More cauliflower!

I don’t think there was a lot of recipes with cauliflower posted here except quite a few classic soups and a few more creative such that one with sansho. This winter I believe we may have eaten a little more cauliflower than usual because it is so easy to prepare and so quick to cook.

I have always been a fan of coconut, everything coconut, and since we came back from Fiji I must say that I am even a bigger fan. I bring back from our trip virgin coconut oil, and we learned and saw how coconut milk and cream are made from the raw coconut. Definitely, coconut cream has been on the pantry shelf without fail since our return.

So last night when I was looking for a recipe to prepare the cauliflower I had, I thought about it: a coconut cream curry with only cauliflower. And it worked out so well… I wanted to share the recipe.

I served it with super flat savory pancakes and a fresh salad.

Spicy cauliflower in coconut milk

  • 1 raw cauliflower
  • 1 pack of coconut cream (200g)
  • 1tsp of curry powder
  • 1tsp of fresh ginger gratted
  • 1tsp of cooking oil

Wash and cut the cauliflower in florets. In a pan, pour the oil and heat to medium high heat. Add the cauliflower and cook at high heat for about 5min while stirring regularly. Add the curry and the ginger. Cook under cover for another 5min. Stir in the coconut milk and cook another 3min at high heat, while stirring once in a while. Serve.

Could also go well with basmati rice.

Cauliflower pasta

It’s the season for cauliflower and I am a big fan, so it always makes me happy to prepare some.

Until recently I would either eat it raw, steam it to melty-crunchy, or make a puree or a soup for some classic recipes. Or use Indian inspiration and cook it with spices.

Yet this year I started to make a sauce for pasta with it, like you would with broccoli. My first attempt was good but needed a bit more elaboration. My attempt today reached the perfection I was expecting. So here is my recipe. Simple but so delicious.

Cauliflower pasta (for 2 servings)

  • 120g of dry short pasta (I used farfalle, but penne, macaroni etc… would work very well)
  • 1/2 cauliflower
  • 2tbs of olive oil
  • Salt, pepper, turmeric, paprika

Boil the pasta. Steam the cauliflower until very mushy.

In a pan, puree the cauliflower and add the olive oil and the salt, pepper, turmeric and paprika, a pinch of each. Stir well. Add the cooked and drained pasta, stir to obtain a well mixed mix. Serve.

You can add grated parmesan on top if you like it.

Chestnut risotto

Last winter I trimmed our chestnut tree to try to improve its production, because we usually have very few chestnuts, despite it being a rather large tree. And it work perfectly, we had plenty of chestnuts, I could enjoy seeing them growing slowly, and I was already thinking about all I would do with them, and give away. But in early August with the drought (since July 10 it’s been 32deg at least every day and it rained may be twice or thrice just a little), most of the beautiful chestnuts felt when they were still small. In the end I only collected 10 chestnuts 🌰…. Basically the same amount as usual… just enough for one or two meals.

Instead of the classic Japanese kuri gohan, I prepared a western version with Carnaroli rice, olive oil, and a bit of kale. I replaced the Parmigiano by fresh grated comté cheese. Super easy, and very delicious! Here is my recipe.

Chestnuts risotto (2 servings main dish)

  • 10 fresh raw chestnuts
  • 1 go of carnaroli rice, or other risotto rice you like
  • 2 leaves of kale (tender is better)
  • 1tbs of olive oil
  • Salt and pepper
  • Comté cheese (optional)
  • Water

Boil the chestnuts for 50min. Let cool and peel them.

In a large pan heat the olive oil, add the rice and stir until the rice is translucent. Cover amply with water, add salt and pepper and the chestnuts roughly broken into bite size. Let cook under cover for 15min. Wash and chop the kale, removing the hard parts. Add to the pan. The liquid must have almost all reduced, and the rice should be almost cooked. If that’s not the case: if the rice doesn’t seem cooked yet and there is no liquid anymore, add a bit of water and cook under cover. If there us still too much liquid and the rice seems cooked, remove the cover, and slightly increase the heat.

In the end, the rice should start grilling in the bottom of the pan. That’s when you want to serve, with just a bit of crisp in the bottom.

Serve, add grater comté cheese if you like and enjoy.

Goes well also with prosciutto or better with Speck. Unfortunately recently Japan has a ban on Italian cured meat so that’s not an option…

Sushi rice and spring vegetables, the perfect combo!

Harvest from the kitchen garden: plenty of green peas, fava beans and herbs.

Late spring brings in so many vegetables! Our modest kitchen garden produced a beautiful crop of green peas. Not over a long period of time like last year, but a few kilos in a very short time. I also harvested a lot of sansho pods, and while looking at the recipe to prepare them in my book of Shojin cuisine, I just found a recipe that so far curiously never attracted me before but was perfect with what I had in the fridge: bamboo shoot and green peas sushi rice. It took just one second to verify I had all the ingredients I needed and my mind was all set. I don’t eat fish and seafood sushi, but I love sushi rice, slightly vinegary and sweet. It is very easy to prepare but somehow never make any…

It was time to change this!

