Category: Travel

Travel and hotel life in Toronto

When I travel for more than two days I usually manage at some point to have access to a kitchen so that I can cook a bit wherever I am. Whether I rent a place with a kitchen or I do a kitchen take over at some friends’ place. I like to cook the local and seasonal products, and also to have homemade meals with just the right preparation and the right size. But sometimes this is not possible and I feel miserable! This trip to Toronto is one of these. I stay the whole week at a hotel without access to a kitchen… and without the time to shopping in a nice grocery store. My schedule was too busy for that and I only could shop at the 24-7 nearby grocery store with fruits coming from wherever it is… So I am craving for homemade fresh and local food. Of course I am a master of in-room food preparation. Before traveling I often search for the hotel nearby grocery stores or farmers markets, preferably the one with local products and arrange my schedule to have a chance to visit them. I always travel with a super good multipurpose Sicilian knife that can be used for anything from fruit peeling to bread cutting, and I often prepare food in my room. Indeed, the first thing I do when I arrive in a hotel is to get geared: I ask room service for a kettle, one or two plates and cutlery and it all usually comes with proper clothes to be used as kitchen clothes, but they never have good knifes.

As usual I did my homework and had a list of places to go visit upon arrival, but it was without counting that I arrived on Thanksgiving day and the many places I wanted to visit were almost all closed. So that dramatically limited my access to food resources. Not to add that Ontario may have a large variety of fruits and vegetables in the summer but when fall arrives, apples are pretty much the only local fruit available and the beautiful season of mushrooms and pumpkins requires a cooking range or some more elaborated equipment. Anyway… I managed to survive I guess…

Though my working program was quite intense with very little free time, I managed to have breakfast at a place I discovered last time I was in Toronto, where they have a delicious spice chai: Hot Black Coffee, and delicious muffins, with also plenty of vegan options, and to check out a place that everyone was talking about: Momofuku. I could see it Momofuku from the hotel elevator on my way to the pool every morning but didn’t know what it was (I first thought it was a daifuku place!!!). But it was on everyone’s mouth…

For those like me who don’t know, Momofuku is a branch restaurant of very popular NY chef Wang, that specializes in Asian fusion and in particular in noodles/ramen (kind of reminded me of the movie You’ll always be my maybe). The Toronto branch has a noodle bar and a high-end restaurant. I didn’t have time for the high-end. Knowing that I only had ramen once before with fish broth because I don’t like the pork-chicken… broth, I am not an expert in ramen, so eating some fusion ramen is not a blasphemy to an institution for me but I can understand that some purists may be shocked by some of the combinations proposed on the menu. I took some vegetarian noodles, with pumpkin (now or never!) and cheese. This was definitely an inventive combination! But not an uninteresting one… In any case, the restaurant itself was a very nice bright space quite enjoyable.

Now I’m heading back home to my kitchen and you can’t imagine how happy I am to have a long weekend to cook and bodyboard! The simple idea of making pancakes for breakfast while A. prepares his coffee rejoices me!

Lozère

Hello there!!! You may have wondered where I was all this time… well… after another crazy busy week in Tokyo, a rapid stop in Paris, and a long drive, I was in Anilhac in my parents country house to celebrate their 50´s wedding anniversary. The house is not equipped with internet and there is no 3G or 4G coverage there either. So obviously I had to be disconnected for a while. After that I went straight to Germany for work and now I’m finally on my way back to Paris for a last stop for work before heading home… pfiou…

Being disconnected from my phone wasn’t a big deal to be honest… I can totally live without it and days in Anilhac we’re actually busy with hiking, flying and very little cooking as mom had planned everything… I only made pancakes for the whole family one morning…

Lozère is not very famous for food and staples: the most well known products are chestnuts from Cevennes, cheeses made of sheep milk, honey, wild berries, and wheat… that’s probably it… it’s a very barren region, with tough winters and dry summers, very poor. Mostly sheep and shepherds. Actually, the house is a former sheep house my parents transformed 45 years ago in a country house.

Life for me in Anilhac is about being outside, hiking, reading and drawing by the fireplace, then having meals all together.

