Category: Japanese food

52 yens

Dekopon
Dekopon

Pretty much every morning on my way to the lab I stop by the local supermarket to buy me something for lunch. Usually some fresh veggies (avocado, tomato, rucolla…) to eat raw in my sandwich or with some pasta-rice-seeds, and a fruit for my snack in the afternoon. After the season of tangerines, I wanted some different citrus fruit and found beautiful iokan. So yesterday I got myself this kind of big tangerine that looks like an orange but not as sweet. And this morning when I was at the cashier the lady explained to me that she owed me 52yens because yesterday she mistakenly charged me for an other citrus fruit. I was really impressed! Not that she misrecognize the fruit, but that she absolutely wanted to reimburse me!!

Back when I lived in France, I remember there were oranges of a few sorts, pomelos, grapefruits, tangerines of two or three sorts, then lemons and limes, cedrats and a few other variations quite difficult not to identify immediately. Arriving in Japan I discovered a whole new citrus fruits variation. Of course there are the now famous and trendy yuzu, but there is really much more than this. The variations vary with the different regions and I am sure not to have completed the exploration, if it can be completed! I don’t even know where to start from with dekopon, iokan, natsu mikan, hassaku, kiyomi, shikwasa… All are delicious with a typical taste and smell, and most grow at different time of the year. They can be used in different preparations or just peeled and eaten like tangerines.

Improvised dinner

Having always a fridge ready with fresh veggies is just perfect when you want to prepare an improvised dinner for a friend stopping by. I had in mind two menus after checking its contents, a vegan-mexican or a Japanese one-plate dinner. Vote has decided for Japanese and so it was a simple rice with katsuobushi and veggies in soya sauce. For the veggies I used what I had in the fridge: carrots, turnips, potato, purple sweet potato and broccoli (they had this massive-beautiful-just cut broccoli the other yesterday at the local farmers place near the university that I couldn’t resist). I wash and cut them (recently I seem to like sticks over slices). I first cook at high heat in a bit of olive oil, then I add a bit of soya sauce and water and cook under cover until the potato is cooked. The rice is just plain white rice to which I add katsuobushi thin flakes after cooking.

Macrobiotic Sunday lunch

Beautiful weather this Sunday morning, so we woke early and spend most of the morning in the garden cleaning and grooming shrubs, by the time we were hungry it was cloudy and chilly, so I decided to cook us a warm lunch and got once again inspiration from my macrobiotic recipe book. It’s a simple collection of veggies and koyadofu that are first cooked in water and soya sauce, then lightly fried and serve with rice.

In my version for 2, it is 2 pieces of koyadofu, 1 carrot, 1 purple sweet potato, 1 shiitake, and the rice is brown rice to which I added red rice, black rice and barley. I cut the veggies in four and boiled them for 7min in one cup of water where I added 1 table spoon of soya sauce, I also cook the koyadofu with the veggies. Then I removed them from the water and let them rest on kitchen paper to drain the excess of water. Then I roll them in rice flour and lightly fry them, and serve them directly with the rice.

Donburi

The donburi or one rice bowl is a very convenient alternative to one-plate, and I like the rice base lunch because it provides tons of good energy necessary to stay outside all day long, now that it’s gotten colder.

 

For this donburi I cooked plain white Japanese rice that I topped with sautéed purple sweet potato, carrot brocoli, and finished with some proteins croquettes: I mixed rice flour with a mix of seeds, an egg and dome chicken meat. The egg and meat can be replaced by tofu for a vegan option. 

Energy macrobiotic lunch

With chillier days we try to play tennis not in the morning anymore but in the afternoon, so before we go we need a good lunch full of energy. Inspired by the book of macrobiotic recipes, I came up with a nice one-bowl recipe using a base of brown rice, some seasonal sautéed veggies: kabocha, purple sweet potato, turnip in sesame oil, and a piece of Koya-dofu diced in the veggies. I topped the whole with fresh purple mizuna. 

Simple, light and full of good energy before our game! 