Here is the recipe I prepared, slightly modified from the original.

Bamboo shoot and green peas sushi (4 servings, side dish)

  • 2 go of rice (or 2 cups but that would be more)
  • A handful of fresh green peas
  • 1 fresh bamboo shoot
  • A pinch of salt
  • 2tbs of rice vinegar
  • 3tbs of sugar
  • 1tbs of soya sauce
  • A few sansho leaves

Cook the rice. In the meantime, peel the bamboo, cut it in 3mm thick slices, and the cut the the slices in 2cm strips and boil it for 15min. Drain. In a pan set the bamboo and the green peas, add 2tbs of water, 1tbs of sugar, 1tbs of soya sauce. Cook at medium heat until almost all the liquid is gone. Mix the vinegar and the 2tbs of sugar with the rice. Stir well, add the vegetables and stir gently. Add the sansho leaves and enjoy!

Do not refrigerate, the rice would become hard and flavors would vanish.

Dumplings again and again…

While spring is on its way and nanohana are everywhere, and I can’t wait for the spring vegetables to be there, I am also happy to enjoy a little more the winter vegetables: the leeks, the cabbages and the very last kabocha until they’ll be back next fall.

By now you must very well know that dumplings are among my favorite food, from wherever they are I love them! Recently I have been making a lot of vegan gyoza and wontons because I found a very good dumpling skin that contains nothing else than when I make it myself: flour, water and salt. But I still prefer the ones for which I make everything from the scratch, the kneading and rolling are so much fun!

One thing that I love particularly to make is dumplings with a puréed filling, when you can fill a lot in one, they are plumped, with a melty heart. Sweet potatoes and kabocha are the perfect ingredient for that. So of course with a kabocha in the fridge I couldn’t help but make some simple kabocha dumplings. Here is the recipe. Enjoy!!

Kabocha dumplings (2 servings)

For the filling

  • 1/2 kabocha
  • 1/2tsp of ground cinnamon
  • 1/4tsp of paprika
  • 1/4tsp of salt
  • Ground pepper

For the skin

  • 120g of flour (+ a bit for dusting)
  • Water
  • A ponch of salt

In a bowl mix the flour with the salt and water little by little while kneading until the dough is smooth but non sticky. Leave to rest.

Cut the kabocha in chuck and remove the seeds, keep the skin. In a pan steam or boil the kabocha ( the less water the better so steaming is more recommended). When totally soft mash and add the cinnamon, the paprika, salt, pepper. When puréed you can start rolling your dough. For that, cut a bit of dough, the size of a walnut, and roll it into a circle. Put a generous tea spoon of filling and close, remove all the air as much as possible. Repeat.

For cooking the dumplings you have several options: steaming, boiling, pan frying or pan steaming. I pan steamed them this time: in a greased and heated pan I set the dumplings, then add 0.5mm of water in the pan and cook under cover for 7-8 min then removed the cover to let the rest of the water evaporates and served adding ground pepper and a pinch of olive oil, but you can serve with soya sauce.

Home alone experiments

While A. is on business trip while my days at work are super busy, I’m oscillating between experimenting new recipes and easy to prepare but very satisfying food such as cheesy toasts and ochazuke… In my experiments, the sweet potatoes gnocchi with a 100% sesame pairing was definitely a huge hit! It mixes perfectly a traditional Italian recipe with Japanese flavors. A must try if you love sweet potatoes and sesame. Bonus, it is one of the easiest recipe ever… and here it is!!!

Sweet potato gnocchi and sesame (two servings)

  • 1 large sweet potato
  • Flour
  • 1tbs of sesame seeds
  • 1tbs os sesame oil
  • Salt and pepper

Steam the sweet potato. When tender let it cool down. Peel it and mash it. Add flour little by little to obtain an almost non sticky dough. Shape the gnocchi. In a pan boil 1-2L of water and poach the gnocchi. Drain and serve in plates, top with a bit of sesame oil and sesame seeds, add salt and pepper. Eat immediately.

A little magic with pasta leftovers

Every morning A. goes to work on site I prepare him a lunch box. I like to cook lunch early because then I know that my portion is also ready and I can eat any time, even when my schedule is super tight, which is more than often the case recently. When it comes to preparing our lunches and it includes pasta, I love to use fresh pasta because they cook very rapidly. The issue is that the brand of fresh pasta I like most has portions that are too big for one and too small for two… so today was one of this day, where I put 2/3 of the portion to A. lunch box, and I ended up with a sort of leftover size of pasta… not enough to feed me until dinner which would be late (again) today. Luckily I had gyoza skin in the fridge (for dinner) so I decided to pick 4 pieces and add these to pasta… but how???

I realized that Asian food often mix dumplings and noodles in soups, so I decided to go for something like that except that it wouldn’t be Asian, but rather Italian like for me, with fresh mozzarella dumplings. And this is how the most delicious thing I have cooked in a bit was born. Too delicious not to share with you my recipe! I used the leftover pasta and the gyoza skin I love most, but you can use fresh pasta and make your own gyoza skin, it is super easy… I was cooking while on a meeting, so I used minimal time.