Meals there are usually simple… a very lot of cheeses for me (this place is cheese heaven!!), and some cured meat for A., fresh vegetables from the neighboring kitchen gardens, and some wild fruits from the garden or harvested during the hikes: plums, hazelnuts, blackberries… oh… and braised potatoes of course! Baked in the embers of the fireplace.

Oh! And my parents had a surprise for us: I finally managed to fly a glider from le Chanet airfield… it was quite an experience… after seeing my sister doing it 37 years ago, and always wanted to try…

Take off

Seoul

Though very close from Japan, it’s only the second time I travelled to Korea. Until this week, I have always avoided traveling to Korea, in particular to Daejon, where a lot of events in my professional field happen. The reason is simple: our first experience with Korea, back then in 2005 was a very disappointing one. Living in Japan for 1 year, we were not sure about what to expect, but except for two or three very very nice people we met, we found the city dirty, people rude and openly racists, and the infrastructure a pale mimic of Japan and we just decided not to go again. Forced by A.’s work now, 14 years later was a good time to check out on the city again. I had no expectations at all and I got this time a rather better impression. OK I stayed in Gangnam, didn’t go on the north bank and it was a mere 48h… I enjoy the cleanliness of the city, the people that were nice, even if they may have I found me rude as my Korean is even worst than my Chinese, or to put simply, I don’t speak a word of Korean, which I found very embarrassing, but I tried to make up for my rudeness with many smiles! Because like when I was in Beijing last November, the air is really dirty from Chinese industrial pollution I limited my walks outside, or went out with mask and sun glasses, but even though my eyes were on fire… I still enjoyed a bit of the walks in the small streets to go up and down hill all the time, offering view of the city sometimes, or sneak peeks in the beautiful manicured private gardens. I also by chance run into an organic grocery store: Chorocmael (초록마을), packing on a few things I usually cannot find in Japan: organic local pine nuts, many different types of herb teas… and fresh local raspberries, that didn’t look like the ugly giant raspberries usually found in western markets. Actually they were so time and cute, that I wasn’t even sure they were raspberries, because of my inability to read.

Food wise I didn’t got too wild, and didn’t have so much time for it. I liked the small cafes with outdoor seating, but I mainly preferred the indoor seating option because of the pollution. And for the food I didn’t get too adventurous, as I don’t like meaty food, sea food, nor spicy food. My best friend on the menus was always kimchi rice. The most appropriate to my liking was the one from a small cafe/florist 식물원282. Most dishes are served with pickles that are absolutely divine. They are prepared differently than Japanese pickles and are just super delicious too!!!

So… except for the pollution, the overall experience was quite positive and I guess I’ll go again!!! Now I need to start learning Korean a bit!!!

Tsunan – 津南町

Every once in a while we go to visit our friends and their cat in Tsunan, in the Niigata mountains. We originally planned to go for new year but the snow has stopped us: our car is not equipped for snow… so we took the opportunity of the long golden week to drive up and to stay 2-3 days there. We’ve been there 10 times or more, at each season but it’s been a while we haven’t been in spring and it was the perfect timing for sansai as you already from my previous post, but also cherry tree blossoms and beautiful river streams full of the recently melted snow.

Each time we discover something new, but we also have a few habits. Let’s start with the habits:

  1. Always stop by the COOP shop in the village to buy 三八五 – sanhachigo to make pickles. They also use to have delicious apricot jam but not anymore…
  2. Drive up to Sakae to buy honey and pollen. I started eating pollen a long time ago, under the pressure of my nutritionist mum. At first I hated it, but after years, now I really find it easy to take a spoon of pollen every morning before breakfast.
  3. Stop at the sake factory, not for sake but for some carrot juice! They grow 雪下人参 – yukishitaninjin literally carrots under the snow, and they give a very nice and sweet carrot juice. You may also find the juice other places.
  4. Stop at the local antique shops. Well, actually this time we didn’t since K. gave us plenty of ceramics and glassware.
  5. Take a walk to the geo-park to see the cliff and the river. We really love that place, even if a few years ago they transformed the little path into a wide wheelchair friendly road, with an artificial pond… the view hasn’t changed a bit.

