50/50 Cooking With Mitsuki

Kabocha Pumpkin Lobster Bisque with Japanese Sweet Potato Chips

Story behind this recipe

This one-of-a-kind recipe fuses together Mitsuki's mother’s traditional Japanese Kabocha pumpkin soup that she grew up eating at the family dinner table, with fresh seafood she caught and speared in the ocean a few miles from my home in Southern California. Mitsuki's mother’s soup is her favorite childhood meal, so naturally I paired it with my favorite SoCal Seafood!

From a young age, the catch and cook lifestyle has been an integral part of how she consume food and represents some of her favorite memories. Mistuki started fishing at five years old off the coast of Fukuoka with her father on his small boat, they called it boat camping and they loved it! Both would stay up all night telling tall tales as they braved the chilly nights and looked forward to tomorrow’s catch. Everything Mitsuki and her father caught they consumed, nothing ever went to wast. Mistuski holds this value of sustainability and honoring the life she took close to her heart and continues to utilize the entire animal in her meal preparations to this day. In Japan, they show respect for their food by saying “itadakimasu” before a meal and “gochisousama” after a meal. By using those words, they are essentially express gratitude for the life the animal lived and promise to honor its life in the meal. These are some of the values Mitsuki brings to her dives and to the spear community as a whole.

Creating unique dishes with her local catches is one of the ways she shows love to the people in her life. It merges her respect for the ocean, with her passion for family. SoCal Dive Babes has quickly become a second family, so naturally designing a dish for them was a full circle experience!

Enjoy!