Nothing better than a one-bowl meal for a perfect lunch. Donburi are really easy to prepare in endless seasonal variations, with meat, fish or vegan, with white rice, brown rice, a mox of grains…
For this one I used plain white rice, seasonal veggies: turnips, carrots and shiitake, and prepare miso meat balls. For that I used pork meat, about 100g, 1 egg, 2 or 3 branches of parsley, 2 table spoons of panko, and 2 table spoons of miso (of your choice). I mix all together and cook the balls in a frypan until golden. The mix miso-parsley is really delicious!
Every year (but last year) there is a big event organized by my husband shamisen’s teacher where a lot of people from the traditional Japanese entertainment business and their apprentice and students join. The event is centered on ha-uta (端唄), a type of Japanese singing from the late 19th early 20th, where is added some naga-uta (長唄), dancing and a lot of other attractions. We’ve been participating in the event every year. My husband plays many pieces and for me it was first just a lot of fun watching and listening (before I starting singing too) and a great chance for me to wear a kimono, because everyone is wearing one! Every year I challenge myself with a new pairing kimono-obi, and by wearing it myself. But always with a twist, because in the end I am not Japanese and everyone knows it!!!
The pairing of the obi, the kimono and all the accessories obimi age, obi jime, haori…) can be really awkward at first since the color scheme and mix can for a western eye be quite a shock or an aggression. But with a bit of imagination and browsing a lot of kimono magazines (my favorite is kimono 姫) it becomes easier every time and quite fun. This year I opted for Japanese traditional patterns both for my kimono and my obi and played with greens, dark blue and ivory (which changes radically from the usual dark grey or black I often use), accesorized with a big broche that Prunellia offered me. Japanese with always a Parisienne touch!! And outside I wear it with high heel boots and a vintage clutch bag of course.
I am extremely picky on the quality of the food we eat and I find it ridiculous to want to eat absolutely meat or fish at every meals or everyday. I’m more inclined to cook a really fresh and delicious piece when I find one and skip it the rest of the time. Lot’s of people curiously worry about proteines intake but not about vitamins or other as much important nutrients. I care about none because I know that what I cook is perfectly healthy. I’m a vegetarian that eat sometimes a bit of cooked white meat or fish. And I’m an egg lover!
Eggs are perfect from breakfast to dinner, they can be prepared and combined in so many ways that I could cook them differently pretty much everyday!! So when I found myself with a bloc of momendofu in my fridge, immediately I though about a delicious fluffy omelet for dinner. The tofu always needs to be drained for a better taste so never skip that part. In a bowl I put the tofu and 3 big eggs, a little of salt and pepy and I mixed until it took some volume up and started to foam. In a large frypan I heared s bit of vegetal oil and cooked on both sude the omelet. Then cut and serve with steam veggies.
Pretty much every morning on my way to the lab I stop by the local supermarket to buy me something for lunch. Usually some fresh veggies (avocado, tomato, rucolla…) to eat raw in my sandwich or with some pasta-rice-seeds, and a fruit for my snack in the afternoon. After the season of tangerines, I wanted some different citrus fruit and found beautiful iokan. So yesterday I got myself this kind of big tangerine that looks like an orange but not as sweet. And this morning when I was at the cashier the lady explained to me that she owed me 52yens because yesterday she mistakenly charged me for an other citrus fruit. I was really impressed! Not that she misrecognize the fruit, but that she absolutely wanted to reimburse me!!
Back when I lived in France, I remember there were oranges of a few sorts, pomelos, grapefruits, tangerines of two or three sorts, then lemons and limes, cedrats and a few other variations quite difficult not to identify immediately. Arriving in Japan I discovered a whole new citrus fruits variation. Of course there are the now famous and trendy yuzu, but there is really much more than this. The variations vary with the different regions and I am sure not to have completed the exploration, if it can be completed! I don’t even know where to start from with dekopon, iokan, natsu mikan, hassaku, kiyomi, shikwasa… All are delicious with a typical taste and smell, and most grow at different time of the year. They can be used in different preparations or just peeled and eaten like tangerines.
Broccoli, turnips, potato, shiitake for a good meal after work, there’s nothing better. Add a little of pork filet diced if you like it, sautéed in a pan with olive oil!
