There’s always something new to discover or to learn… that is true in any discipline, but even more in cooking!!! The quantity of potential ingredients is really enormous, and the variety depends so much on customs and climate that I am far from having explored a hundredth of what exists. Even in after 16 years in Japan, there are still some surprises. Products that are not necessarily Japanese but made their way a few decades or century ago. That’s the case of the yard-long bean or in Japanese jūrokusasage 十六ササゲ. Something I had never seen before, that attracted me at the farmers market, and so I tried it and it made its entry in the glossary. I really like how farmers manage to grow locally so many different vegetables in such a beautiful way! I wish I could one day…
As the name promised, it’s a double long long green bean like vegetable, but the flavor is more subtle and more grassy. As I wasn’t sure how to prepare it first, I decided to blanched them and serve with soya sauce, grilled thick fried tofu atsusge 厚揚げ and that was perfect and top with katsuobushi.
After days of grey, humid and heavy days, suddenly one morning the sky is perfectly blue, the wind is perfectly warm, the sun is deliciously burning, the cicadas sing. At dawn and dusk the kanakana mushi sing along and you know it is the perfect summer day and you hope for more to come. The rainy season has finally ended, the typhoon season has not yet started. Everyone was waiting for this time to take their pickled plums outside, and so did I, to dry them and store them for the coming year, it is also time for lazy walks and long dives in the ocean.
It is a perfect day to take a walk and enjoy the rice paddies bright green before they start turning yellow under the sun. It is also the time to harvest myoga, this little edible flower that is so characteristic of Japanese cuisine and so refreshing. Myoga grows easily in the shaded and humid areas of Japanese gardens or in the wild. We are lucky to have a lot of them that grow wildly in our garden, so the foraging is simple: avoid snakes, identify the female plant, look 2~5cm around their base and find the pinkish buds or the white eerie flowers. Delicately cut them.
AS for cooking myoga, I find that it doesn’t support much cooking so it is better to eat it raw or only slightly cooked. My favourite recipe is a simple dashi clear soup where the myoga is chopped in. It is fresh and warm at the same time, the flavours of dashi balance well with that of myoga, this is simple but always perfect. For me, myoga does not only go well with katsuobushi, but it is also a good match with soya sauce and summer Japanese green bell peppers, another classic Japanese preparation, where the bell peppers are simply cut and cooked in a bit of oil, then steamed a bit and deglazed in soya sauce, sometimes with an addition of katsuobushi small flakes. But more often you will find myoga served with tofu, a little as a replacement of ginger, which I do not like so much as the myoga flavour is too strong and overwhelms the delicate flavour of tofu.
Pickled plums on rice and clear myoga soup, together with okaka okraGreen bell pepper, soya sauce and myoga with rice and scrambled eggs
For me, summer means swimming in the sea or the ocean, so I spend most of my free time there, catching some waves rather than in my kitchen, yet I never neglect to prepare us a good meal full of energy!
How do you like to spend your summer days when not at work?
Well, well, well… the rainy season doesn’t seem to clearly end this year again, turning the garden into a jungle, with the heat and a few hours of sun somehow everyday and the season for summer fruits has truly started. Be it melons, peaches or blueberries, the freshness and sweetness of all is a joy every morning for breakfast, eaten simply raw.
It is also the time of the year we spend most of our free time at the beach swimming, bodyboarding and surfing, and we need a solid five o’clock tea with something to eat. When it’s hot I don’t feel like standing in front of my cooking range flipping crepes, I prefer a ready to eat summer fruits in tart, clafoutis, cobbler or crumble. Blueberries are a good ally for any of the aforementioned preparations. But my favorite of all is a simple tart with a sablé pie crust, topped with fresh ripe delicious fruits. I love when it bake to see the dark fruit juice turn into syrup and make a thick layer. I like simplicity.
But after I prepared this simple blueberry tart the other day, A. argued that the tart with custard is better. I assume he wanted to tease me just to be sure to have another blueberry tart soon enough… and it worked well for him!!! The week after I was preparing a custard cream version of it.
I love custard too, but to be honest I find that baked blueberries in their juice are much nicer than raw ones… So while I loved both I still have a preference for the simpler version. What is your favorite???
Blueberry tarts
Simple version
150g of flour
30g of sugar
50g of butter
Water
Blueberries
In a bowl combine the ingredients but the blueberries. Make a dough and roll it to the size of your pie dish.
Cover with the fruits washed and patted dry. Bake in the oven at 190deg until crust is golden and fruit juice is thick.
Custard version
Same as above
1 egg yolk
1 cup of milk
1tbs of flour
1tbs of sugar
Vanilla (2cm of a pod)
Make the dough as above, roll it and set in the pie dish. Put an oven proof weight on it, and bake until golden at 190deg.
In the meantime make the custard: in a bowl mix the sugar, the egg yolk, the flour, heat the milk, add and stir well, and cook while stirring until creamy (I like my custard very creamy not hard… but adjust the quantity of milk depending on your liking. For that boil a smaller quantity of milk first and while stirring and cooking add a bit of milk once in a while until you obtain the desired thickness. Remember it will thicken further when cooling down)
Spread the custard on the crust, add the washed and patted dry blueberries, that’s it!!!
