Category: Cooking

My lovely neighbors

The fun part of living in the countryside and having a great garden that produces plenty of things independently is to exchange crops with neighbors, friends and colleagues and these past few days we’ve been exchanging a lot! It all started with plums… like last year I harvested about 20kg of plums and left the rest on the trees. I pickled 2kg, made syrup with an other 3 and gave away the rest, to our pottery teacher, to friends, to my secretary and other colleagues at the university. I also harvested fuki, Japanese plums or sumomo (スモモ) and strawberry tree fruits today and gave away plenty around too. When you give away crops, usually you receive other crops or the result of what you have given after a preparation. It’s a kind of barter. So we received plenty of fruits and vegetables. Plenty of potatoes… and my favorite neighbor knows how much I love them tiny, so she kept me the smallest ones just like my grandfather would do. She also gave me cucumbers, parsley and flowers to plant that were growing rogue in her garden.

From some other neighbors we received jam and fresh fruits, which I used to make a version of the almond sable with jam in large version (picture) and in tiny bites. A real treat!!!

We also received big potatoes from another neighbor… I’m thinking of making gnocchi with these ones or just mash them, you’ll see soon enough. And finally we received pickled plums and pickled ginger from my colleagues. Super delicious with rice!!!

I really love this! It makes the effort to harvest more, give away around very fun and entertaining, without any expectations… but then sometimes you receive something unexpected, sometimes nothing but that’s fine also since it’s giving away… it just makes people happy!

Almond sables

When there are so many delicious fruits to eat it’s nice to have a few biscuits to go with. Usually with summer fruits I like to prepare simple sablés. This time: almond sablés with a recipe I found browsing some magazines online. The sugar sprinkles really attracted me because I had some I use for frosting some time ago and it needed to be finished before the rainy season makes it unusable. So I went for it… and it was much much better than anything I expected. So here is the recipe.

Almond sablés for 30 bite-size pieces

– 140g of flour

– 100g of butter (at room temperature makes it easier to knead)

– 60g of almond powder

– 30g of sugar

– a bit of icing sugar for the finish

Mix all the ingredients (but the icing sugar) together to obtain a smooth dough. Pull chucks and make small balls that you gently squeeze into a flat and thick coins and arrange on a baking plate greased or with cooking paper. Bake for 15 to 20 min at 160 deg. Sprinkle icing sugar… it’s ready to enjoy!!!

Kohlrabi and edamame salad

As I was telling you, kohlrabi is my new best cooking ingredient. Sautéed it is great with other vegetables, pasta… but kohlrabi is also delicious raw. Many recipes I saw on the internet inspired me while looking for ideas how to cook it. And if the weather is called one day it is warm and sunny the next, so a simple salad with raw kohlrabi is always a great option. When the kohlrabi is juicy and crunchy and very refreshing. As I said in my previous post, it is really nice with olive oil, so no headache about the dressing. To make the salad a little Japanese style I added boiled edamame (the season is just starting), some brocoli sprouts and a bit of sesame. For the kohlrabi I grated it with a mandolin and remove the extra juice by gently pressing it. Simple and super delicious…

The next thing I am wondering now is with which herbs and spices to try it… If you have any idea, please share with me! I’ll be happy to try.

Kohlrabi

I didn’t remember seeing kohlrabi too often in Japan and I couldn’t remember having actually prepared some anytime in my life. I vaguely remember it was something we would eat in the 80’s when I was little and didn’t eat anything… So kohlrabi (chou rave as I remembered it) was just a name with no associated taste or memory. When I saw it at the local farmers market I found them so cute that I couldn’t resist buying this lonely pack of three kohlrabi. And I didn’t regret it at all!!! Quite the opposite!!

I browsed the net to get a few do’s and don’t, and my first recipe was a simple olive vegetables sautéed with a bit of sausage and potatoes and red cabbage. Really simple but a great way to cook kohlrabi quickly. It adds some crispness and a fresh cabbage taste but more subtle and sweeter than I expected. Really perfect with olive oil too, so I knew we would be good friends!

More recipes with kohlrabi coming soon!!!

Sweetness for cold afternoon

Not only it’s rainy… which is normal for the rainy season, but it’s super cold. With not more than 15degrees today, we could neither play tennis with that rain, nor go swimming in the ocean with that cold… The arcade and at the batting center kept us active for an hour but then we had to admit that reading at home was the only option… and cooking was obviously a good alternative. I pulled out from the shell my old “fall baking” magazine and was in the rare enough mood for some rich recipes to go with a hot chai. I stopped on a recipe of spicy cake with a coconut and walnut caramel topping. I decided to try, but since I had neither coconut or walnuts I replaced them by almond powder and almond slices. The recipe frightened me a bit with the quantities of sugar and butter so I reduced them a bit (a lot)… and the result was really rich and suited perfectly the chai! So here is the recipe.