This morning I went back to work. I hate when the clock rings, but when it rang this morning I was dreaming that it would rang as many times as there are fountains in Rome, and I just didn’t bother… But after a while I had to go back to real life… to open the curtains and see a beautiful blue sky and mount Fuji in the background. Hum… Not too bad after 17 days of the same weather to have another one. In the train, surprisingly empty I was thinking about writing something about Sicily, or about Rome, and share some of these beautiful things we’ve seen and amazing places we’ve been, but I quickly got immersed in my emails and forget to write anything. When the train arrived in Koganei, I got off mechanically and headed to the supermarket to grad something for my lunch later. That’s when I got stricken by the fact that really in winter the only thing I find suitable enough to eat is the sandwiches I make with wholewheat and seeds bread, cream cheese and avocado. I got a bonus apple for my snack and then I realized that I AM going back to work and that I NEED to break this avocado-sandwich routine to something else, but right now I’m unable to figure out which substitute could work for me and I have the impression to be under the avocado curse (like in Kid Icarus, a game I used to play on my gameboy when I was a kid where you get cursed by an eggplant!!) … What do you have for lunch at work? I’m open to ideas… Pleazzzz
Too happy to have found the cooking gears I was looking for in Rome and the super Sicilian flours, I couldn’t wait to try them so I decided to make ravioli of course. For the filling since we arrived late on 31st I didn’t have so many options left for shopping, so I decided it’d be pork filet and shiitake. For the pasta I used my usual recipe (1 egg for 100g of flour), but used the “semolina di grano duro” instead of regular flour. The pasta is much drier and easy to roll, and the taste is perfect. I used the ravioli rack, but my filling was not smooth enough to cut the ravioli properly, so I finished them with the roller. Both are super easy to use and I was very satisfied with the result for a first try, I don’t how I was making ravioli before! It’s so much better. It makes them perfectly regular, and the taste and size were perfect. Now I need to work a little more on my filling to have it smooth so that it’s easier to fill the ravioli, but without loosing the taste and without cheese for my husband… Many trials to come!!!
When we left Japan in December it was still the end of autumn, in our garden the Japanese mapple trees were all red, the gingko had just lost all its leaves, the camelias were starting to bloom. 15 days later, the mapple leaves have all fallen, at first sight only the camelias haven’t changed, but with a closer look, the daffodils are blooming, the magnolias and the plum trees are full of buds already big, and the garden is metamorphosing slowly towards spring. From now on it’s going to be the coldest days, but the garden needs a lot of attention to get ready for spring: tree treaming, weed removing, cutting, grooming, planting… So we spend a lot of time outside in the cold, and there’s nothing better to start such days with a warm energizing rustic bread for breakfast. My recipe is simple: 50g of rye flour, 200g of white flour, 170g of water, 14g of sordough, 4g of natural dry yeast, 6g of salt. 20min cooking at 230deg, plus 5min in the oven cooling down. Perfect with jam, honey, butter or whatever pleases you!!!
On January 1st last year I started Tokyo-Paris sisters. The idea came for several reasons:
the need to revive the cooking and life-style part of gentianeetantoine.com, a website I started when we moved to Japan in 2004 and where pretty much everyday during 7 years I shared our discovery of Japan and our trips in Japan and abroad. The cooking part was a public space mainly dedicated to our friends and family where I shared Japanese recipes I was trying and French recipes I was preparing.
I needed a cooking diary to remember year after year what I am cooking and how because, as you may have noticed I cook without books and got inspiration on the moment, and forget as quickly as the idea came, and a picture is often better than notes.
I wanted to do something with my sister.
Now that we’ve been on for a year I realized it’s a lot more fun than I expected and I really like this moment I spend, mostly in the train, writing something about what I’ve cooked, or reading what Prune has been writing, I also realized that most of the posts are about food which at first was not intentional, though I wanted a cooking diary, I thought about mixing it with many more things that I am excited about or Prune is excited about, but for some reason I restrained myself and Prune may have too. Anyway, TPS is going on and starting fresh in 2016 with many more recipes, some travel and hopefully home decor and life style. Everyday brings something different, let’s enjoy that!
