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I know, I took too long to take the photo so the seaweed has softened 🙁

Recently I had a craving. No, I’m not pregnant. Though I have had a couple of strange dreams of being pregnant. But no, I’m really not pregnant.

Ok, so I had a craving for wafuu pasta. Wafuu just means Japanese-style. So there’s no tomato or cream-based pasta sauce. In its place is something Japanese and in this case, I used tsuyu.

Tsuyu is a rather concentrated sauce and so is usually diluted but since pasta on its own is tasteless and I didn’t season the rest of the ingredients, I used it in its concentrated form and the pasta turned out to be just nice – not too salty.

Here’s the simple recipe that guarantees you a one-dish meal in less than half an hour for the family. The butter and mushroom add a richer dimension to the simple dish so try not to leave that out. 🙂

Salmon mushroom wafu pasta recipe

Author: Simply Mommie

Recipe type: Mains

Cuisine: Japanese

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 20 mins

Total time: 25 mins

Serves: 2-4

A quick-fix meal that is delicious and nutritious.

Ingredients

about 200-250g salmon fillet
10 white button mushrooms (whole), remove stem
250g (dry) spaghetti
water and a pinch of salt to cook pasta
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 teaspoon olive oil
110ml tsuyu
30ml water
kizaminori (shredded seaweed), amount as desired for garnishing

Instructions

Set the pasta to cook - cook it 1 minute less than instructed on package instructions with water and salt as it will be transferred to the pan when you are adding the sauce.
Rinse and pat salmon fillet dry.
Heat the oil in a non-stick pan and pan-fry the salmon till the centre just turns pink. Remove salmon and set aside.
In the same pan, melt the butter and add the mushrooms. Let it cook for about 30 seconds then add 30ml water and allow the mushrooms to cook further for another 4-5min. There should be still some mushroom 'juice' in the pan at that time.
Add and toss the cooked pasta in the pan so that the pasta can soak up the mushroomy goodness.
Pour the tsuyu over the pasta and mix thoroughly, allow the pasta to sit for about 30 seconds to soak up the sauce.
Plate the spaghetti.
Toss salmon with the remaining sauce in the pan.
Top pasta with mushrooms, cooked salmon pieces and remaining sauce (if any).
Lastly, top with shredded seaweed.

Notes

1. This recipe serves 2 adults and 2 children.

Click the link for a complete list of one-dish meals (with thumbnails) on the blog.

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Ice alphabet letters play

When better to indulge in some icy cold play than in this sweltering heat? I finally made coloured ice alphabets (and numbers) for the kids to play with – again, I’ve procrastinated doing this for erm, probably a few months and the silicon moulds have been sitting in the cabinet.

There were three alphabet moulds and one mould for the numbers. For the alphabets, I chose three different colours; I left the numbers one colourless but added peppermint flavour instead so that it could be a multi-sensory activity. And indeed, the peppermint ice numbers smelt so wonderful!

yellow, red and blue!

the peppermint numbers

I’ve not let them play with ice for quite a long while so they were really elated!! Both kids helped to remove the ice from the silicon moulds and started touching and attempting to hold the ice.

Ok, now if you notice, I set up two sheets of paper – one for each. I got my girl to write alphabets for little boy to learn his alphabets while playing with the ice alphabets, while hers had simple words which could be spelt using the ice. We did the writing prior to setting up the activity.

We did some matching!And spelling too!

And spelling too!

And after that, they just started ‘painting’ with the coloured ice by moving the fast-melting ice around on the paper and it was a beautiful sight as the colours blended together.

While the ice melted, we also talked about how the ice would melt faster if she kept swirling the ice alphabets around in the plate compared to those lying still on the paper. And of course, we couldn’t miss out discussing the colours which were appearing before our eyes.

Ok, after awhile of playing, my daughter asked, what are the ice letters made of? Hmm, so I told her water and food colouring, and for the numbers water and flavouring. Her question that followed?

Can we eat it?

Ok, so I said, you can taste it, though I don’t think there’s much taste, except for the peppermint ones.

Trying out the taste of ice

And of course her brother was only too glad to follow suit:

And he couldn’t quite stop. I think he thought the activity was about eating the ice.

Anyway, so after all the eating – or so I thought – I passed my girl a paintbrush to ask if she’d like to try to mix the colours a bit more on the paper but well, I think she was still hooked on trying to eat them –

And right after this photo, we had to end the activity because the ice had more or less melted, though they kept bugging me about the last few bits that were lying around. Hmm, I guess they had fun!!