Breakfast, August 13, 2011

The daikon leaves are spreading and shading neighboring vegetables in a raised bed. To take care of the situation, we’ll eat those daikon leaves.

• Steamed rice with scrambled eggs with shiso perilla leaves
• Kenchinjiru / root vegetable soup
• Tofu to daikon no happa no miso itame / tofu and daikon radish leaves sauté with miso
• Suisu chaado no gomaae /Swiss chard with sesame dressing

A miso-flavored sauté with tofu is one of the first dishes I think of when wanting to use a fair number of daikon leaves. Perfectly, there is half of a broiled tofu left in the fridge.

Since miso is used in the dish, skip the miso soup. However, Tom tends to swallow rice and choke if there’s no soup accompaniment. So a soup not of miso but flavored with soy sauce … Kenchinjiru with several root vegetables would do. Kenchinjiru usually has tofu and konnyaku in it, but I’ll omit the tofu as it is used in another dish. And we are out of konnyaku, so forget it. Missing some ingredients is not a big deal. The ingredients are first sautéed with sesame oil… This makes it the second dish cooked with oil for this breakfast. At least this soup only takes 1 tsp of oil. It shouldn’t do any harm. Thin slices of green onion add a subtle punch.

Root vegetables are filling and warm your body. In other words, they tend to be on the slightly heavy end in terms of palate, especially in warm weather. This is countered by Swiss chard with its colorful stems, which are blanched and lightly coated with toasted black sesame dressing. It is fresh and juicy, and also pleasant to the eye.

Oil-free scrambled eggs with shiso leaves are added at the end. We need to keep up with the shiso plants growing in the greenhouse.