviewed a Clif Mojo bar before- the peanut butter pretzel flavor. You may also recall that while I didn’t hate it, I definitely didn’t think I’d purchase one again. Well lo and behold I went and did just that when I stumbled upon this delightful looking white chocolate macadamia flavor.

I love white chocolate, and macadamia nuts. What could go wrong?

Let’s start with the stats. 190 calories with 11 grams of sugar and 8 grams of protein. All well and good here.

The ingredient list is mostly organic with very few funky ingredients to complain about.

Appearance: Chunky with puffed rice, pretzel bits, macadamia pieces, and white chocolate chunks all held together by a shiny colorless glaze. One side of the bar has more pretzel pieces while the other seems to have all the white chocolate chunks.

Texture: Everything has a very satisfying crunch to it from the crackling puffed rice to the crisp pretzel bits. The nuts and chocolate pieces have a similar oily smoothness and density that feels good as they give way under the strength of your bite.

Taste: There is a very surprising saltiness right from the start. It’s not like individual salt crystals dissolving on your tongue either, but more of an all over saltiness as if the bar was painted with saltwater. It’s jarring at first, the acrid iodine flavor washed over everything makes your jaw tingle just under the ears like you’ve bitten into a lemon.

It’s great when you bite into a white chocolate chip and the saltiness combines with the sweet to make one cohesive flavor, but since the distribution of ingredients isn’t homogenous, some bites are a mouthful of sweet chocolate while others are just an unpleasant saltlick.

As for the macadamias, they’re barely noticeable. There is a faint nuttiness in the back of your throat if you’re looking for it, but really it’s not a huge part of the overall flavor of the bar.

Overall, while I didn’t hate it I didn’t really “get it” either. The pretzel bits seemed out of place entirely and the saltwater flavor was just impossible to get past. I would have liked this better if the nuts were salted rather than the binder and if the whole thing were better distributed so that most bites will have a bit of everything in them.

I’m really just not feeling this whole “put pretzels in everything” business that Clif Mojo has going on, so this product line as a whole is probably just not for me. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what is giving the entire bar that bathed in saltwater taste when there doesn’t seem to be a colossal amount of sodium in it.

Also….where my macadamias at!?!? What a tease.

What is your favorite nut? (I’m a cashew and hazelnut fan myself.)

November 30, 2011 Alayna Discussion 10 comments

After all the homey comfort food we’ve been eating for the last week, Jeff and I were both craving a totally different sort of comfort food – Chinese.

If you’re familiar with Atlanta, then you know that Buford highway is the place to go for “ethnic” restaurants. There’s tons of great Korean barbecue, Vietnamese pho and bahn mi, slow-roasted Mexican pork in hand made corn tortillas, and of course some awesome Chinese offerings that go far beyond the general take out fare.

Cafe 101 is easily our favorite Chinese place. It’s a quirky little round building with sort of a clamshell roof, you can’t miss it.

The walls are absolutely covered in magazine clippings and ceiling is a bit like a cathedral.

We started with some hot jasmine tea to warm up from the cold weather we’ve gotten hit with this week. Floral and soothing like chamomile.

And we’re always given these little starter dishes of spicy cucumbers that have been only lightly pickled and a type of seaweed that I’m completely unsure of the name of.

And here’s where we proceeded to order entirely too much food, starting with some pork dumplings and some hot and sour soup.

The dumplings were so soft and flavorful and the soup was full of tingly pepper that clings to the back of your throat.

We were both dying for mapo dofu, a crazy-spicy dish of tofu in a chili-heavy sauce. It was so good! The tofu actually had a distinct bean flavor that is sometimes missing from commercially-made tofus, and the sauce was the kind of spicy that makes you sweat and pant like a puppy.

We also got the duck buns, crispy-skinned duck on hot steamed buns with sour plum sauce and green onion. They actually brought all the fixins to the table and assembled the duck buns right in front of us.

I love this type of Chinese steamed bread, it’s so pillowy like a marshmallow. The duck was pretty fatty and I ended up picking off the larger hunks of fat, but it was still amazing.

As if we weren’t about to explode already, the server brought us a few slices of fragrant Chinese melon for a dessert and palate cleanser. Cool and crisp.

We took a ton of food home and had it for lunch the next day. Mmmm, mapo dofu for lunch.

Cafe 101 is kind of a special place for me. I remember the day we got our wedding rings in the mail. Jeff and I agreed to meet at Cafe 101 for lunch and to see our rings for the first time, but they were closed when we got there. We ended up going to another Chinese place in the area yet for the longest time I completely forgot that that happened and was convinced that we’d saw them at Cafe 101 for the first time. So now that place is kind of tangled up in that memory and for some reason means more to me than the restaurant we actually ended up at.

Do you have a restaurant that is special to you for no real reason?

November 29, 2011 Alayna Discussion 10 comments