Category: Japanese food

An other dinner at home

What to cook for your friends visiting Japan when you are back from work past 21:00 and everyone is starving? A soba salad with spring veggies of course!!! Spring veggies: asparagus, snap peas, green peas, are very easy to prepare and require very little cooking, just blanching them for 2min. Soba are also quick to cook, so in 15min I can have a dinner plate ready for 4 people. To the spring veggies I’ve added some cucumbers and a bit of brocoli sprout, as for the dressing, I mixed a bit of soy sauce with vegetal oil and just add a bit to prevent the soba for getting too sticky. You can also top the plate with some Japanese salmon, shredded nori…

Cooking and baking, yes!

Finally the weekend, almost done with my administrative duties at the university, and also done with two crazy weeks of dining out. So the first thing we did when we arrived in Ohara was to rush to the local farmers market to shop fresh food, then I started baking and cooking!! Hurray!!  

Baking a big bread for our breakfast tomorrow; and cooking our dinner, something simple but fresh: plain white rice with fresh shiso leaves chopped; lotus root cooked in sardines dashi and then slightly fried; and bonito, just cooked in a hot pan. Back to simple and delicious homemade food, back to the country with our stray cats, back to spring with the frogs now in the rice paddies!

My cooking process

It’s always the same. There are weeks when we are just busy and then there are weeks when we are busy and we have friends visiting in Tokyo, colleagues from abroad, party and outing with work all at the same time. This means a lot of dining out and much less sleep than usual and less workout, it also means a more or less empty fridge. And then my body gets crazy and crave for even more simple food. So today I decided to prepare a simple Japanese meal. I started by preparing rice of course and some ichiban dashi (konbu and katsuobushi). Then I use the dashi to cook daikon and to serve it with some yuzu miso, as I did before. I just love it. But then I was wondering what to prepare with. I found tomatoes in the fridge and remember about these delicious dashi-tomatoes I may have seen somewhere so I prepare some: easy just wash tomatoes and boil them 2 min in dashi, then peel them. and serve with some hot dashi. And finally I found wakame that I got from the country and haven’t used yet, so I added some again in the dashi, added an egg to poach and served all in one plate. All came while I was cooking and that’s my normal cooking process, I create the meal in real time as I am cooking. That’s why I never cook twice quite the same thing and why Tokyo Paris Sister is so important to me, because it is a trace, a diary of the inspiration of the moment and it helps me keep track of all these ideas I had.

One-plate salad

This morning the farmers market showed me once again that it is not clear which season we’re in!!! The transition seems to take an unusually long time and daikon and cabbages were lined together with strawberries and new wasabi leaves. It gave me the idea to prepare us a warm/cold salad with warm green lentils from France and thick fried tofu, fresh tomatoes and wasabi leaves, with an olive oil and soya sauce dressing and finished with a few sesame seeds!

Plum jelly – 梅羊羹

It is extremely rare I cook something sweet for dessert, or I cook dessert at all. Unless we have guests for dinner our meals end sometimes with a fruit, sometimes a yogurt but most often with just a little piece of chocolate. In the trading with our neighbor, fruits from our garden in exchange whatever she has, the other day she gave some plum jam and she told me: “you know, it’s sour, but it’s really good in plum jelly!”. OK then, let’s make some plum jelly (梅羊羹-ume youkan)… Well it’s really simple and it works also with any jam you like (I trued also with my natsumikan jam). You need only a flat recipient, some jam, 1/2L of water and a little bag of agar-agar or 寒天-kanten. Boil the water in a pan, add the jam, then the kanten, stir well while still heating for a few minutes. Set in the flat recipient  and wait for the liquid to cool down, then refregirate. Before serving cut in pieces of the shape you fancy.

Weekend one-plate

Sunny weekend, fresh food from the market and the beginning of spring vegetables: na no hana. So I prepared a simple one plate with white and green rice, boiled daikon in dashi with yuzu miso, boiled na no hana in dashi with soya sauce and katsuobushi, grilled fresh bonito, and some little radish. All simple all delicious!

