Egg miso 卵味噌

Flavored Miso is perfect to "nibble/lick" as you sip sake. It also works well as a condiment for hot rice. This one is based on a condiment for rice I ate as breakfast when I was a kid. This is also a perfect Izakaya food. My mother made this using a large scallop shell as the pan. She told us that this was the way her father used to cook this dish. The miso and egg were well cooked, even a bit burned at the periphery but loose in the middle. I recall that I enjoyed the different tastes, textures and degrees of doneness of this dish. I do not have any idea what the recipe was except that it was made from egg and miso. Since the scallop shells I have are too small to use as the cooking vessel, I made this in a small frying pan. As a result the end product may not be that similar to what I had as a child. Without a specific recipe I made it according to my whim.

I first finely chopped garlic, ginger, and shallot  (I am sure scallion or onion will also do but I happened to have a half of a large shallot). I added a small amount of light olive oil and a dash of dark sesame oil to a small frying pan and sauteed the garlic, ginger and shallot mixture until fragrant and the shallot was soft (2-3 minutes). I added miso, mirin and sake and mixed well on a low flame (amounts are all arbitrary). After everything was combined, I kept stirring until the mixture became somewhat thick (not to the original miso consistency but softer). I then added one beaten egg and mixed until the egg was just cooked.

This was not too bad but it wasn't like the one I remembered. Maybe I should have added more eggs and I will have to be on the look-out for a really big scallop in the shell. It went well with cold sake, however. As a shime 締め or finishing dish,  we used this as a condiment when we had leftover and microwaved chestnut rice. That was also quite good. The only problem is that this dish is rather salty. As a result over indulgence in sake may occur. I may have to experiment a bit more to make this dish better.