Last winter you could see that I discovered having a thing for ochazuke. This thing suddenly arrived when I was stuck at home with a pneumonia and I thought it may be temporary until I fully recovered, but it continued on… so I thought then when winter would be over, but not even… it has lasted a whole year and ochazuke has been on my table many many times and not only on chilly days!
The generous bowl with rice (brown or white are equally delicious) topped with a few vegetables, a pickled plum, sesame… and finished by pouring dashi or something of the like on top has revealed to be a very handy lunch fix for busy days. Indeed since telework is our new way of working, it is more than often that lunch breaks are short or that mine and A.’s do not coincide well. Fixing my lunch in a snap is then paramount and ochazuke are great for this. Rice cooked in advance or by itself in the rice cooker, dashi gently boiling on the stove for a few minutes, a handful of seasonal vegetables, that all needed. Sometimes when I am even more busy than usual it’s simply one of our homemade umeboshi that serves for everything.
For the dashi I mainly use a mix of katsuobushi and konbu, sometimes dry shiitake, less often only konbu, or a bouillon with pork filet cooking juice. For the vegetables, whatever is in season is good!!!
Such simple lunches are really great because they are light and nutritious and allow me to work very efficiently in the afternoon!!! Below is a selection of my favorite! What’s yours???
All time classic: shiitake & spinachKomatsuna, radish and a bit of pork filletKomatsuna and umeboshiGrilled sweet potato and mizunaGrilled lotus root and umeboshi Lotus root and korinkiLate summer version with kabocha and black sesame
This is the time of the year when work gets busy with graduation thesis to read, budget to close, new contracts to search for, and plans for the new term to make. Every year it comes inevitably, together with the excitement of new things in preparation and the sadness of seeing students wrapping up their research before leaving the lab. It also coincides with the short season in Japan when seasonal food variety is at its lowest level (while we can’t complain much because even at its lowest it’s plenty!!): chinese cabbage, leeks, sweet potatoes, burdock, turnips and spinach are the main staple and it has been such for quite a bit now… of course there has been occasionally mizuna, shiitake and a few others but they are scarce and it is a few more weeks before we start having some spring greens. Hopefully on the fruit side, citrus fruits of all kinds, yuzu, lemon… come to light up savory recipes, and hassaku 八朔 from our tree make our breakfasts and desserts bright! Strawberries are also slowly getting towards their pick season.
After having prepared all kind of recipes with spinaches, I was wondering if dinner would be another quiche, another ravioli, when I was reminding myself my last travel, that is now more than a year old… travel Malta, the country of the delicious pastizzi tal pizzeli. Green peas are far from being in season but why not trying something with spinach and a bit of pork meat??? The idea was immediately approved by A. and I started cooking. Time was shirt and puff pastry is not a recipe I master well, so I opted for a rough puff. The overall preparation was quick, cooking not too long and the result was delicious tasty savory pies. I am so pleased with recipe that I can’t help sharing it!!!
Savory spinach pies (6 individual pies)
For the rough puff pastry
120g of flour
100g of butter
A bit of water
For the filling
5 bundles of spinach
1 large onion
1tsp of ground cinnamon
1 pinch of ground cloves
Salt and pepper
100g of ground pork meat (optional)
Start with the preparation of the filling. Peel and cut the onion, wash and cut the spinach. In a slightly greased pan cook them at low heat. If you use the meat add it also. Cook while stirring once in a while until the vegetables are soft but not golden. Add salt, pepper and the cinnamon and clove. Stir well.
Then make the pastry. Cut the butter in small blocks. Knead very roughly the butter and the flower without incorporating the flour in the butter. The butter should stay in small blocks. Fold and turn 4 times like for puff pastry, but without waiting. Roll to a 2mm layer.
Cut 12 squares in the dough of aout 12cm -15cm. In 6 of them put 1/6 of the filling each. Cut or not the remaining 6 pieces of pastry. And cover the 6 filled parts, seal with a bit of water. Bake at 200deg until golden. Eat right out of the oven!!!
