Our vegetable garden is at the peak of its harvest. Every day we are harvesting cucumbers, courgette, tomatoes, beans, etc., and our consumption of Korean shiso is not keeping pace with the amount of produce.
The miso (soybean paste) I made at the same time as the pandemic started is coming along nicely, so I’ve put some of it in the fridge and started using it in our daily cooking.
Today, I made a pork miso soup with vegetables from our vegetable garden and homemade miso.
豚汁 (Tonjiru / Butajiru) is a miso soup with pork in it. Usually, when you make miso soup, you make soup stock from bonito and kombu seaweed and add miso to it. On the other hand, pork soup doesn’t need bonito or kombu seaweed broth (Dashi) because the pork gives off its own flavour.
Ingredients
thinly sliced pork: about 100g
Tomatoes, komatsuna, okra or any other vegetables you like
Ginger slices like needles: (optional)
Miso paste: about 2 Tbsp
Salad oil: 1~2 tsp
Water: about 2 cups
How to make
Heat salad oil in a thick-bottomed pan and fry thin slices of pork.
When the pork changes colour, add water and bring to a boil.
Add chopped vegetables and ginger and simmer until cooked.
Dissolve the miso in the water and season to taste.
Okra flowers
I love okra, although it’s not often sold in supermarkets here. Even when there is, it’s often grown so big that you probably can’t chew it unless you cook it in soup.
I want to have the delicate okra that we eat fresh in Japan, so we decided to grow our own.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to grow okra in Quebec, Canada, where we live, because okra likes hot weather. I’ve planted it in planters, but there’s only one flower on the plant, or the buds don’t open and they just wilt and die.
Finally, today we harvested one okra (I forgot to take a photo).
When I sliced the okra into thin slices, I found that it was soft enough to eat raw. However, what can I cook with just one okra? So I decided to put it into the pork miso soup.
As it is almost the end of summer, it might be difficult to harvest any more okra. If we are lucky, we can harvest another one or two.
