Little things can mean a lot

There's a lot to be said for a tried-and-true dish that requires no deviation from the method, but a lot of tweaks may go into that recipe beforehand. Take braised hijiki. My original version of this dish was the standard version of frying and braising hijiki (a type of seaweed) in a sweet shoyu broth with abura-age (recipe here). Then I hit on the idea of using somen noodles to sop up the broth rather than abura-age (recipe here).

The other night, I was in the mood for hijiki somen, but wanted to do something a little different. I cooked it in my nonstick wok, with honteri, and noted how the starch from the somen thickened the dish (along with the sugar from the honteri). Then I decided to add a few drops of sesame oil.

This was a winner. Braised hijiki is a sweet dish, but the sesame oil adds a smoky savory undertone. Just a few drops do not permeate the dish with sesame flavor (sesame oil can overwhelm a dish), but still add a certain not-so-sweet undertone that can add depth to a sweet dish like braised hijiki. Tweak, tweak.

Hijiki somen

I haven't been cooking as much as usual lately, but last night I wanted something more than pasta and sauce from a jar. After a bit of dithering, I decided to have some hijiki. What I ended up doing was my usual recipe for braised hijiki but I used somen noodles rather than abura-age. I just put the dry somen into the pan and let it braise along with the hijiki. The noodles did a good job of soaking up the sweet shoyu broth (somen noodles are normally cooked by letting them steep in broth, rather than boiling them separately). In the end, the noodles probably gave the dish more body than it normally has; not a bad thing on an evening when a spring sleet storm was clattering on the windows. Then again, a sleety evening probably calls for mizore nabe.

The next time I try this braised hijiki variant, I might zap it with a bit of pepper sherry to add just a bit of heat to the broth's sweetness. I suspect that might be a good combination.