Not cooking for a week and enjoying some delicious food in a variety of places have boost my creativity and my willingness to cook. One of the things that I enjoyed particularly was chilled soup as a starter for dinner. So I have been testing a few ideas. But my favorite is definitely a kind of vichyssoise, with Japanese flavors. Since it’s the season for myoga we went to our myoga forest to forage some.
Myoga field in our forest
Myoga is not easy to find in the forest as the buds are often hidden below the fallen leaves. But we got pretty lucky and found plenty.
A myoga bud with an already opened flower
That, and some powdered seaweed I got in Okinoshima, it inspired me this new recipe. It is so delicious that I want to keep that recipe and I am happy to share it with you. I hope you’ll like it. Oh! And it is very simple!
Vichyssoise my way (2 servings)
1 large potato
Milk, fresh cream, water (I used milk and water)
1 fresh myoga
1/2 tsp of powdered seaweed (if you can’t find use salted konbu instead)
Steam the potato. Once soft, let it cool completely and peel it. In a blender, set the potato chopped in chunks, a bit of water. Blend until pureed. Add milk or cream until the texture is almost liquid, but not too much. Add the powdered seaweed. Serve in the final plates/bowls, and keep refrigerated until serving.
Wash and thinly chop the myoga. Top the soup with some. Add a bit of powdered seaweed for the color, or dried salted konbu.
Enjoy!
PS: you can probably add onion or leek to make it more of a vichyssoise, but I decided to keep it simple.
If you have been to Japan or a Japanese grocery store, you probably came across a very popular sweet: dorayaki どら焼き. This traditional Japanese sweet consists of two stacked fluffy and soft pancakes and in between a spoonful of sweet red beans paste. It’s a very nourishing treat that many loves. There’s also some variations, add a steamed chestnut in the fall, a ball of soft mochi, a macha filling and whatever can come to mind to make a sweet.
I like dorayaki, but I found them a little too nourishing. The other day though, I was thinking about a quick fix for lunch and got inspired by dorayaki. Except that instead of the red bean paste I prepared a savory and fresh mix of ricotta and cucumber. It worked sublimely, so I am please to share my original recipe with you. It’s so super simple to make I hope you’ll enjoy it!
Savory summer dorayaki (2 pieces)
1 egg
150g of flour
1tsp of baking powder
1 pinch of salt
Milk or water
1/2 Japanese cucumber
100g of fresh ricotta
Herbs you like: I used fresh basil I grow at home
Salt and pepper
In a bowl, mix the flour, egg, baking powder and pinch of salt. Add milk or water little by little until obtaining a neither thick nor liquid dough.
Cook 10cm diameter pancakes in a non sticky pan or a greased pan. It’s ok to have one side slightly under cooked. You should make 4 pancakes.
In the meantime, wash and slice finely the cucumber, mix with the ricotta, salt pepper and herbs chopped.
Take two pancakes, on the less cooked side of one set a large spoonful of the ricotta mix. Top with the other pancake. And your all set!
This year, after many ideas and discussions of places we could go for the holidays and my birthday, we opted for a short road trip to the coast of Kanagawa and Shizuoka. Plenty of blue ocean and blue skies and views of Mount Fuji from every single angles (we ended up making a 360 around it).
Our trip was more or less planned, we usually like improvisation, but more and more places, since the pandemic, operate on a reservation-only, so it is best to schedule a little if you want a good lunch, a visit to a must-see museum… but luckily there are still many places that welcome visitors on the spot too.
Our trip took us to Kamakura, Oiso, Atami and Fujinomiya.
In Kamakura, we always use the bike share service Hello cycling. There are many stations all over from Kamakura, to further down the coast. Beware that more than often the batteries of the electric bicycles are not charged enough so they will let you down at some point!!! Not funny given that the bicycles are twice or thrice the weight of regular ones and it can be pretty hilly…
In Kamakura we really like the museum of modern art. (We also love the one in Hayama too) It’s located right on the left side of Hachimangu. It’s a small uncrowded museum, with exhibitions that are usually very well curated and would take about one hour to visit.
Kamakura Hachimangu
If you want to get lost in crowds, climb up to Hachimangu, you’ll get to mingle in big crowds, and honestly I’ve never understood why people come to visit. In its present form, this not the kind of sanctuary that I personally enjoy. However, the Great Buddha is always worth a visit. It is crowded but it’s so majestic that it invites for peace and quietness.
Going down the coast, in Oiso we visited former prime minister Yoshida’s residence. The garden is quite old and features a few beautiful plum trees. The house is rather recent, with some beautiful material. If you like history of Japan it also has some interest. And the view of Mount Fuji is beautiful.
Down further south, advanced reservation only, is the Enoura observatory. It was in my list of places to visit since it opened in 2017 but never managed to be in the program… we haven’t been much in the area in the past 10 years. On a good weather day it is a dramatic place to visit with stunning views and some stones collection (yes you read well) and sculptures exhibited outdoors. And you navigate in a citrus grove, typical of the area. On a bad weather day, I am less sure it would be worth going though… same in a very hot summer day.