As you already know, I am a great fan of greens and even more in the form of beans: green beans, fava beans and of course the famous Japanese edamame. You have seen this year already my edamame ravioli, and many years ago edamame rice, but there is so much more to do with edamame!!!
I tested the gyoza version of the ravioli: pasta without egg and fried in a pan instead of boiled and that was scrumptious. But that’s not all!!
One thing that was on my to-do list with edamame was a soup, like that with fava beans or green beans, so I was more than happy when my IG friend Junkikat posted a recipe of edamame soup inspired from Korean soy beans and noodles: Kong-guksu. I am not familiar with Korean cuisine very much, but I was very much attracted by the simplicity of her recipe. I adapted further to my liking and pantry and ended with a delicious recipe that was extremely simple. In a sense it reminded me ramichelles, even though it has nothing much in common but the thin noodles that are so delicious in summer!!!
Edamame soup and noodles (2 servings)
75g of dry somen or vermicelli
1 handful of boiled and shelled edamame (about 3 handfuls of edamame in pods)
Water
Katsuobushi thin flakes (furikake style)
If your edamame are not boiled boil them, it’s ok to overcook them a bit. Remove the pods and skin. In a mortar, puree them. Add water little by little to obtain a very creamy paste. Once the creamy paste has been obtained, add further water to obtain a thick liquid. Boil the noodles and drain under cold water to cool them.
In a bowl serve half of the soup, add the noodles, top with katsuobushi flakes. Eat at room temperature or refrigerated.
For those that have been to Japan they know that potato salad ポテトサラダ is a quite important dish in Japanese cuisine. It is probably one of this japanized version of western food that is so popular it looks like genuine Japanese food!! You can find potato salad on the table at every party and it is so common that it can be found in combini as well. While the idea of a potatoes base salad with vegetables all creamy and mushy is very nice, just like the kabocha salad. But the problem with most potato salad is the abundance of mayonnaise that just makes it fatty and taste like mayonnaise, nothing else. I do like fresh homemade mayonnaise once in a while but I am not such a fan to bother making some in particular if I have no plan for the egg white. But I love homemade potato salad, so I just replace the mayonnaise with a simple soft boiled egg with olive oil. That’s it! It’s faster, more digest and none the less tasty! Because fast is an important condition for preparing lunch when we are back from the ocean.
So here is my potato salad recipe with all ingredients from Isumi except the olive oil from Tuscany and the salt and pepper.
Potato salad (2 servings)
3 mid size potatoes that becomes mushy when boiled
1 Japanese cucumber
5 Japanese sausages
1 egg
1tbs of olive oil
Salt and pepper
In a pan boil some water. In the meantime peel and cut the potatoes. Add to the boiling water, add the sausages, and later the egg. Boil until the potatoes are soft. The egg shouldn’t be boiled longer than 5min to keep the yolk creamy. Cut the cucumber in thin slices. Drain the potatoes and the sausages. In a bowl, set the cucumber, the potatoes. Cut the sausages in 1cm long pieces, add to the bowl, stir. The potatoes should start mushing and mix well with all the other ingredients. Add the olive oil, salt and pepper. Finally, add the egg cut roughly. Stir well again. Eat right away or later!
When I make pasta for ravioli I always end up with a significant amount of pasta that has been floured and roll and is unsuitable for making ravioli again. It has become to dry. Usually I would just keep it that way, cut in squares and boil it or fry it as a little bonus or for finger food with a drink. But recently I have been really attracted to making shorter pasta like troffie, orecchiette, gnochetti… and seeing video of Scusatema on IG really inspired me to make the step and test… the ravioli rolled pasta is a lot drier and hard than the original pasta and I thought it would be perfect for the test. I have little cooking equipment, and thought my little gnocchi board would be good for that.
So I assembled all the remaining pasta in a ball, rolled it in a long stick.
Cut the stick in small pieces, and started rolling them on the board. That went just perfectly. No meed for additional flour, no sticky parts and beautifully shaped gnochetti came out one after the other. Bonus it is super relaxing to do this little gesture to roll the pasta on the board and see them pilling in front of me.
Since I made only a small amount instead of boiling them I cooked them in a little pan with olive oil and a bit of water, and waited for the water to go before lightly frying them, and served them as a little snack.
For sure I will make short pasta again soon! That was so nice!!
Every week, I am hoping for a more quieter week and every week day is getting busier and I end up with very very little time to cook… for example today my lunch was some raw carrots, a piece of Comte cheese and some nuts… as I rushed between meetings and things to do. It is also often a bowl of rice topped with something rapidly cooked (more coming about that soon). So when I manage to have just a little more time to cook I jump on the occasion and I cook some more fancy things. “Fancy” being almost exaggerated!! The season for edamame is starting now and I got some from the farmers market, which I was thinking I would just boil for a quick use in salad or with rice but then I had this little window of time for cooking and I was all set for making edamame gyoza, but then thought that as delicious it seems, it would be almost too conventional in traditional Japanese flavors, so I decided to opt for the Italian version: ravioli!!!