It’s been now 6 years now that I have been keeping steadily this food diary of ingredients and recipes I loved, and some of my culinary failures too. And in 6 years I never talked about (Japanese or Chinese) yam, the Japanese yama imo 山芋・大和芋 or naga imo 長芋, also sometimes called tsukuneimo つくね芋. While they are supposed to be slightly different in shape and size, they basically have the same properties and taste. It is true that I rarely buy it because A. is not such a big fan and I hardly know how to prepare it to make it really tasty. Indeed yam taste is very very mild, but its texture, slimy and crunchy is very interesting. It is most often used in a preparation called tororo とろろ which is just grated yam that makes this very specific white and slimy “thing” used in tororo-soba とろろそば for example, or in other preparations, such as in surimi’s classic recipes (you can add some to mine) and in salads. And yam salad was one of the first genuine Japanese cooking experience I had with our friend S. when we moved to Japan and came to cook at home with us. We prepared two dishes for dinner together: a yam and cabbage salad and a snapper takikomigohan 炊き込みご飯. How did I come buying yam again is the kind of stupid mistake you wish you do more often. I simply couldn’t read the third kanji in 自然薯 when I saw it at the farmers market, and just bought it. As soon I was home and looked at this root more closely I realise it was a sort of yam. Jinenjo 自然薯 is in fact wild yam. It is in season during the winter (December to February) and for some reasons, it is also a lot more pricy than regular yam. Anyway, I ended up with it and was quite excited to cook it! The menu fo the dinner was all set: a wild yam meal with this salad of our very beginnings in Japan and a simple bowl of soba with tororo. It’s been a while we didn’t have soba!
Tororo soba
For the soba I guess there is no need of a recipe, just cook your soba as usual and prepare your dressing, grate the yam and top the soba with the white slime you have obtained. Add some nori. For the salad, I will share this 16 years old recipe!
Oh! and by doing a bit of reading to prepare this post I realized that the skin of the yam could be irritating so it is recommended to wear gloves when peeling it. Personally, I didn’t know and I never add problems touching it.
Yam and cabbage salad (2 servings)
20cm of Chinese or Japanese or wild yam
1/4 cabbage
2tbs of sesame seeds
1tbs of sesame oil
a pinch of salt
Peel and wash the yam and cut in 4cm sticks. Wash and cut the cabbage in big chunks. In a suribachi squeeze the sesame to obtain a smooth paste, add the sesame oil, the salt and you have obtained a nice homemade sesame dressing. In a bowl set the yam sticks, the cabbage, top with the dressing and that’s ready!!!!
When you hear the word “surimi” you probably think about this disgusting white or orange industrial thing they sell in supermarket, I would definitely at first. I have never eaten any so I don’t know how it tastes like or feels like but my surimi looks quite different… it is made of ultra fresh fish flesh and based on cha-kaiseki classic recipe.
Indeed! That’s what surimi was before it turns into a super processed food: a classic Japanese recipe, made of local products and seasonal: cooked seasonal white fish flesh, without bones, egg white, and tororo (grated yam). It is used in cha-kaiseki cuisine to make fish cakes, fish balls, kamaboko 蒲鉾, satsuma age さつま揚げ, chikuwa 竹輪… I remember making surimi at my first cha-kaiseki class, with my mother. That’s shen I realized the meaning of “surimi” when seeing written in Japanese for the first time: すり身, which is literally squeezed body. Just like the sesame powder: surigoma すりごま, or the mortar used to make surigoma and surimi: a suribachi 擂鉢. The preparation is ultra simple and the result quite versatile. So here is one adaptation of the classic recipe to make some fish balls.
Surimi (2 servings)
100g of white fish (I used flounder)
1 egg white
2tbs of grated yam (optional)
1/4 leek
Cooked the fish as you like: poached, grilled… everything is fine. Remove bones, skin… In a mortar, squeeze the fish, add the egg white and continue stirring and squeezing to obtain a paste. Add the tororo (grated yam) if you use some and continue until the paste is homogeneous. That’s the raw surimi!
Wash and cut the leek in small pieces. Add to the mix. Make balls and cook them in a greased pan, I put them on skewers but it’s not mandatory. That’s it!!! Anc have a good
I hesitated in doing an adzuki week but thought I would come dry of ideas quickly except from the many sweets… but we don’t eat so many. But discovering more and more recipes, maybe I should have had… another time!