Okonomiyaki-お好み焼き

The okonomiyaki is a preparation from the Kansai area. A straightforward translation of the work means “grill what you like”, and it is well rendered with the profusion of recipes and variations. In the Kanto area the equivalent would be Monja-yaki, but what I prefer with okonomiyaki is the consistence of the crepe rather then a kind of weird porridge! Okonomiyaki includes a base of Chinese cabbage (hakusai 白菜), some grinded pork meat, a preparation of flour, water and egg like a crepe, then a toping of mayonnaise and Bulldog sauce, finished with katsuobushi. Any addition of veggies, meat, seafood etc is possible, just as you like it!!!

Mine is the simplest. Chop on small Chinese cabbage or 1/4 of a large one. In a frypan put a little of oil  and the cabbage, stir often untill soft; add some grinded pork meat (150g), and continue to stir. In a batter prepare a mix with flour and 2 eggs to obtain a thick dough, add a bit of water to liquefy (it should be slightly more liquid than pancake dough). Add in the fry pan, cover and cook at low heat, then flip and cook again a lityle more. Serve and top with what you like: usually bulldog sauce,  mayonnaise, and katsuobushi but I removed the mayonnaise and bulldog sauce topping, just the katsuobushi remained in my version (I reckon that the white mayo and the dark bulldog sauce make a much prettier finish). You can make individual cute okonomiyaki or large one that you cut to serve. Tonight I was a bit running out if time so I went for the second option.

There is one extraordinary strange thing I love with katsuobushi toping on hot food, it’s when it’s moving like if it were alive, though of course it’s just dry flakes!!!

A dinner with guests

The other night we had some guests at home, and when we do I need to be super-well organized to squeeze one hour to prepare dinner in my schedule, this usually my target time. So I need to think carefully the menu, the ingredients and once I enter the kitchen I know exactly what I’m doing. Usually I have some extra time or a few ideas on the fly, so that it turns I always improvise something. This time was no exception!

For the dinner it was simple: grilled delicious wild snapper with a little of sesame oil, rice with katsuobushi, white and pink turnip tofu salad with pumpkin seeds (similar recipe with the persimmon salad, but I replaced the persimmon with a little cucumber and the walnuts by kabocha seeds) and some pickled sweet ginger.

Then I realized that we didn’t have too much to snack while drinking so I decided to make a little extra, because it’s nice when you have dinner after work with friends to hang out and chat, to release the oressure of a long day at work. Well, with what I had in the fridge the best option was to make some kabocha chips, so I thinly sliced half a kobocha and cooked it in a bit of oil. Add some salt and served. That was a hit! Everyone loved it! 

Persimmmon and turnip salad

We harvested some more persimmons today and I really have a lot!! So I’m trying a few recipes with persimmons, after the not too conclusive jam experiment. Back when I was going to cha-kaiseki classes there was a really nice autumn recipe of persimmon in salad. Later I found other recipes that inspired me, and today I would like to present you my original recipe of persimmon, turnip and tofu. 

The recipe is ultra simple. For 4 servings, 1 still hard persimmon, 2 turnips or a piece of daikon, 1/2 block of hard tofu, sesame seeds, a few walnuts, salt. Start by draining the tofu, since it takes some time. Then peel the turnips and cut them in small sticks (thin slices can also work); set them in a bit of salt to remove the water. Peel the persimmon, and cut similarly to the turnips. In a bowl, roughly squeeze a tea spoon of sesame seeds and the walnuts. Once the tofu is drained, press it in a clean clothe to remove the additional water and once quite dry mix it with the sesame and the walnuts. Drain the turnips and add ghem to the tofu, add the persimmon. And serve.

Autumn meal

I love when I get back to work a bit late (which is to be honest pretty much every day) to open my veggie drawer in the fridge and to find a whole set of fresh things just waiting to be prepared. What and how just naturally flow from my mind and in less than 15min the dinner is almost ready or at least all decided!

This time my fridge had a wide choice of autumn veggies, no surprise there. And I prepared a little mix to accommodate a simple bowl of rice and some pickles. So I just just a red onion, a piece of lotus root, a carrot, a piece of kabocha, some shimeji and a few green pepper. I cooked them in a bit of oil at high heat for a few minutes then under cover at low heat for an other few minutes, finally add a little of soya sauce and serve.

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