The very special blend of spices, citrus fruits zest and sesame seeds of Maltese Qagħaq tal-Ħmira is still floating around me and inspires me a lot, but it’s not always that I can wait for my sourdough Lois to work slowly a dough which in this still cold season can be 12 to 24 hours… sometimes we need something to eat, QUICK!!!! So I came up with a scone version of Qagħaq tal-Ħmira… it may be a blasphemy to the true Maltese tradition, so I apologize for this rather crude recipe. But to my defense, this scone recipe brings in all the flavors of Qagħaq tal-Ħmira in only 25min: 10min of kneading & shaping and 15min of baking. The softness of the famous slightly brioché bread is replaced by a more crumbly dry scone one. Add jam, honey or butter to it, or it alone in bite version… it is truly nice! Really!!! Try it and tell me what you think!
Scones Qagħaq tal-Ħmira way
150g of flour
50g of butter
30g of sugar
1tsp of baking powder
1 pinch of salt
1tsp of ground cloves
1tsp of anis seeds
1/4 of orange zest
sesame seeds for the topping
a bit of water or milk
Pre-heat your oven at 180deg.
In a bowl mix all the ingredients except for the last two: sesame seeds and water/milk. Start kneading. Add a bit of water/milk while kneading until you obtain a homogeneous dough. Roll to 3cm thick and top with sesame seeds. Roll a little bit thinner and be sure the sesame seeds are well incrusted. Cut to the shape and size you want, and put on a sheet of cooking paper. Bake 15min, and enjoy as soon as you like.
Sunny but cold days follow each others this week, so a warming and rich soup is always good, isn’t it? I had rice ready for lunch and a romanesco in the fridge, and I wasn’t sure about how to eat them together, when the idea of combining them in a soup came to my mind. I was a bit worried about how it would turn, but with a few well chosen spices it was really a great idea! Not very photogenic though… so let me share the recipe here with you. I hope you’ll like it and test it!
Rice and cauliflower soup
1/2 cauliflower or romanesco
1 cup of rice (cooked)
1 pinch of nutmeg
2 pinches of paprika
salt and pepper
1 little pinch of red pepper (optional)
If your rice is not cooked yet, cook it, you can use leftover rice too.
Wash the cauliflower or romanesco and steam it. Then mash it roughly adding a bit of the cooking water, to obtain a rather liquid but not too though, mixture (blender works too). In a pan heat gently, add the rice, salt and pepper, the nutmeg, the paprika and if you like it a little spicier the red pepper. Stir and serve hot.
In France, on February 2nd, it’s Chandeleur. A quick search on the internet told me that it’s Candlemas, a Christian celebration, 40 days after Christmas, the presentation of Jesus to the temple (thanks Wikipedia for enlightening my ignorance), but for me Chandeleur was just the day we ate crepes. A most awaited time as for some obscure reason my mum wouldn’t flip crepes often and we would for sure have some on February 2nd!!! One of my mother traditional savory filling was béchamel and ham, while I did like it then, I now barely prepare béchamel. A. doesn’t like it and I find it a bit heavy unless it is to eat with leeks or mushrooms only. My crepes filling is usually very simple: spinach, mushrooms, ham or prosciutto, eggs, cheese. Usually no more than two at the time, we are eating crepes not a kind of “put it all”… and it’s s good excuse to have a few crepes with different filling combinations!!!
To be honest, I care a lot less now of Chandeleur, because, as you may know if you follow me on Instagram, I flip crepes more often then I don’t! Crepes are my quick fix for a snack treat and A. loves them. And once in a while we also have savory crepes, or more precisely galettes, because I cannot help but love buckwheat crepes. I like them simple, with some vegetables and eggs, or ham and melted cheese. So over time I realize I have been skipping Chandeleur quite often, but who cares? As soon as you have a good crepe basic recipe you can make them anytime and realize how easy it is! You can easily change the wheat flour by 2/3 of buckwheat in my recipe to make galettes, you can even increase more the percentage of buckwheat, but don’t forget that with wheat comes gluten and with gluten comes consistency and firmness, so going gluten free means more cooking time before flipping and extreme carefulness in handling.