Shojin cuisine – 精進料理

I love kaiseki cuisine (懐石料理) and in particular cha-kaiseki (茶懐石). I’ve learned it for a year and it helped me a lot understand Japanese cuisine and cooking, it also helped me to train my palate. But what I really troubles with kaiseki because it includes quite a lot of raw fish, shellfish, fish eggs etc… And so it is when you go to kaiseki restautants. In particular it is always a fixed seasonal menu, and it kind of doesn’t really make sense to go to a high end kaiseki restaurant and pass on the half of the courses, or ask for a special menu. But hopefully there is Shojin cuisine! You may think of Shojin cuisine as the rustic vegetarian they serve at Mount Koya, but actually there are several places where it is treated as kaiseki and this is just awesome. I know I can eat everything without worrying and it shows the potential of vegetarian or vegan cooking to be super high cuisine. Shojin cuisine is related to Zen Budhism and is meat-fish free, while being very ingenious in using gluten, soya beans etc.., it is also a seasonal food, so somehow the precursor of Japanese macrobiotic eating in its original meaning. I’ve planning to learn Shojin cuisine for a few years but my lab kept me to busy. I’m hoping that I can start this spring.

Example of seasonal dish served at Daigo (from Daigo wesite)
Example of seasonal dish served at Daigo (from Daigo wesite)
Our dessert last night and the view to the garden
Our dessert last night and the view to the garden

In the meantime while we were looking for a place to celebrate our anniversary I suggested we could try a kaiseki Shojin cuisine restaurant that I randomly found while looking for vegan places in Tokyo. So we booked at Daigo (http://www.atago-daigo.jp), near Atago shrine in Tokyo. The place has something a bit magical, since it is a little Japanese heaven in a high rise with the service expected from any high standard ryotei. The food was amazing as expected (and as usual I won’t show you badly taken pictures of this deliciously and beautifully designed food, you’d rather try yourself) and once back home we realized it is actually a 2-star Michelin restaurant. I can only but recommend the experience when visiting Tokyo! 

The most impressive dish from our menu is hard to choose but I was impressed by the bamboo shoots with kinome dressing (or for the fashionable word “pesto”), which take both ingredient to perfection. Something I will definitely try my way very soon!!! 

Individual dining room at Daigo (from Daigo website)
Individual dining room at Daigo (from Daigo website)

Donburi

Ashitaba are in season and this little green is delicious with grilled pork, and nothing easier then puttibg the mix on top of rice and add some sesame. I just cut in little pieces thin slices of pork cutlet from which I remove all the fat. Then add the ashitaba chopped. Cook everything in a pan under cover and serve on top of freshly cooked rice. Simple & delicious as usual!!

A little Japanese dinner

I love Japanese food but because it always requires several preparation steps: preparing a good dashi, marinating ingredients, multiple cooking… It is rare I prepare a genuine Japanese dinner, unless it is some donburi, like veggies on rice etc… But I really like cooking Japanese and with a bit of organization in 30min it is possible to have someting ready.

First, start with preparing dashi by boiling katsuobushi in water. I put the flakes in a net so that it is simple to use the dashi. Then prepare the rice and start to cook it. Finally start marinating what ever needs too, here for me fish in soya sauce. While everything above is set, prepare the veggies or other ingredients: here wash the spinach, cut the mitsuba, prepare the miso… Once the dashi is ready you can cook the veggies. I picked spinaches because they don’t need much time to cook. I just boiled them in a little dashi and drained them well. Then grill the fish, some fresh cod from Aomori, add the miso to the soup, set the mitsuba in the bowls, and when the rice is ready, serve the miso soup, prepare the spinaches balls, add some delicious yuzu-miso bought in Karuizawa (the whole purpose of this dinner was to try this miso!), served the rice and finish with the fish. Ready!!!

And the miso from Karuizawa was just awesome, sweet tasty and with the perfect yuzu taste. When it possible to buy some of these delicious products locally I see really no reason to try to make some!

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