Month: February 2015

Technicolor dinner

I’m in love with this purple sweet potatoes (murasaki imo). They make every plate instantly look so much different, so much illuminated!!! 
Here for dinner, sliced with just some cabbage and carrots, and cooked simply with a bit of olive oil. You can eat it as a main dish (what I usually do) or as a side.
I also come with the idea that a bit of consomme with it will make a great soup, or with some Carnerolli rice or Arborio rice that’d make an awesome risotto. So I tried the risotto, except that I was running out of cabbage, so replaced it by brocoli and diced the carrots and sweet potatoes instead of slicing them. Taste wise it was delicious, but I admit that pictures of risotto never look too good!!!
(Hint to keep the rice white: cook separately the sweet potatoes and add them in the end, if not the purple color will transfer to the rice)

Crumpets

It’s been sometimes I wanted something that changes from the usual scones/pancakes/crepes… I often prepare for breakfast and I was longing for English crumpets. I checked on my usual resource for English recipes: the bbc website and thought I could make crumpets right away. Not so simple. You need circles to bake them and you need baking soda, and instant yeast something I not often use. I must admit that I had to do some research too about the differences between instant yeast, active yeast, baking powder and baking soda…

So I finally manage to gather everything and cook them according to the bbc recipe. It was a little more fastidious and time consuming than expected but it was really worth it!!!
Some of the crumpets ready to be eaten!

The growing batter

Saturday lunch: potato cakes

I needed some energy before going to play tennis in the cold so I made these potatoes cakes served with leek and shiitake. The leek and the shiitake are thinly sliced and cooked slowly in a bit of olive oil. For the potato cakes, I gratted roughly 2 potatoes, mixed well with 2 battered eggs, added salt and pepper, and cooked both sides in a circle in a frypan greased with olive oil.

DIY lamp in a basket

The other day at Yasukuni Shrine flea market I bought 2 bamboo baskets for 500Y. Usually such baskets are use for flower composition, but I liked so much the bamboo pattern of one of them that I wanted to make a lamp out of one to enjoy the projection of the pattern on the walls.

With such basket it was really easy to mount as a lamp, and here is the result!
How do you like it?

Oat bran mini pancakes

Sometime it’s nice to have a drink and a few snacks to go with but no junk, no nuts nor cherry tomatoes…

As I mentioned the other day, I quite addicted to making pancakes and similars. It’s really super simple, it takes a few minutes and it is possible to create any variation. So today I made some salty oat bran mini pancakes to top it with whatever you have: here melted cheese and French pâté (not for me the pâté of course!!).
The base for the pancakes is made of plain flour, oat bran, baking powder, salt and water. I adjust the quantities of flour and water to obtain a not too smooth mixture so that when I bake it in the pan the shape won’t collapse and I don’t need circles.
And you, what kind of pancake addict are you?

Turnips filled with miso and pork

Sunday as a side dish of the buta shoga yaki I prepared an experimental recipe of some turnips filled with a mixture of miso and pork. This idea comes from two Japenese dishes, one is quite classical: boiled daikon in dashi topped with chicken and miso (for the recipe please contact me), the other is more refined and learned it at the cha-kaiseki cooking class (I’ll write more about that soon and introduce some recipes) I used to take, we once prepared some turnips filled with a mixture of shrimps. Actually I wanted to repriduce that dish, but I find it extremely difficult to find good shrimps (by “good” I mean wild shrimps that haven’t grown in shit-pools, sorry for being gross!). Being unable to find what I was looking for I decided to take the safe path and go with some Isumi pork (again…). That being decided the recipe needed to be adjusted.

I peeled the turnips (they were rather small ones), boiled them in salted water but could have been dashi, until soft (use a little wood toothpick to check), then removed a bit of the top and cut the base to make them stand. In a bowl I mixed the grinded pork meat with miso (with a ratio of about 1/5 of miso for meat). Then with a spoon I filled the turnips, lined them in an oven dish and baked them until the filling was well cooked. It’s better to serve them while hot. Since the turnips were small it made a lovely one bite size.

Crepes!!!

22:00, I’m just from work and from my pilates class, my husband won’t be back from work before 22:30. Just enough to time to prepare crepes!!! I couldn’t resist walking in the cold wind thinking about warn buckwheat crepes!!!

So here I am, cooking some. The filling will be simple: butter, cheese, eggs, or leek, and to finish dark chocolate or butter and honey (delicious honey made by my uncle in Salon de Provence).
How did you eat yours?
Buckwheat crepes or “galettes” are a traditional Brittany dish and I have this in my blood from my grand-father!!!

Mix buckwheat flour with eggs, milk and a bit of water until obtaining a smooth., silky mixture. Cook on both sides in a buttered pan until golden. Eat right away!

Chandeleur

Today is French “crepe day” called Chandeleur. I’m not sure I’m gonna make any tonight because I’ll be back from work quite late tonight. Yet I cook crepes and pancakes very often recently and in many different versions: changing the flour type, egg/no egg, milk/water…
This recipe is one I like to prepare for myself when I manage to have lunch at home.
I use a mix of chesnut flour and of corn starch, some baking powder, one egg and a bit of water to make the dough for the pancake. I baked it in olive oil in a small fry-pan on one side only, thick enough and covered the top side with 1/2 fresh mozarella, 1/2 fresh large very riped tomato. Seasonned with thyme, salt and pepper. And ready to eat in less then 10min!

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Ginger and pork

Isumi in Chiba (where we spend most of our week-ends) has very good pork meat. It is not as famous as the one from Miyazaki in Kyushu, but it’s as delicious and local, which for me is enough. I don’t eat much meat anyway, only pork and chicken breast, and only when I know where it comes from. 

One of my favorite Japanese recipe to cook thin slices of pork cutlet is the “buta shoga yaki” (grilled pork with ginger). It’s one of the basic Japanese recipes. It’s also a standard in lots of Japanese style cafes. It’s usually served with rice.

Today I had nice thin slices of pork cutlet and a piece of fresh ginger, a good opportunity to make some grilled pork with ginger. 

My version is simple: I grat (I use the daikon oroshi type gratter) the fresh peeled ginger on top of the pork slices in a container. Then I add a bit of soya sauce and a little of cooking oil. I close the container and shake well before I leave to rest for 5-10minutes (time to start cooking the rice). Then I heat a frypan and delicately put the slices to grill. Since I’ve put already a bit of oil in the mixture there’s no need to add more. I like my pork to be golden brown, so I cook it until it has the desired color.

And since I really like ginger, I also used the fresh ginger roughly sliced to treat myself with a “hot ginger”. For that I just top the ginger slices with boiling water and a spoon of honey!

The dish on the bottom left are some turnips filled with miso and grinded pork. An experimental recipe that was really nice. 

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