26 December 2007

Culinary Adventures: Chicken and Seaweed

We needed to make dinner, and my wife doubted that we had enough left over chicken to feed us all, but I had a solution.

We had a pack of udon noodles, so I got the water boiling for them, and put a about 3 cups of stock in a pot and started to boil it.

I took about 4 sheets of nori (Japanese sushi seaweed), shredded them, and put them in the stock, and brought it all to a simmer, then added the chicken and remaining gravy, some oriental vegetables (broccoli, snap peas, water chestnuts, etc.), and a few chicken wings from the freezer, which took no time at all in simmering broth..

Boiled the noodles for 8 minutes, and then rinsed with cold water to stop the cooking, and when the wings were good and done (even frozen, not that long), put the chicken and veggies on top of the udon.

The seaweed added a lot of umami* to the broth flavor, and even my son, who is a notoriously finicky eater loved it.

*Umami, from the Japanese word or "meatiness" is the 5th flavor, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. The actual taste bud receptor, for glutamates present in animal proteins, was determined in 2002, though it has been a part of oriental cookery for centuties, and the great Brillat-Savarin's concept of osmazome a very similar concept of meat flavor.
Finicky eating habits is a classic symptom of conditions on the Autism spectrum

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