Dumplings and noodle soup (1 serving)

  • 50g of leftover noodles or the equivalent to cook
  • 4 gyoza skins (you can make your own, it is super easy and rapid too)
  • 1/2 fresh mozzarella
  • 1 leek
  • a few mushrooms ( I used shimeji)
  • thyme
  • salt and pepper
  • olive oil

Cut the leek in the size/shape you like, same with the mushrooms.
Cut the mozzarella in 4. In each gyoza skin, put a piece of mozzarella, a bit of thyme and pepper. Wrap.
In a pan add 500ml of water, the leek, the mushrooms and cook for 5minutes after it boils. Add the noodles, the dumplings and cook for another 5minutes. Serve, add thyme and olive oil and eat while it is hot!

Birthday lemon cakes are my favorite!!!

Here we are, Christmas is passed and new year not yet there, and it’s exactly the time for my birthday.

Almost as a tradition, A. went horse riding with me, which is a big challenge for him who feels a little uncomfortable on the back of a horse. And then he baked me a cake!

It’s the seasonal for citrus fruits and I love citrus cakes, and for a few months we have patiently and lovingly followed the growth of a single lemon on our tree. Our lemon tree, planted 5 years ago is struggling to adjust and we have very very little fruits if none, so one, wasn’t so bad. And on my birthday we picked it for a lemon cake recipe. As we have explored over the years many recipes with lemons for my birthday, it was hard to decide which recipe to choose (A. agrees to cook if there is a solid recipe to follow by the letter). With our rosemaries growing wildly and needing a trim, I decided that it would be rosemary and lemon cake, and we opted for a cupcake base. A long time ago my mother in law offered me a book about cupcakes and it’s been years I didn’t opened it, but I immediately thought about it to find a recipe for A..

I used the poppy and ginger recipe, replaced the ginger by lemon zest and poppy by rosemary, I also added a pinch of baking powder in the dough when A. was not looking, I was worried that the baking soda wouldn’t give fluff enough…

The result was damn good! I must admit that if I were to do the recipe I would have used a little less butter, but A. followed the recipe and it was great!! So here is our recipe. Oh… we didn’t do any glazing but lemon glazing could have worked well too.

Lemon and rosemary cupcakes (makes 6)

  • 100g of flour
  • 100g of sugar
  • 100g of butter
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 tsp of baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp of salt
  • a pinch of baking powder
  • 1 lemon (zest only, unless you do the glazing, for which you will want the juice)
  • 1 branch of rosemary

Preheat the oven to 180deg.

In one bowl mix the flour, the salt, the baking soda and the baking powder. Add the lemon zest and chop the rosemary leaves. Stir well.

In another bowl mix together the butter and the sugar (using your hands is the best tool). Add one egg and stir well with a whisk, add the second egg and stir again to obtain a creamy mixture. Add in the flour mix through a sifter, little by little while stirring. The lemon zest and rosemary may get stuck, so don’t forget them in the sifter!!! Add them too to the mix and stir.

Prepare 6 medium size muffin or cupcake papers and fill to 2/3 with the mix. We added a little branch of rosemary and a tiny pieces of lemon on top but that is optional.

Bake in the oven until perfectly cooked (clean pick comes out when picked). It took 25min for us.

If you want to glaze them prepare a mix of lemon juice and icing sugar. Otherwise enjoy just as they are. I served them with hot lemon using up the rest of the lemon.

Don’t you love parsley too?

When I was a child my grandmother would only make things I love to eat. My favorite were cannelloni and “croustades” and “tomates a la provencal”. But when I stayed longer with grand parents she would also make millions of other things I love: stuffed vegetables, bouillabaisse, paella, cantonese rice, floraline, butter macaroni and “kromsky”.

That was a long long time ago, when I was eating beef (I stopped when I was 15 or 17 I think…), but I think what I really loved with kromsky (I guess it was inspired from Russian kromeskies but my grandmother recipe seems very different than the actual recipes I could find online), is the parsley. I think my grandmother always had parsley in her kitchen or in her garden and used it a lot. Contrarily, I have a tendency to forget how parsley is delicious, and mine in the garden is under used.

So, after browsing the garden this morning and harvesting some parsley I decided to make kromsky like my grandmother would, or almost… Kromsky for her are just meat balls, with a lot of parsley, I replaced the ground beef by ground chicken. So here is my recipe. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much I did!

Kromsky (for 2 servings)

  • 100g of ground chicken (or beef)
  • 1 bouquet of parsley
  • 1 egg
  • a bit of cooking oil

In a bowl chop the washed parsley. Add the egg and the meat. Stir well.

Grease a pan with the oil and heat at medium high. With a fork or a spoon make bite size balls of the mix and cook until golden. Flip on the other side and repeat. That’s it!!

I served them with spinach and rice. In the summer my grand mother would probably serve them with tomates a la provencal, which are oven slowly cooked tomatoes topped with chopped parsley.

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