But first, my “not anmitsu.” It’s a dessert that I’ve been thinking about making for a while now, but I could never bother obtaining every ingredient for every element. I knew I wanted to make my own interpretation of it, in fact, I wanted to hipsterise it. But keeping the mochi, red bean and green tea elements there was so difficult. Plus I wanted shiso leaves, but I didn’t want them to go to waste if I had no other plans for them.
What ended up happening was this:
Which was a pretty good effort!
My original idea was to include strawberries plus other fruit, shiso leaf garnish, cubes of almond milk jelly, cubes of green tea jelly, azuki beans, mochi (or chia seed and coconut milk fake mochi, or a panna cotta), and dark agave syrup.
What actually ended up happening was strawberries, plums, feijoa, mint leaf garnish, cubes of very soft almond milk jelly, cubes of green tea jelly, azuki beans. The agar agar was tough to work with, as I’ve never used it before and didn’t bother researching. I didn’t realised it needed consistently higher temperatures than gelatine to dissolve completely, so I did have to redo both the green tea and almond jellies through re-heating and adding a bit more agar agar powder. The consistency of the green tea jelly cubes were pretty much spot on in terms of how well they held together, but I could have used a bit more to make them just a tad harder.
It feels so good to cook again, and I managed to make a massive soup with beef bones, chicken bones, dashi broth, and a whole lot of vegetables. I also wanted to try my hand at making squid ribbons, but I was put off by the high cost of squid. Luckily, a fishery opened up a stall at the local farmer’s markets and sold some squid at a good price, so I bought some!
I prepped my squid from memory, and now feel I can do it quite easily. It still takes me a long time, but I know exactly what to do.
And lo and behold, BLUE SQUID INNARDS!! I didn’t even know they could look like that since I’ve only taken apart squid twice before, and they’ve always been white on the inside. It was so pretty!
And from the tubes, I managed to slice them fairly thinly to become ribbons, that would then go into my soup.
The soup itself is rather ugly and murky so there’s no picture of that.
Cooking is so fun!