Japanese soups use dashi (see preceding pages) as their base. Add miso to the mix and you have miso soup, the most popular soup in Japanese cuisine. In Japanese homes, miso soup is often chockful of all sorts of vegetables and seafood. Lots of families use ingredients familiar to Westerners such as onions, potatoes and carrots, but today we want to show you how to make miso soup with Manila clams. In Seattle, these clams are cultivated in the Puget Sound just like local oysters, so we’re lucky enough to call the Manila clam a local delicacy.

Ingredients

Manila clams .................................  1lb

Dashi stock .................................   3 ½ cups

Miso ...........................................   1-2 tbs

Directions

1 Wash the clams in water, rubbing the shells clean.

2 Put the clams in the dashi stock and heat. When the clams have opened, add miso paste to dissolve in the

soup, then turn off the heat. The clams have a salty taste, so you can go easy on the miso. Adjust the miso amounts

to suit your taste.