While making ravioli takes a little bit more time, it is so rewarding and we love them so much that it is always worth eating a bit late!!! For this edamame ravioli, I mixed in the filling the edamame and some pork meat and I dressed them simply with olive oil, salt and pepper. Here is my recipe.
Edamame ravioli
100g of flour (I used whole wheat here)
1 egg
a bit of water
100g of ground pork meat
200g of edamame
Salt, pepper olive oil
Prepare the pasta by mixing, as usual, the flour, the egg and a bit of water. Knead well and keep for 30min.
Boil the edamame. Once cooled down, shell them and remove the skin as much as possible. In a mortar puree them roughly (as on the above picture). In a frypan cook the pork meat then mix with the edamame. Add salt and pepper. Keep the frypan as it is.
Roll the pasta. Fill the ravioli and close them. Boil a large pan of water and boil the ravioli. When they float move them to the frypan with half a ladle of cooking water. Add olive oil a bit and cook 2min before serving and enjoying immediately.
Ohoh! Exploring new possibilities with edamame will last the whole season!!! This recipe of fougasse came naturally to my mind as I love to bale fougasse for summer evenings drinks or summer lunches when I need something quick.
In Japanese bread shops you can sometimes find edamame and gouda breads, and I like them very much, but the idea of a simpler version (without the gouda for A.) and with olive oil and salt tempted me a lot, that the last batch of edamame I had was used to that purpose.
The result is really nice but my recipe needs a little improvements to emphasize more the edamame. So I am sharing with you the improved version but not tested yet… but I am sure it will be delicious.
Edamame fougasse (makes 1 bread)
200g of flour
3g of yeast
7g of salt
Water
Olive oil
A handful of boiled, shelled and peeled edamame
I only use fresh edamame, so the recipe starts by boiling the pods in salted water. Once boiled and cool, shell and peel them. Add a bit of salt.
Prepare the dough of the fougasse: mix the flour, 5g of salt, the yeast, add 2tbs of olive oil, and water to obtain a soft, silky and smooth dough. Add the edamame and knead a bit. Let rest for it to rise. Once is has started to rise you can work it in the shape of the fougasse, and let rest about 30-60min depending on your room temperature.
Bake at 230deg until golden. When out of the oven spread a thin layer of olive oil and sprinkle a bit of salt. That’s it!!!
Breakfast, as I often say, is my favorite meal and I would never skip it!!! But it wasn’t always the case, it took me twenty years to be able to eat breakfast… Probably because waking up early to go to school wasn’t adapted to my sleep rythme and I’ve never been a morning person… When waking up to the alarm (which I try not to do too often anymore) I am in an autonomous mode for a (A. would say loooong) while. When I first started eating breakfast, I was in college. At first when I was still home, my father would bring my breakfast to me, no kidding!!!! My breakfasts consisted in things that are really easy to serve without preparation: muesli with milk, a pack of fruits compote, a glass of fruit juice and a large cup of tea. I kept the same routine when I moved out. It could be made easily, but I took it in my room on a silver platter, beautifully organized and served. That was part of the routine of making it enjoyable, together with listening to music and getting ready.
We kept a similar routine for a long time, but slowly replaced muesli by bread or equivalent that we would buy, and the compote by fresh fruits. We also got ridden of the fruit juice. I also adapted my schedule (that I am lucky I can control 99% of the time) to something that fits more my morning slowness, by allowing more time to breakfast and avoiding morning craziness. So that now we don’t buy bread anymore, or only croissants or pain de mie from artisan boulangers once in a while. I bake it most of the time or I prepare pancakes or scones. The music is still an important aspect of our breakfast!
I have endless variations of bread recipes that I am now all trying with the respectus panis approach: with not enriched flour, little salt, little yeast. It works great!!! And I found that it is even more adapted to our schedule as now I prepare the dough in the late afternoon, let it prove a few hours, shape the bread in the evening, put it in the fridge, and in the morning bake it for 20-25min depending on the size and type, which is just perfect for a out of the oven bread for breakfast!!!
The bread in the picture is one of my favorite: 4/5 of plain white flour (I am testing organic Japanese flour providers from different regions of Japan, preferably closer than Hokkaido, I’ll keep you posted once I have found something really nice), and 1/5 of roughly stone grounded whole wheat flour that has a lot of coarse bran in it. It gives the bread an interesting texture and a subtle flavor. I bake it low in the oven hence it doesn’t have the golden color on top, but on the bottom!!!!
While this breakfast routine is what I find the easiest to go with every morning, I like both savory and sweet breakfast. Eggs, bacon, cheese, salad, avocado toasts, honey, jam… everything makes me happy! But there is one thing I never prepare but I love dearly is a true Japanese breakfast… I promise a post on Japanese breakfast and a few recipes in a few weeks!!!