As for the new things… we discovered Nakago – 中子 a small village by a lake with a few sakura tree. The place is on a plateau where they do a lot of farming. The beautifully opened view and the quietness were totally exquisite.

The other place we went was on the way to Akiyamago, a small village with a suspended bridge on top of the Nakatsu river, the Mikura bridge – 見倉橋. It was a beautiful walk down the river, and you can go up the other side of the bridge to the Mikura village. But we didn’t, so next time we’ll visit K. we know were we could go!!!

Wild mountain plants

More than 10 years ago our friends K. and S. invited us to their home in the Niigata mountains to go picking wild plants – 山菜 – sansai with them, and to cook and eat them together. Of course we couldn’t say no, and we had an amazing time with them walking deep in the forest, picking all the different kinds of wild plants, seeing wild animals and then learning how to prepare them…

With the super long golden week, we decided to go and visit K. for a short trip to Tsunan and to go wild plants picking again. Since S. has past, we didn’t go as deep in the woods as we did before but we went for a long walk in the woods and picked enough wild plants for a nice lunch. The winter has stretched rather late in April with huge snowfalls and there was still quite a bit of snow, so we were a week or so too early. Here is an illustrated list of what we found though:

– つくし – tsukushi – horsetail

This little white flower can be easily found everywhere. Always take those that have no pollen. For preparation see my post here.

– こごみ – kogomi – fern sprouts

They are easy to spot, easy to pick and super easy to cook. I find them as easy to prepare than wild asparagus: in omelets, with pasta… they are really the simplest of the sansai and the more accessible in terms of flavor and texture.

– タラノメ – taranome – angelica buds

They grow at the head of wood sticks. The one in the picture is a little young and they need to have a few leaves out. These ones are really delicious in tempura and require little handling.

– 木の芽 – kinome – chocolate vine

This little green sprout that grows in the midst of other trees sprouting is the hardest to find, but once you’ve spotted a tree, easily recognized by its leaves, it is easy to find the sprouts. Washed and eaten raw, or cook, it is fresh and crunchy.

– 蕗の薹 – fukinoto

In the mountain fukinoto grow right after a patch of snow has melted. So spot a patch of snow, and look at the edges. They are best when just sprouting. They can be as big as a ping pong ball. There taste is very strong and specific. Probably the most difficult to accommodate and cook of all. See my posts on fukinoto here.

There are many others wild plants such as zenmai – 薇 – osmunda japonica (with me on the below picture), yama udo – 山ウド, tori ashi shouma – 鶏足升麻… we also harvested a bit of some, so some others… we also found morels. we had taranome, fukinoto and kogomi tempura, kinome salad and tsukushi just heated in soya sauce and dashi.

Now the golden week is getting to its end… time to go back to work soon!

Melbourne

Well well well the title of this post is very ambitious and may be misleading. I am not going to give an extensive review of the city nor of it’s eateries and markets… I was there for three days for work and it was my first time in Melbourne and I didn’t touch a pan or a knife, nor a raw ingredient the whole time. I actually didn’t even enter a supermarket or any shopping place! I was staying downtown where our friends and colleagues live, and they showed me a bit around every morning and every evening. The one thing that I truly enjoyed is that there are plenty of options to go out for breakfast even quite early and D. took me to a few very nice places. The top of the top was Vacation, I liked the fresh and open atmosphere and where I had an amazing avocado toast made with Australian avocados. Topped with sprouted garbanzo beans and green peas it was really divine!! Of course D. also took me to Lune for the best croissants in town (it was also recommended to me on IG by @baker.kobo) and I had there an indeed delicious croissant. Going out for breakfast in a new city, when people move around is really a good way to feel the vibe and discover a bit of their habits. I found that a lot of people grab breakfast on their way or stand in to eat, there are of course some seat in places. But everywhere it is usually quick. Lune in particular reminded me of that cafe in Milano I loved to go to have a croissant and a fresh squeezed orange juice. Breakfast eateries in Melbourne offer a large panel of options with healthy bowls and fresh fruits or bacon sausage and eggs, and plenty of fresh smoothies. There’s a lot of vegetarian and vegan options too. And with strong ties to the UK they have kept the tea culture, so every place has delicious tea to offer.

