Dau miu furikake ( 振り掛け / ふりかけ ) -- A Japanese condiment made with Chinese greens :)

Blogging is making me shop for unusual and unfamiliar ingredients which I see often in supermarkets here, but which I never dared to buy before as I din't know how to cook them. Nowadays, that part is easy.... you don't need to go to any expensive cooking schools to learn new stuff. For me google is the best teacher .... :) And blogging is teaching me a lot of things. My son loves Japanese food and he loves topping his rice (any rice whether it is Japanese, Indian, Thai, Jasmine...white or brown) with something called "furikake".  It is a dried mix of vegetables, fish, nori (seaweed), salt, sugar and MSG. I get his favorite brand from Japan, when my kind friends visit. 

I bought "Dau Miu" or "dou miao" greens (豆苗) from the local chinese supermarket, as I thought they looked similar to Indian "Methi", and I planned to to use them to make "theplas" which is a kind of another flat-bread. I did make it,(Here is the recipe for dau miu theplas/flat bread) but i used just 1/4 of the greens, so I used my favorite search engine and found the recipe of furikake here. It looked very easy and ready in about 30 minutes. More information about dau miu (pea shoots in English) at the wiki page.

An interesting recipe, to make kids eat their "green veges" ...:)

dau miu furikake

Bread-maki

"Makizushi" is a type of sushi. Japanese cuisine is one of my favorite cuisines after Indian. Japanese cuisine is very attractive visually.  Maki is a roll made with  bunch of fillings over rice, which is stuck over sea-weed rolled with the help of a bamboo mat called "makisu". More about sushi and maki roll here.

This post is about a snack item inspired from the Japanese Maki roll, I make for my kids for their school lunch boxes or evening snacks. Very easy to prepare and quick. All you need is some bread slices, some raw vegetables, some cheese, etc...any filling of your choice.