I don’t have a shallow crepes pan so I simply flip them in a large non sticky frypan slightly greased with butter, and it works perfectly well, no need to clutter the kitchen with this kind of goodies!
Have a good crepes flipping if you are planning to make some! I made some last week so I’ll pass today! Oh! And this year Setsubun 節分 is on February 2nd (it usually is on 3rd or 4th)… a celebration to welcome the new season (spring) that I love very much. I prefer by far traditions that are linked to seasons cycles or natural events rather than religions, so let’s throw beans to chase the evil out and hope for a quiet and peaceful home and year for everyone.
Last winter you could see that I discovered having a thing for ochazuke. This thing suddenly arrived when I was stuck at home with a pneumonia and I thought it may be temporary until I fully recovered, but it continued on… so I thought then when winter would be over, but not even… it has lasted a whole year and ochazuke has been on my table many many times and not only on chilly days!
The generous bowl with rice (brown or white are equally delicious) topped with a few vegetables, a pickled plum, sesame… and finished by pouring dashi or something of the like on top has revealed to be a very handy lunch fix for busy days. Indeed since telework is our new way of working, it is more than often that lunch breaks are short or that mine and A.’s do not coincide well. Fixing my lunch in a snap is then paramount and ochazuke are great for this. Rice cooked in advance or by itself in the rice cooker, dashi gently boiling on the stove for a few minutes, a handful of seasonal vegetables, that all needed. Sometimes when I am even more busy than usual it’s simply one of our homemade umeboshi that serves for everything.
For the dashi I mainly use a mix of katsuobushi and konbu, sometimes dry shiitake, less often only konbu, or a bouillon with pork filet cooking juice. For the vegetables, whatever is in season is good!!!
Such simple lunches are really great because they are light and nutritious and allow me to work very efficiently in the afternoon!!! Below is a selection of my favorite! What’s yours???
All time classic: shiitake & spinachKomatsuna, radish and a bit of pork filletKomatsuna and umeboshiGrilled sweet potato and mizunaGrilled lotus root and umeboshi Lotus root and korinkiLate summer version with kabocha and black sesame
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.
It’s a kind of rule at home that A. cooks only when I am too sick to cook, which happens every 5-10 years or so, and for my birthday tea-time. I would select a cake and he would make it, usually with a little help of my mother when we are together at this time, or with mine when that’s the only help he can get. My favorite birthday cakes involve usually fruits: apples 🍎 or lemons 🍋. This year our lemon tree gave only one lemon, which we preciously watched growing and yellowing until we could harvest it just for my birthday. A recipe that would use the whole fruit was my target, and I have seen many but never tried lemon squares so I opted for it. Difficulty minimum, preparation quick enough for A. to get through it. The basic idea of the recipe comes from this french website, with a few adjustments made on the spot as we were not satisfied with it. So here is my version of it. For those who have never had lemon squares (like me until yesterday, as it hasn’t really made its way to Japan) or seen any (they are everywhere so I hardly can believe it!!!), they consist on a sweet sable dough topped with a kind on custard made with the whole eggs. So it’s kind of close to a lemon tart but a lot easier to make… maybe it could be called lazy lemon tart.
Lemon squares (9 large squares, 16 medium)
1 lemon
100g of brown sugar
150g+40g of flour
125g of butter at room temperature is easier
2 eggs
40g of icing sugar plus a bit to sprinkle for finishing
First task is to prepare the sable dough. Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees. In a bowl put 150g of flour, the icing sugar and the butter and knead to obtain an homogeneous mix. It maybe rather sticky. Try making a bowl of it and move to a sheet of cooking paper 30cmx30cm. Gently squeeze flat and lay another similar sheet of cooking paper on top. Roll to a 25x25cm square and set on oven proof receptacle of that size (mine is Pyrex). If you don’t have a square oven dish of that size you can use a rectangle one. The sharper the edges the nicer the cuts will be. Bake in the oven until it starts to slightly become golden. It should take 15-20min.
While the first layer is baking prepare the second one. Take the zest of the lemon, the juice. In a bowl beat the eggs and the sugar, add the lemon zest (keep just a bit for decor )and juice, the 40g of flour and stir well. As soon as the first layer is baked, take out the oven, add the second layer evenly and bake for 18min or so. If you overcook it’s going to be dry, undercooked it will be hard to have clean cuts.