The place kind of made me think about the “Contempt” villa. The blue sea and sky, the parallelepiped roof top… but in more contemporary version.
We also went to visit Odawara castle ground, with pines that could make me cry, so beautiful, so old. And in Atami the museum of art MOA, but I am not sure I would recommend it. Contrarily to the name could suggest, it’s a private museum. We had an awkward feeling while visiting it, in the way the exhibition was curated, and then realized that the founder was the guru of a sect, and we then understood the awkwardness…
Now let’s talk food.
While on a trip we would have a mix of simple food taken at the hotel (I am a master of hotel room minimal cooking) and restaurants. For once we had a rough plan and booked ahead a few restaurants worth the trip, and with stunning views on the ocean, so best for lunches.
Aroma mare アロママーレ in Atami was a great experience for Mediterranean cuisine and delicious homemade pizza in a small beautiful space. While a booking may not be necessary, they get full rapidly so if you want to secure a table…
Girino in Ninomiya for Italian x Japanese food, course menu only, reservation only, also small restaurant with a do it all chef and beautiful wares.
Amalfi della serra in Kamakura, has been our favorite place for dinner outdoors, we usually go there in early evening spring or summer when in Kamakura. You don’t go there for the food, though the pizza is good, but for the chill. After climbing up the narrow stairs behind the Enoshima line, up the hill, the terrace is just breathtaking. You travel to the Amalfi coast in a climb!
Figaro in Fujinomiya has something special to me, not only it’s a beautiful cafe at the foot of Mount Fuji, it’s owned and run by the Mine’s and they are also the parents of Fujinosuke and Kintaro, to of Pablo’s kitten we saved 7 years ago. Opened just recently, we thought we ought to visit for a sweet treat for my birthday, even though it wasn’t in the plan to go to Fujinomiya. Good jazz music, beautiful space, delicious sweets (very sweet!!!) and good coffee and macha latte. Fujinomiya looked like a sleeping city but the cafe was very busy! Yet we could have a good chat about food and gardening with A.. We couldn’t stay for a proper dinner, but A.’s cuisine is delicious (we had the chance to have lunch at her place once) and highly recommended.
For casual Japanese food we also tried Hayase no himono in Odawara and chiffon cake for breakfast from the nearby Grit, where I had a nice chat with the owner-chef about the importance of cooking in copper pans.
18 years ago today we arrived in Tokyo with not much of a plan, I would be working at the University of Tokyo for 2 years, and A. would see how the job market is for him. Not speaking a word of Japanese, but with a few good friends in Tokyo, Japanese and French.
18 years later we are still there… still discovering, still learning.
I took this opportunity to browse the website we created when we moved in 2004. A journal where we shared our life day after day more or less, with pictures and movies (you will see two soon at the end of this post, but not today because my phone doesn’t want to save them…). We never called it a blog because we never used any such platform, rather, A. developed for us a custom site I could easily use to upload posts, images and recipes, because even back then I was sharing recipes!!!
The very first one I shared may have been nikku jagga, if not shiitake and chicken takikomi gohan. The pictures were bad… really… not that they are much better now 😉 but I have made some progresses and digital cameras and screens resolution have improved a lot. Those pictures back then were supposed to be seen in tiny size, we compressed them a lot to have enough space on our server!!! Judge by yourself below, if you can ever guess what is in the bowl.
My very first nikku-jagga in 2004
I’m a forward looking person, so I will spare you a review of these 18 years. They are what they are, and I am happy like that. But sure things are that those bowls are still in use, and today, incidentally I ironed with the cordless iron I bought when we moved in, with the same ironing table you will see in the movie…
No recipe today but I may dig one from my old website…
P.S.: the top picture is a 2004 picture of Shinobazu ike, of the now gone Novotel. A beautiful pagoda-like construction, now replaced by an ugly insipid common tower mansion.
So…if you have read my previous post you may have read that in Kanazawa I bought some mysterious food (I don’t know if we can call it fruit or vegetable…): propagule-ムカゴ-mukago. It looks like a tiny potato with a darker skin. It’s the “fruit” of the Japanese mountain yam-山芋-yamaimo. It wasn’t the first time I saw some but never ventured in trying cooking them before and they are local in Kanazawa, so it made sense for me to try there.
As many of the food in Japan, the first recipe that comes to mind is to cook with rice. Mukago are no exception. I was recommended to cook them with rice and a piece of bacon. That seemed simple enough to try right away. However, recently I have been having a hard time finding good local bacon, the pork is usually imported-輸入-yunyu, and that I don’t buy… so instead I decided to buy fresh pork belly, and cook it with salt and pepper, not exactly the same thing as bacon but close enough and at least it is easy to find local fresh pork.
Mukago rice was a huge hit with A., much more than I expected!! Actually mukago are amazingly delicious. They have a very nice complex texture, a very subtle flavor with violet and flowery notes, very sophisticated. I instantly loved them!
I need some thinking and testing to understand in what kind of preparation they could be good. I tried in vegetables stew, but found that their flavors was suffocated by the other vegetables. It could be that rice is their best friend!! I’ll more investigations… in the meantime here is the mukago rice recipe. Enjoy!
