I love soymilk, so I was excited to hear that my uncle made his own soymilk with a soymilk machine. I thought it was going to be some huge machine, but it’s only a little bigger than a coffee percolator. I bought myself one over the weekend along with some soybeans (did you know they’re different than edamame?!) and gave it a spin.

The first time I made soymilk, I put way too many soybeans in. Luckily, nothing broke. The resulting milk was pretty creamy, but a little gritty. The second time, I put a little over the recommended amount and it came out pretty well. Before buying the machine, I wondered if it was worth paying $70 for, but after drinking a warm frothy mug of fresh soymilk with some honey mixed in, I stopped wondering.

Another good thing is, I can cook with the ground up soybean pulp (okara in Japanese, tza in Mandarin). I’m not really sure how to cook with it, but I’m thinking about simmering or throwing it in some stir fry.

I don’t know why but I thought I had bought ong-choy (chinese water spinach?) instead of gailan (chinese broccoli). I never cooked with gailan before, so I just did a boring stir fry. First, I cut up the gailan and separated them into stems and leafy parts. Then I blanched the stems for a bit, and then threw the leaves in too. After, I drained it and it let sit in the colander while I whipped up some sauce. The sauce consisted of 3 parts vegetable broth, 2 parts oyster (or veggie oyster) sauce, and 1.5 parts rice wine, roughly. Since I never really measure stuff when I cook, that’s a rough estimate. I put some oil in the wok, fried up some minced garlic in the oil, threw in the drained gailan, stir fried for a couple of seconds, then threw in the sauce and stir-fried till the sauce was pretty much evaporated.

The curry fried rice was a first timer too. Someone said I should use curry paste, but the curry powder turned out fine. I used broken rice (only destitute people eat this!) that I cooked tonight. I mixed about half a cup of vegetable broth with maybe two tablespoons of curry powder (guesstimate it) and put it in the wok to simmer for a bit. Then, I threw in some cut up baked tofu, and then the rice. Mixed it up, threw in some green onions, decided it wasn’t salty or curry-tasting enough. To fix that, I mixed about two tablespoons of soy sauce, 1/3 cup of vegetable broth, and then some more curry powder (one teaspoon maybe?) and then threw it on top of the rice and mixed it in. It tasted about right by then.

Not bad for some first-time cooking, I would say.

430Seaweed soup is my “I feel like drinking soup but I’m feeling lazy” soup. The directions are simple:

• rinse some dried seaweed/laver
• put it in some boiling water
• stir in one pre-beaten egg
• turn off the heat when the egg is done
• stir in miso and a little bit of salt to taste
• throw in some cut up green onions