Coral lentils spicy stew

I love lentils of all sorts, but when I see coral lentils on a shelf, I can’t help being attracted by their beautiful color. And every time I forget that the color will somehow fade away when cooked (contrarily to some fancy pictures you see on the internet… or they have a well kept secret…)

So I usually get excited starting cooking them and thinking about the beautifully colored dish… and 20 minutes later… damned! It’s yellowish brownish… Nonetheless the recipe I came with yesterday was really delicious, and worth remembering. So let me share it with you.

Coral lentils spicy stew (2 servings as whole meal)

100g of coral lentils
5 little potatoes
1 onion
1 eggplant
1tsp of curry powder
1tsp of turmeric
Ground black pepper
Salt

In a large pan put the lentils and cover generously with water. Cook at low heat for 15min or until the water is gone.

Peel the potatoes, cut them in 4. Cut the onion in bites, and the eggplant. Add to the lentils. Almost cover with water, add the spices, salt and pepper and cook at medium to low heat for 10min, or until the water is almost gone. Serve and enjoy!!

July 31, 2021

Summer…

Damn I love summer, the heat, the cicadas, the trips to the beach and all the summer foods!!!

Another year without travel has taken us to our usual refuge for the holidays, where we’ve been spending more and more time thanks to telework. Escaping for one full week Tokyo’s heat, the Olympics fuss, and the again increasing rate of contaminations is just perfect.

Holidays are usually spent between morning and afternoon surf sessions, playing tennis, when the weather allows, gardening (we’re expanding our garden so there is quite a bit of work to prepare the new plot soil, as we plan to use it as an orchard and kitchen garden partly), talking, reading and sleeping a lot, and cooking less than I always originally want…

I must say that the fresh fruits and vegetables are so delicious eaten just the way they are that it doesn’t invite to be creative!!! Simple melons, blueberries, blackberries, and now the nashi season has also started… though in the past I tried some nashi tart and baking them, I love them just the way they are… simply peeled and eaten just out of the fridge, that’s when their cold and sweetly perfumed juice is so refreshing! (Top picture)

Breakfasts = fresh fruits and sourdough breads

The one thing I steadily do is baking breads and tarts and quiches. Whole wheat, buckwheat, plain, seeds, focaccia, pizza… everything is good for my sourdough! And blueberries tart are also a favorite at home!

I’ve been also making quite a bit of skewers. Simple but easy to serve and grill in a pan… fish, chicken breast, pork filet… everything is good! My favorite is to roll the fish or the meat in green shiso leaves, that for sure feels like summer. Shiso everywhere! Topping a salad, in white rice…

For our new plot, I hope we could try to turn this desert land into a permaculture forest garden… my experience and skills in growing a kitchen garden are rather close to zero but I really would love to have one of these beautiful forest gardens that populate Instagram… one day maybe… but planning is fun anyway.

Enjoy your summer!!

July 29, 2021

Cucumber 🥒 love

If you like cucumbers you surely like even better Japanese cucumbers. They are tiny, crunchy, juicy, with much less seeds. Chilled they are perfect for the summer. Slightly pickled or not we love them and eat some every day in the hottest season. They are good just cut and dipped in miso for a very rapid snack, or prepared in light pickling with salt or with umezu 梅酢. You can find many of my recipes including cucumber here. But today I came up with a new idea, of a simple cucumber salad, with Japanese flavors. And it is so simple that t is going to be a new summer favorite.

Summer cucumber salad

1 Japanese cucumber
2 myoga (Japanese ginger)
1tsp of umezu (otherwise a pinch of salt and 5 drops of soya sauce)

Wash and pat dry the cucumber. Slice it thinly. Put in a bowl add the umezu and stir with the hand. Wait 5 minutes, in the meantime, wash and chop thinly the myoga. Gently press the cucumber with the hand and remove the juice. Add the myoga and stir. Serve chilled and enjoy!

July 23, 2021

Summer

The end of the rainy season coincides with the beginning of the true summer days. The cicadas start singing full blast, the dusks and the dawns vibrate with the beautiful and typical sounds of the かなかな蟬kanakanamushi (Tanna Japonensis), probably above all my favorite animal sound… the humidity goes slightly away and the heat climbs up to another level… it’s a short time of the year that lasts just a very few weeks, before the typhoons arrive. The heat brings some kind of slowness to our home, and some restlessness because all I think about is going swimming. But there is much to do too.

What do you think is the very first thing I do when the rainy season ends in Japan?

Well… it’s easy, it’s drying my umeboshi. Gently taking them out of the brine on a nice morning one by one and lining them in the sun. Turning them and doing it another day. I must say that I am getting better at picking plums and the worries of the first attempt are now all gone and I am more confident. This year for the first time I also added red shiso to some and I am quite please with the result.

