Tofu pouches for dinner

How about another food post?  Someone asked me about tofu pouches and since I was using them in a dish I took pictures of the process.

Tofu pouches are called aburage in Japanese.  The actual translation is "deep fried in oil".  They can be easily bought in the tofu section of supermarkets in Japan.  I don't know about in other parts of the world.

Supposedly they are actually thin slices of tofu that have been deep fried and they naturally get an open space inside the slice.  BUT since one can buy them so easily, I've never tried making my own aburage.   If you are going to try to make your own I'd suggest you squeeze as much of the water out of your slices as possible otherwise you are going to have a dangerous oil fire.

This evening I was making aburage and sliced daikon (icicle radish) miso soup.

Slice up the daikon.

Slice up an aburage the same as the daikon and throw them in a pot with fish stock (powdered).  When the daikon is tender add miso to taste and green onions if you have any.  Ta-da!  Miso soup is finished!

But that wasn't really what I making that night for dinner. 

THIS was what I was making for dinner.  Vegetable and pork rolls.  I boiled up some sliced carrots and some greens.  I have no idea what the greens were... You could probably use spinach.  Meat; pork and beef, is most often sold in slices in the Japanese supermarkets.  It is harder to get large slabs of meat products here.  On the other hand, when I am in the States I find I have to ask the supermarket butcher in order to get paper thin slices of meat.

ANYWAY... salt and pepper the pork (and it is pork just because beef is so expensive in Japan) and then roll up the vegetables.  Fine.  Those rolls will be for Tetsu.

Now, I'm not much of a meat eater and so instead I took my aburage pouch and sliced off the four edges.

That gave me TWO aburage sides of the aburage and I placed the inside part down and then rolled up the vegetables the same as with the pork rolls.  The aburage rolls have to be held together with a tooth pick but besides that they work the same as the pork rolls.  I fried them lightly in the fry pan and then added sukiyaki sauce and let them simmer a bit.

You can make sukiyaki sauce with 1/3 cup soy sauce, 3 Tbsp sake or mirin, 5 Tbsp sugar, and 3/4 cup water.

And here is my main dish that night.  In the foreground are the pork rolls... they seem to "tighten-up" better than my aburage rolls in the back row but basically they taste the same.  Cooking both sets of rolls in the same pan combines their flavors.

I would say that the sukiyaki sauce recipe (with maybe a bit of added water) will cook up your aburage  all by itself and then the pouches can be cut in half and used for oinari-san much like my friend made the other day for us. 

Not too Christmasy a dinner but with the miso soup it was filling and tasty!