Mukago rice ムカゴご飯 (4 servings)
300g (2合-gou)of Japanese rice (I exclusively use Koshihikari from Isumi or Onjuku, but any Japanese rice is ok)
200g of bacon (slice or block)
1cup of mukago
Rinse the mukago.
Wash the rice.
In a large and thick pan or in a rice cooker bowl put all the ingredients. Add 400ml of water and cook. If you use a rice cooker chose the takikomi-炊き込み option if you have one. If you cook in a pan, start at medium heat until the first boil. Then cover and cook at low heat for 30min (check eventually that it’s not too quick nor too slow, and adjust timing, but don’t stir…) then stop heating but let rest for 5more minutes before serving.
After the heat of the summer and before the crowds of international tourists flock the country again we decided to go for a short trip to Kanazawa. Our last visit was more than 10 years ago, before the Hokuriku shinkansen opened… we drove there and stopped to visit friends and Shirakawa-go at the time and stayed 3-4 days in Kanazawa. But I had a rather fresh memory of the city, the many places we visited already, the atmosphere of a rather rich and refined city. So this time we decided for a rather different program:
1. We rented a house not far from the main market to be able to enjoy all the local and fresh food Kanazawa and Noto offer.
2. We moved by bicycle around the city to expand the explorable territories and just enjoy riding in new surroundings, see further than the stuck in time places, where people actively live and work.
3. We put more focus on the contemporary scene visiting craft galleries and the beautiful 21st century museum for the Yves Klein exhibition chiefly (we skipped the permanent exhibits), since we already visited all the historical sights during our previous visit. And visited also the National craft gallery that moved from Tokyo to Kanazawa a few years ago.
At gallery Kiku & Sayuu we incidentally found the same metal craftwork artists Yuichi Takemata, that we loved the first time we visited and where we had bought order-made spoons. This time we came back with sets of forks and knives. Also discovered Rei Camoy’s work, a great surprise and a new fancy.
Additionally we toured bakeries and cafes, and found the most exquisite bagels to-go and cookies for our breakfast at Hug mitten Works, up north of the city, a fairly uninteresting ride to a typical suburban area, but damn… the bagels were so good that it is my target ideal bagel next time I bake some.
The market was a great fun, local green grocers too, with local products, fresh fish and vegetables. The region is famous for certain greens, such that gynura bicolor – 金時草 – kinjiso, lotus roots – 蓮根 – rencon, and propagule – ムカゴ – mukago (recipe coming soon). And of course, a few local Japanese sweets… we couldn’t resist to have gold leaf covered castella in the city famous for its gold leaf fabrication.
Well well, the two main protagonists of these past two weeks in the kitchen, are not only delicious alone, but also prepared together. A classic Japanese recipe would be to simmer them individually and then combine them with a bit of red pepper 🌶 and soya sauce. I personally usually pass on the red pepper but this recipe is simple and delicious. Here with brown rice, scrambled eggs and salad.
But really from the start I had something in mind using both combined… something that I love making with whatever is in season: steamed dumplings, of course!!!!
With the beginning of the new fiscal year, school term and the abundance of work in the garden, the surf season… I’ve been pretty busy! But dumplings don’t require that much time to make and they are always a feast. My idea was to combine chopped warabi and takenoko, with coarse ground pork filet, soya sauce and fill some sourdough dough with it, and steam. So that’s exactly what I did and it was soooo delicious I regretted it was our last takenoko!!! So if you still have a chance to get fresh takenoko and warabi I can only but recommend you try! I need mote practice to fold my dumplings beautifully but the taste is here!!!
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.
Birthday hike
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.
I often talk of recipes with lotus roots. It’s a Japanese staple easy to find when in season and super very versatile to cook and delicious. I love it in Japanese classic preparations such as stuffed or with vinegar, but also in more western style like on pizza or in quiche… lotus root is reaching the end of the season but there are still a few more weeks to enjoy it luckily!!!
Lotus root in pizza and quiche
In Japanese supermarkets, you pack your shopping goods after the cashier on dedicated tables that have small bags, tapes and usually a few advertisements for local things or recipe cards. I like to look at these recipe cards, they sometimes remind me of a recipe long forgotten, an ingredient cooked last too long ago or just an idea for a new recipe. That’s how the lotus root burgers came to my mind. The recipe is rather simple and very tasty, it is made with chicken meat but it can easily be replaced by hard tofu for a vegan version. So let me share it with you.
Lotus root burgers (2 servings)
10-15cm of lotus root, about 4-5cm diameter
100g of ground chicken breast or drained hard tofu
2tbs of miso
50g of panko
1 egg
A bit if oil for frying
In a bowl mix the meat or the tofu, the miso, the panko, the egg. Stir well.
Peel the lotus root and cut 12 regular slices of 4-6mm. Chop the rest of the lotus root and add to the mix.
Pick one slice in your hand. With a spoon cover with the mix to obtain about a 10mm layer, sandwich with another slice.
In a non sticky pan slightly greased with oil, fry the 6 burgers in both sides. Serve with rice, and add the juice of a yuzu for an even tastier experience. Et voilà!!!