Spicy cake with almond caramel

For the cake:

– 1.3 cup of flour

– 2/3 cup of sugar

– 1/4 cup of butter

– 1 tbs of baking powder

– 1 tsp of baking soda

– 1 tbs of nutmeg

– 1 tbs of cardamom

– 1 egg

– a bit of vanilla

For the almond caramel topping:

– 1/2 cup of almond powder

– 2/3 cup of sliced almonds

– 10g of butter

– 1/3 cup milk

– 2 tbs os sugar

First mix all the ingredients for the cake and stir well. Bake in a greased baking pan at 180deg for 30min.

In a small pan mix all the ingredients of the caramel. Cook at medium heat and stir once in a while until bubbling and browning. Top the baked cake with the almond mix. Eat when cool.

Sansho

One of the first thing I planted in the garden 6 years ago was herbs: rosemary, mint, sage, parsley, basil and a sansho shrub. I wanted to be able to go down the garden when I was cooking and puck whatever herb I needed. The rosemary and mint did really well, and they are still there, growing and spreading! The basil and the parsley never survive the winter so I replant some every year. The sage survives the the mild winters but not the cold ones. The sansho? It grows at a pace I didn’t imagine! Actually after a while I realized there was already a sansho shrub in the garden but at a very inconvenient place so I took it and gave it to our neighbor. Sansho is great because you can use both the fruits and the leaves.

After trying a few recipes of simmered sansho with konbu… I decided to prepare them in a manner that will allow to keep them longer and eat them all year round. Indeed, the shrub is growing and the number of fruits too, but it is difficult eating more than four of five grains at the time because it is really very fragrant. I found a recipe of saumure for sansho so I have decided to try it. It was awfully simple to prepare but it needs to be kept 3 months before eating… so we’ll see in September…

More zucchini!!!

I could have totally go with an other zucchini week worth of new or modified recipes in the last 7 days… to add to the existing collection of zucchini recipes! I’ve been preparing most of our meals using zucchini because it’s just the season and now they grow plenty of zucchini in Isumi! So again last Saturday I got plenty… yellow, green, small and big… later there will so round ones… And with the typhoon coming and the sudden drop in temperatures, a warm soup was very welcome, so I prepared a … zucchini soup of course!!!

Zucchini naked soup

– 2 large zucchini

– olive oil

– salt and pepper

– optional: 2tbs of cream cheese

– optional: bread croutons

In a large pan filled with 1l of water boil the zucchini washed and cut in rough pieces. When tender blend and add olive oil, salt and pepper. That’s it!!! Serve warm and eat right away!

You can add the cream cheese directly in the plate. Stir a bit when it has melted. Add the bread croutons if you want a richer experience.

Summer teaser

Last weekend and today were really giving a taste of summer. Harvesting from the garden: locats, plums, herbs, sansho, eating in the garden at night, playing tennis and going swimming or bodyboarding right after in the chilly water of the ocean to cool down the body… and now a typhon is coming, it rains and it is cold. It was just a teaser for the coming summer… I didn’t harvest enough locats to make more than fruit salad. But I harvested again about 15kg of plums this weekend and it’s a great time to do some plum job: ume jam, umeboshi, ume syrup…

I like particularly ume jam because it can be eaten right away. All the other you have to wait between one week and one year… and ume jam is perfect with a batch of English scones!!!

The recipe is really simple. The same base as plum jelly except that you don’t use agar agar but instead I put the seeds of 2 apples in a tea bag and cook further, before pouring into boiled glass bins and closing.

Zucchini cake

Somehow this week has been a lot about cooking zucchini. There was a few classic things such as “soupe au pistou” for friends coming for dinner. But also a few new recipes such the salsola quiche. And after seeing a few cakes on IG, I thought it was time to make one with zucchini and rucola. The recipe is very simple and the zucchini bring the moisture often missing in savory cakes. I added rucola for a bit of fresh taste, and served it with a simple herb salad. A perfect dinner, all in one plate.

Zucchini cake:

– 1 zucchini

– a handful of rucola

– 150g of flour

– 1tsp of baking powder

– 3 eggs

– 1/2 cup of olive oil

– salt and pepper

In a bowl mix all the ingredients for the dough. Wash the rucola and the zucchini. Cut them. Add to the mix. In a greased cake dish pour the mix and bake at 160deg for 30min, rise the temperature to 190 for the final 5-10 minutes. Check with a knife if ready.

That’s it!! And it’s Friday, so have a good end of the week!

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