So if you had pickled plums this year, it’s gonna be about time to dry them and enjoy them. Keep the brine for the summer energy drink. Add a bit to a large glass of water to pack on salt and minerals.

July 19, 2021

Malaysian inspirations – fragrant rice

In search for new inspirations and continuing with these inspirations from our travels around the world, after Italy (which I must say was an easy one!!!) I decided we would travel back to Malaysia.

A long long time ago we traveled to Malaysia for a few days in Kuala Lumpur and then north to Langkawi. In Kuala Lumpur we were super lucky to spend time with some local acquaintances that were total food fans and introduced us to all the possible food that exist there, discovering the Malay, Indian, Chinese… influences of this very original cuisine. I came back from our trip with a cookbook in our suitcase. A book in the end I enjoyed looking at but barely made any recipe from because I’m always missing an ingredient…

This time I decided I wouldn’t care and would just do with what I had, assuming that what I don’t have in my pantry is something I don’t like much. Hopefully, recently I bough some jasmine long rice as a change from round Japanese rice, because this is probably what would make the most difference. So I did a super simple rice recipe. Of course I didn’t have all the ingredients and adapted it to our taste. I served it with some vegetables simply cooked in a bit of coconut cream.

The recipe was mentioning that it is traditionally served for weddings. But I am simplifying it so much that I don’t even want to use the original name of the dish to call the recipe I have prepared. Yet the degree of satisfaction for that recipe was really high so I invite trying it!

Fragrant rice Malasia-style (4 servings)

300g of basmati or jasmine long rice
350g of water
20g of butter
2tsp of ground cardamom
1tsp of coriander seeds
1 stick of cinammon
2 star anises
2tsp of soya sauce
a pinch of salt

The first thing to do is to prepare fragrant water. In a small pan, heat the coriander seeds, the cinnamon stick, the star anise and the coriander for a few minutes. add 50g of water and bring to a boil, add the butter and keep heating until half of the liquid is gone. drain to keep the water and remove the spices. Keep the spices for decorating.

In a pan set the rice, top with 300g of water, add the fragrant water you just made, the salt, and the soya sauce. cook undercover at low heat until all the water is gone. Stop the heating and keep everything in the pan, under the cover for another 5minutes before serving. use the spice for decorating if you want to.

July 14, 2021

Too much routine

I need to go outside of my comfort zone in the cuisine… but I don’t know how…

Making ravioli, pancakes, scones, quiches, breads etc… has become such a routine and is so effortless that I miss the challenge. Because, yes indeed, I am a challenger. Whether it’s at work, on the court, in the ocean, or in front of my sewing machine I like challenges. That’s how I ended up registering to a bodyboard school last year and I still enjoy learning to ride waves better and to spin on my board! That’s why I enjoy sewing (and here the challenge is massive!!!) . But recently cooking has been more functional than challenging. Even the steam buns, the bread in a pan etc… are now basically classics and I rush them between two meetings!!

Since my main source of inspiration : experience and local sourcing during our trips has dried up in the past 18months, I have decided to use my imagination and my recollections of some our trips. First stop: Firenze of course! I remembered these gigantic sandwiches they would sell in something resembling focaccia (scaccia in Florence) and I never tried because it is just too gigantic and there was too much fat left on the ham (I have always hated meat fat) and since I just bought some prosciutto it was the perfect timing. So I baked a plain focaccia, and decided that we would have a savory breakfast.

Trying a new type of breakfast: focaccia, prosciutto and fresh tomatoes and peach…

And then because I made a rather giant focaccia we went for it again for lunch, this time in a real panino version with grilled vegetables. (Top picture)…

It wasn’t much but it was a change. Not yet far away from the comfort zone, but new enough!!!

I’ll keep searching my memories!

July 10, 2021

Amaranth leaves – ヒユ菜

Every time I think I have seen all the possible greens they grow in Isumi, every time I happily discover a new one. I am most attracted by greens and naturally when I see a new leaf on a shelf I can’t help buying it.

This time our local farmers market surprised me with hiyuna – ヒユ菜 apparently amaranth leaves. A nice green leaf, very tender and mild in taste. It is so mild in taste that I found it fits perfectly western cuisine, despite its Chinese origins! While most recipes I found were stir fry pr soup, I used the nice green leaves for omelette or pasta sauces. A bit like spinach. No wonder why one of their name is Chinese spinach!! And a rapid look at its nutritional value showed that this little leaf is packed with iron, potassium and several vitamins, another good reason to enjoy it.

I also found it was easy to prepare, and it goes very well with eggplants as in the picture below. And with tomatoes as in the other picture below. Enjoy if you find some!!!

July 2, 2021