Wait until it has cooled down to move to a cutting board, sprinkle with icing sugar and a few zests, and cut to squares the size you like. Enjoy!!!
The frenzy of Christmas leaves me more and more perplexed and this year, having the opportunity (if one can says so) to spend it at home, just like a normal day off was actually more than welcome. Since we’ve been in Japan, rare are the years we haven’t spent Christmas with our families in Europe. While a family reunion is nice, Christmas is a time I dislike being in Paris, it’s dark, gloomy and cold. We are always suffering from jetlag, waking up at 5:00am when it’s pitch black outside and it will stay so for another 3 hours… better yet when we spend Christmas in the south of France, or even better in Italy. I love so much better the Italian spirit… But jetlag and dark mornings are not the only reason why I dislike so much this period, what I fear the most about Christmas are the long dinner and lunch that go with it, the sudden abundance in food like it were the only day we can eat and we have to eat them all from the appetizers to the mignardises… in magazines, instagram and wherever else… giant turkeys, creamy cakes, chocolate overdosed buches…
This is millions miles away from my conception of good food and good eating. Why shall you wait for Christmas or new year eve for champagne, caviar, foie gras and truffle and presents??? For fine chocolates and treats??? Why on earth would you get them all on one day??? For me, everyday is a cooking feast and every day is worth a present, I love the concept of unbirthday we should have an unchristmas too! I can’t wait 365 days and then just have to take it all in a snap! This is too ridiculous. Maybe also because my birthday is so closed from Christmas. Also, for me, a festive good meal doesn’t need to have fancy ingredients (actually I dislike most of them…), it just needs love in the kitchen and at the table and a few basic products. So the very best part of a European Christmas is undeniably the breakfast, really early, in the kitchen overlooking the garden still in the darkness: pieces of pompe a l’huile or slices of panettone dipped in a cup of hot black tea and tangerines peeled carefully and eaten slowly🍊 is what makes me the happiest. When all is still quiet.
Pompe a l’huile and tangerines
This year, no travel, no jetlag, no dark morning , no family reunion, and no Christmas party with friends, it was just the two of us in our country house. Perfect. I prepared rustic potatoes and smoked ham ravioli for Christmas eve, and pompe a l’huile for the morning breakfast, which wasn’t dark as in Japan the sun sets early, and early enough to catch up with family still on Christmas eve. Luckily Isumi is well stocked in tangerines groves, so it’s really easy to find some good ones… ours from our tree are long eaten! And that was a perfect Christmas.
I wish you all a happy holiday season!
Christmas ravioli, just the usual ravioli filled with smoked ham and potatoes, dressed with onion and shiitake
On rainy days when we can be outside in the garden, in the ocean or elsewhere there are a few things we like to do. One of them is to look at real estate agencies websites (that’s actually how we found our house), and simultaneously look at google map satellite view and see the properties, the local terrain… and usually find new things around, hiking spots or roads to explore by bicycle. That’s exactly what happened the other day. While we were searching for woods to acquire (without success) we found the cheese factory called Ikagawa that is just 8km away from home on a nice small road, so a perfect short ride by bicycle. Not that Ikagawa farm is new. They’ve been around for at least 10 years. Just we never found out before…
As soon as the weather got better we took out bicycles, went up and down the hills inland and found the place. From the website it seemed tiny, but it looked like the cows were there. They weren’t, they are in the farm 10min ride away, and as it was late and getting dark we didn’t go. We only saw a very friendly dog and a goat. And the tiniest “shop” that is barely a counter. We were nicely welcomed and presented with the cheeses. A few varieties, but the ones I came for were the hard cheeses 🧀. They have two varieties of hard cheese. I got both.
I baked a sourdough bread back home. Oh! Yes! Sourdough… you read well. I cook everything sourdough now and I am very pleased with it. I start to get things well now!!! And breakfast for the next day was all set! Both cheese were delicious and we’ll be back for sure! We are so lucky that Isumi has such delicious cheeses factories and it is really great to see that there are many farms doing different cheeses. If you come around Isumi, I recommend you get a cheese factory tour!!!
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!!!
