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.
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.
