This was my experience with miso soup when I was studying in Akita—a city in Northern Japan that is considered to be fairly rural and spacious. The two kanji used in the name of the city reflect that, as they mean “Autumn rice.” As you can imagine, a lot of rice is produced in Akita. So are a lot of vegetables! So when I ate miso soup there, and found daikon radish and carrot in it instead of the “usual” tofu and seaweed, I was blown away. It grew on me, and now I find myself resenting that we only serve miso one way in the United States. Fortunately, miso soup is a fairly simple dish, and I was recently able to recreate the soup I ate in Akita two summers ago.
Ingredients:
1 small daikon radish
2 medium carrots
1 block soft tofu
½ cup white miso
9 cups of dashi
A quick preface: the ingredients list I’ve given above is for a main course miso, as in you’re planning on making it the main part of the meal. If that’s not the case and you’d prefer to serve this soup as a side dish, halve the recipe. There are also different types of miso out there! Miso soup is typically made with white miso as opposed to yellow or red miso. White miso is the least salty of the miso family. Yellow is more salty, and red is the saltiest! Be aware of this when picking out your miso and playing with the recipe. You can read more about different types of miso and their uses here. I’m sure you’re also wondering what dashi is. Dashi is a soup base commonly used in Japanese cooking. If you’re interested in making your dashi from scratch or making vegetarian dashi, here’s a handy guide. Otherwise, simply go to your local Japanese specialty store and grab some premade dashi packets. If you don’t have a specialty store near you, you can even order it online!
Now that you have all your ingredients and understand them to some degree, let’s get started. You’ll start by creating your dashi broth—either by boiling the ingredients you’re making it from scratch with in cheesecloth or by boiling one of the premade dashi packets you purchased. While you’re making your dashi, clean and cut the ends off your daikon radish and your carrots. Set the carrots aside for now, and cut the radish lengthwise, so you have two long halves. Slice each half into half moons. Set aside for now and turn your attention back to your carrots. You’ll want to cut them diagonally on the bias, so that each slice is a long strip of carrot.
Once done, check your dashi broth to see if it’s taken on the desired flavor. If it has, remove your dashi packet and add in your vegetables. Let the vegetables boil for a bit, then reduce heat and let them simmer. Turn your attention to your block of tofu and cut the soft tofu into the desired cube size for your soup. I find smaller cubes blend better with the vegetables, but larger cubes can be a fun way to break up the soup too.
Check on your vegetables. If they’re soft, we’re almost done! Make sure your soup isn’t boiling, or it will scald the miso during this next step and kill the probiotics present within it. Measure out your half cup of miso, but don’t add it directly to the soup. Instead, put a little on a cooking spoon or in a ladle (I find the ladle method allows me to mix more miso in at a time), and then mix the miso together with a bit of broth in the dish of the spoon/ladle using chopsticks. Once the miso is mixed in, add your tofu, give the soup a couple of stirs to warm the tofu in the broth, then serve and enjoy!
Like food, there are certain kinds of stories we get used to seeing one way. These become tropes, which inform our stereotypes, and ultimately just aren’t a reflection of the way people actually do things. One genre that is hugely guilty of this is the M/M romance genre. If you’re an anime fan, you may also know about the Boys Love genre of anime and manga, which consists entirely of stories about two male lovers for a female audience. Often, one character is branded the “uke” in the story—which literally means “receiver.” Since the genre is intended for female readers instead of actual gay men, the uke represents “the woman” in the sexual relationship between the two men in the story. Because of that, the sexual relations between the characters in Boys Love stories tend to be a little heterosexually informed and a poor representation of a realistic same-sex couple’s love life. M/M romance in America tends to have its own failings excluding gender roles from the same-sex pairings within their pages. However, the M/M sci-fi romance webcomic Starfighter does not.
Please be warned before you go looking up Starfighter on your web browser that the comic is an erotic one, and does include explicit material. None of the explicit pages of the comic will be posted within this blogpost, however, so don’t worry about NSFW content ahead.
Starfighter is set in the future during humanity’s first contact with aliens, a species called Colterons. The main story centers around a fighter and navigator duo, Cain and Abel. Navigators fly spaceships, fighters make sure the enemies the ship encounters explode. Neither can survive doing their job without the other. As you can imagine, this makes for some pretty reliant pairs. It can make partners obsessive, or controlling, or even territorial. Cain is a fairly territorial fighter, marking Abel as “his” with a bite-mark scar on Abel’s lip as soon as they are alone for the first time after their assignment. Abel is understandably upset—and refreshingly, doesn’t ever accept the way Cain first treats him as anything but abusive.
It’s only as Cain’s abusive behavior remedies itself that Cain and Abel become closer emotionally. And Cain does stop being such an asshat, I promise, here’s proof of one of his lackeys quitting on him because he cares too much about Abel now:
One of the other refreshing things about Starfighter, is that none of the sex Cain and Abel have is poorly disguised rape. One of the most unfortunate tropes in Boys Love and M/M is the case of the dubious consent in love making. Often times, the “fem” or “uke” character in the same-sex pairing will be unsure of their feelings and the sex they’re having with the other character. This takes the onus of sexual desire off of that character and places it on the other, more “masculine” character—which perpetuates and romanticizes silence culture in the bedroom and gender roles, where it is assumed that a man will always want sex and a woman never should. Instead of adhering to this trope, Cain and Abel are fairly communicative about their love making. Despite Cain’s possessive streak and his concerning behavior at the beginning of the story, Abel is very physically enthusiastic the first time he and Cain have sex. The reader is even treated to a play-by-play of how badly Abel has always wanted to have sex with a man and wants what is happening between him and Cain—which allows the reader to enjoy the scene instead of being concerned that Abel isn’t enjoying himself. Then, instead of feeling guilty over what they did or being unsure of his feelings, Abel decides he wants to do it again.
Abel takes a very active role in his and Cain’s intercourse the second time, destroying more of the heterosexual gender-norms that one partner is always acting upon the other. And, just in case those two things weren’t enough to blow M/M tropes out of the water, show that Abel is comfortable with his feelings, and convince the reader that Abel really does want to have sex with Cain, Abel tells Cain that he enjoyed himself afterwards.
Starfighter takes it even further, however. Whenever anal play occurs between two same-sex characters in M/M, often roles are assigned. One character will always penetrate, and one character will always be penetrated. Often, it’s easy to tell which character is which even before the characters have had any intercourse at all, because this trope often relies on lazy gender-coding. The penetrator is always masculine, aggressive, powerful—and the penetratee is always meeker, softer, and feminine. There are couples that break this coding out there, but they can be difficult to find. One genre in Japanese storytelling breaks it consistently, known as bara. The idea is to portray real men, with muscles and beards, having sex with each other. However, even bara falls prey to the strange heteronormative gender roles sometimes, where only one character will penetrate and the other will be penetrated.
Starfighter has Cain and Abel switch—you know, like a normal same-sex couple that engages in anal play might.
In conclusion, this is one of the most refreshing M/M romances I’ve read in a long time, that also has the bonus of being mega-hot and set in space. Here’s the link if you want to go experience it for yourself, and may you read many a story that has educated, healthy, and satisfying sex in it.
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