So to change a bit from sweets I wanted a savory recipe to test and when browsing a Japanese cooking website I discovered recently I was immediately convinced that it was a perfect recipe for me: brown rice, sweet potato and adzuki! The simplicity of the ingredients, the seasonality of sweet potatoes 🍠 and the timeliness of me buying and cooking adzuki for the first time. (Really!! Can you imagine it took me 16 years to buy dry adzuki and cook with them!!!!)
The most common and popular recipe of savory adzuki is probably sekihan 赤飯 or literally red rice. The rice used for this preparation is usually mochi rice (sticky rice). It is served topped with black sesame and salt. It is often served for special occasions, but I think the most often I have had it was in bento bought in Tokyo or Ueno station… so for me it’s associated with train travel! 😉 That could still count as special occasions, more now that we haven’t traveled for a year, neither plane nor train… As I don’t buy normally mochi rice (but that too may change soon…) this option of recipe was excluded. Of course using regular Japanese rice would work too by slightly steaming longer… but the idea of adding sweet potatoes was just too tempting, I love sweet potatoes so much!!! So here is the recipe, easy as can be and each ingredient perfectly balanced and the flavors harmoniously enhanced. You can replace the brown rice with white rice, but it will change the texture balance of the overall. Taste will still be ok of course!
Sweet potato and adzuki rice (2 servings)
1go (150g) of brown rice
10-15g of dry adzuki
1 sweet potato (not a big one!)
a pinch of salt
a pinch of sesame seeds
Rince the adzuki, set in a pan (that can be used for cooking the rice as well, so non sticky is nice), and cover with 1.5cm of water, bring to a boil and boil at medium heat for 5min. Wash and dice the sweet potato. Add the brown rice and the sweet potato and the salt to the adzuki pan, stir a bit and cover with water to obtain enough liquid to cook the brown rice (that will depend on your pan, your cooking range and the lid you are using. I usually add water to double the height in the pan, plus a bit for brown rice, but I do every thing about). Cook under a lid at low heat until the liquid is all absorbed and the rice is soft. Serve and top with a bit of sesame seeds.
Sorry for the delay! I was hoping to publish it much earlier but then I got busy with work and I am struggling with wordpress and jetpack… technical issues that are getting more and more annoying.
So to continue with adzuki, there are a few more recipes I would like to share, and as promised on IG, kintsuba was one of them. It’s a slightly more elaborated recipe of wagashi than those with just anko and mochi or shiratama. I like it very much for the variations that exist, it can be with sweet potatoes, including walnuts etc… so many options… I like it also for its very graphic visual. It’s a little square “cake”. Kintsuba consists of a soft and melting jelly and a thin cooked skin. Making kintsuba is simple but takes a bit of rest time as it uses agar agar and it takes 2h for it to solidify. Then there is a frypan cooking step to finalize them. But they are really delicious and worth trying.
Kintsuba also uses an ingredient that is often used in Japanese sweets: shiratamako. It’sa kind of rice flour but made from cooked mochi rice.
Kintsuba (4 pieces)
For the beans jelly
100g of tsubuan or anko
25ml of water
1g of agar agar
For the skin
25g of wheat flour
5g of shiratamako
60ml of water
A bit of cooking oil to grease the pan
First of all the jelly. It’s quick to make but as I said it takes about 2h for the agar agar to stiffen so better do this step ahead. Once you have the rest is rather quick.
In a pan heat the water and the agar agar, stir well, when it comes to a boil lower the heat and continue stirring for 2min. Add the anko or tsubuan prepared before hand as in the recipe here. Continue stirring for 5min at low heat. Then move the paste into a dish that is square ideally. I use a Japanese tofu and jelly stainless steel dish for that specific use (see below picture). The jelly should be 1-2cm thick in the dish. Let cool down and refrigerate for 2h. That’s it for the jelly. You can eat it once it has stiffen as a jelly.
Once the jelly is stiff, take it out of the fridge, cut it into 4 pieces of 4x4cm approximately. In a bowl mix the ingredients for the skin. If you use shirotamako, you will need to crush it to powder it. It’s very easy. Stir well. Heat a fry pan and grease it. Now dip one face of a square in the skin dough and put this face down in the pan. Cook until that side is dry and no longer sticky. Repeat for each side. If you think your skin is too thin, apply a second layer. You can eat right away or keep a few days in the fridge.
