A strange experience

My husband helps me a lot at home and we share the house chores, but he likes to joke and say that he is the one doing everything at home, once he has just finished washing the dishes once in a while! So l’ve decided to let him experience what it is really to do everything! He is now in charge of the grocery shopping, the laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, the driving, the bill paying, the movie picking, the holidays planning and so on. Funnily enough but totally un-correlated this experience coincides with a number of studies I’ve found and discussions I’ve had about how men are happier when sharing house chores with their partner, about how important a supportive partner is to a woman’s career etc…

I’m having an other busy week at work so I won’t enjoy it too much lazying around and I must admit for this first evening it was quite strange to sit on the sofa and browse Wired while he was cooking (or let say struggling) in the kitchen. I felt like I was sick, which happened may be two or three times in the 15 years we’ve been together, I also felt like jealous not to have fun cooking in the kitchen with him, but I felt grateful for the simple meal he prepared for us! Last night the experience was more delectable. I had a late call for work (damned time difference!) and I was delighted to see the dinner ready when I finished, a delicious set of grilled eggplants whith pasta.

With this experience I realized that many of the things I do at home are mechanical and it takes a lot of effort for me not to do them. They are part of a sort of routine just like brushing teeth and require no effort. Also that I  easily accept to give away tasks in which I don’t especiacilly take pride in, but cooking!!! this is much harder… For me it’s like sleeping, exercising or going outside, I need it! Please! Give me my kitchen back! I just can’t stand seating and doing nothing while you somebody else is in my kitchen!

Another veggie tart!

With endless variations and always the best seasonnal veggies, a tart is always a perfect meal.  

My veggie tart today contains the last green beans and the last broad beans of the season, a handful of edamame, one yellow sweet pepper and one tomato. I prepared the dough with a mix of buckwheat and spelt flour, and olive oil. Except the edamame that I boiled a few minutes, if not they are hard to peel, I just use raw ingredients. Simple and delicious.

Basil and tomato ravioli

The basil in the garden seems to enjoy very much the rainy weather and it’s growing gigantic, so I went to cut some and was thinking about preparing a simple dish of pasta with basil and tomato. But then it turned out in a new ravioli recipe! 

I peeled a large tomato (you’ll actually need 2 or 3) and then cooked in a pan with a tiny bit of olive oil and some salt, until I obtained something close to condensed tomato. While the tomato was getting ready I prepared my usual dough recipe (100g of flour, 1 egg, a bit of salt and olive oil) and washed the basil and chopped it, and added it to the dough. This why I didn’t add water in the dough, the moist came mainly from the basil. I knead well and then pass it in my pasta machine untill it was thin enough (7 on my machine). I prepared two versions one with plain tomato for my husband, and one parmegiano-tomato for me.  I have some delicious vintage parmegiano brough from Italy, so I gratted some and mixed it with the tomato sauce. On the dough I lined a little quantity of filling, then lay an other layer of dough. And then made the ravioli. I am not very well equipped for making beautiful ravioli, so mine are pretty irregular. I just finally boiled them in salted and oiled water and served them with a little of olive oil. Super delicious. I was really surprised by how much we can appreciate the taste of the three ingredients: basil, tomato, parmegiano in my ravioli, a perfect balance that is usually not so easy to obtain with just tomato-basil pasta.

Week end lunch

Funny because I don’t often cook soba on week days, but on week end I realized we eat some quite often!  I love to cook them in a simple manner, neither in soup nor cold with tsuyu, but rather just boiled with a few drops of soya sauce, accompanied with some vegetables and often meat balls. This time it’s simply Japanese pickles (carrot, cucumbee, turnip), and the meat balls are just pork with garden parsley, salt and pepper.

Quinoa bowl

A pure bowl of yumminess! With quinoa simply boiled, baby leaf salad, diced avocado and dried salted konbu (shio konbu – 塩昆布), and the juice of a local lime for a late Friday evening dinner in the country. I love shio konbu, it accomodates very well with Japanese and non Japanese dishes. It tastes slightly like salted licorice, and I am still imagining ways to use it in my recipes.

Thick pancakes

In my quest of an ever changing breakfast menu, I decided to try to make soya flour thick pancakes. It is as simple as making soya flour pancakes but the fluffiness obtain with the thick layer of dough is really changing the whole experience. For this recipe I used a mix of white flour and soya flour (only soya flour makes a strange consistency), 2 eggs, 1 pack of baking powder, a bit of brown caster sugar and a bit of salt and water. After stirring well all the ingredients, in a greased heated pan I form the dough in metal circle and cooked at low heat until the top is almost not moist anymore, then fliffed the crumpets with the circles and cook a few minutes more. Delicious with any kind of topping!

Vegetarian late dinner

Sometimes (often) I don’t have much time to prepare dinner so I really like to prepare sautéed fresh seasonal vegetables (carrot, lotus root, potato, okra), and this time I accompanied them with a fluffy tofu omelet. Yes fluffy again, after yesterday’s pancakes recipe!

In a bater I mixed 3 eggs and a block of silky tofu roughly drained, and beat well. I cooked it in a frypan under cover at medium heat both sides until golden.

Buckwheat bread

A new variation of a classic bread: buckwheat and plain flour bread. It is really simple it consists in replacing half of the flour by buckwheat flour and add a little more yeast. It has a subtle taste perfect for breakfast.

Japanese vegan dinner

An other of my simple vegan dinner, this time 100% Japanese. With a konbu dashi miso soup with tofu and myoga and a bowl of rice topped with sauteed veggies: shishito, carrots, burdock and potato. No seasonning, just the pure delicious taste of each ingredient.

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