One thing I have very rarely talked about here is adzuki – 小豆 literally small bean. They are present in many Japanese recipes and in most of the Japanese sweets. In fact beans are an important staple in Japanese cuisine: to name only a few the soya beans or daizu 大豆 literally big beans, the traditional jumbo black beans or kuromame 黒豆 for new year and of course the tiny adzuki!
raw adzuki beans
These little beans are usually cooked with sugar and salt to make tsubuan 粒あん when the beans are kept almost whole, or anko あんこ when the beans are puréed into an homogenous paste. The paste of tsubuan and anko is then used in many preparations: yokan, dorayaki, daifuku, ohagi, kintsuba, oshiruko…
Today let me introduce the basic recipe for anko and tsubuan and of oshiruko お汁粉, one of the traditional new year “soup”. Even though adzuki are dried beans they cook in 1h only so they are surprisingly easy to use.
Anko and tsubuan (makes 500g which is a lot!)
200g of dry adzuki
200g of brown sugar
Water
A pinch of salt
Rince the beans and put them in a pan, cover with water, bring to a boil, then decrease the heat to keep a steady boiling for 5min. Then drain the beans and throw the water. Return the beans to the pan and cover with ample water and bring to a boil again. Cook at medium heat for 40min, until the beans are almost soft. Drain the beans, throw the water, return the beans to the pan, add the sugar and cook at low heat and stir gently until the remaining moisture is gone. Add a pinch of salt. For the tsubuan that’s it. For anko you need to purée to obtain a paste.
Oshiruko (1 serving)
50g of anko or tsubuan
15cl of water
A small piece of semi-dry mochi to grill
In a pan heat the bean paste and the water to obtain a kind of thick soup. In the meantime grill the mochi. Serve the soup, add the mochi and enjoy!!! Beware that the soup, because of the sugar can be really hot.
Or I rather write “THE holidays”… as this year we didn’t take any real holidays until this week, rather a few days here and there to make long weekends and get away from the city. But for the new year, both the university and A.’s company are getting in a real slow mood, so it’s easier to take a few more days. Usually we would spend this period in Europe or travel in Japan, but this year things were obviously different. 10 days in a row in the countryside in winter was a first for us, and without any jet lag. Before the holidays start I was full of ideas of recipes, sewing projects, gardening tasks and other activities. Because the days are shorter, because it’s cold, days have vanished one after the other with only half of the things I wanted to do done, and it’s now the last few hours of the holidays and I realized I didn’t post any new recipe since my birthday, and can’t even remember what I cooked without browsing my picture gallery!!! Though I did cook, and bake every single day 3 or 4 meals (more often 4 ;)). But there was so much in my to do list that I feel like I did nothing. Literally nothing. Though the garden has never been neater than this year, in every corner, the trees are trimmed, the fallen leaves wiped away nicely, the house clean and sorted. But what did I cook???
First I did a bit of Christmas bread cooking. On Christmas day I decided I would try to do a world tour of Christmas bread: a Christmas bread a day. But after baking three on three days, I realize that since these breads are meant to be large, for just the two of us they are too much to eat. So after the pompe à l’huile, the panettone and the julekake it was time to move towards smaller sizes.
And then it was my birthday. As we went for a 12km hike, I prepared a picnic lunch to eat during the hike and baked bagels for that, to eat with eggs and radishes. It was months I didn’t bake bagels and I’m always surprised how much I like them and how little I cook them… Then came the lemon squares… and the yuzu scones, the buns, the breads, the scones again… a long and continuous series of baking in fact, and my sourdough has been behaving very well despite the cold temperatures at night in the house (5-9 degrees). When it’s dark at 17:00 and the house is getting cold, working in the kitchen with the oven at full blast is damn sweet! More so if you have spent most of the day outside being active.
Birthday hike
And so the last day arrived and I haven’t had time to cook my azuki, you know the famous Japanese red beans. So this evening I hurried up to bake a bread for dinner, some scones for tea and finally, in-extremis, I made anko from the scratch, which means from the beans, to make kintsuba, a very simple yet delicious Japanese sweet, oshiruko, a traditional new year sweet soup and probably if any left some dorayaki. It was my first time doing both anko and kintsuba but I found it really easy, more than I imagined it would be.
Recipes with anko will come very soon for the very first time! I realise I never posted any recipe of Japanese sweets. In the meantime I wish you a good new year, and a good week! I hope, if you were on holiday that you had a good one.