Dinner wise they took me to different neighborhoods and food was great. There is one thing though I realize when we were in Brisbane last May, Australian restaurants for dinner are utterly noisy. They always have very very loud music and huge space with people shouting rather than conversing as you can’t hear each other because of the music. It makes the whole atmosphere rather exhausting after a day at work.

D. and C. also took me to see some possums living in the city near Flagstaff. They were absolutely too cute!!!

So basically I haven’t seen much of the city in these three days, and that wasn’t the point of my visit, but I know I will be coming again and this first contact was a good one! I am hoping to stay longer next time for more exploration of the fresh local food and a kitchen takeover if I don’t have my own kitchen!!!

Taken for granted

This short trip to Beijing has been quite eye opening for me. I realized that there are three things that I take for granted: the quality of the air I breath, the quality of the water I drink and the quality of the food I eat. This third one is more of a life style I have inherited from my family and won’t talk about it today. The two others, I’ve never really thought about it before to be honest… there has been a few times when I was living in Paris I felt suffocated by the pollution in the air, and that the water tasted really bad. In Tokyo of course I have been worried after March 2011 with air, water and food. In early spring and in the summer I sometimes check the quality of the air for pm 2.5 but it has nothing to do with how I felt unsecured about that in China. Last year in Shanghai I was concerned by the air quality but it wasn’t as strong as it felt this time in Beijing. When seeing everywhere that you cannot drink tap water unless boiled, I realize I was living on bottled water in plastic containers, something that I avoid as much as possible to use in Tokyo… and feeling always worried about what I drink was quite strange actually for me and made me think that being able not to care about what is coming out the tap is just a precious gift. Add this to waking up in a smoggy city with air quality quite alarming made me ask myself unformulated questions about this giant gap between ultra-urban areas and rural areas. Not that rural areas are free of pollution… the river cleaning we did a few weeks ago showed me how much farmers destruct their surroundings by being careless and lazy. And I think carelessness and laziness are really two keywords for me that represent very well our societies. Being so careless that in the end you can’t breath the air around you seems unbelievable to me but that’s what it is in Chinese big cities and I do believe that it is not only China… society has decided it’s better to consume more of an electricity produced by coal rather than breathing normal air. Looking always first at serving a purpose that I cannot understand, up to a point where cities are becoming unlivable just revealed to me my misunderstanding of the world I live in, the gap between the ideals I believe in and a certain urban reality.

In the meantime, traveling is always full of surprises and even during such a short and busy visit I discovered at least two interesting things food-wise: beancurd noodles that I had in a restaurant and rose and honey milk tea that I had at a bakery where I stopped for breakfast making quite good pastries and funny artistic cakes (that I wouldn’t eat). I actually have a very bad knowledge of Chinese cuisine mainly for two reasons: the use of many ingredients I don’t eat (jellyfish, shark, seafood, meat…) and the spicy food from some regions. I would love for example to know more about Chinese zen cuisine but never actually heard about any. May be they just ate rice… but these beancurd noodles could have been something they ate… I’ll definitely try to find some information and get back to you soon if I find anything interesting!

Swordfish

When the season for swordfish starts I am always pleased to start eating some, in particular because it often arrives after several typhoons and fish options have been more than scarce in Isumi. After the long months of bonito, it is time for a change. And if I love sanma, which also marks the beginning of the autumn, I rarely cook some because of the smell. But swordfish is perfect for me. I like the consistency of the meat even better than that of snapper and sea bass, and it has not shape at all (I gave trouble eating fishes that have fish shapes in the plate… maybe another reason why I don’t eat sanma much!).

So, the swordfish (メカジキ mekajiki) season is starting and I found some beautiful pieces of Kesennuma swordfish. Kesennuma is a fishing port up north in Miyagi famous for tunas and swordfishes, and that was badly hut in 2011. They kind of made a brand of it, and the swordfish is actually really delicious.

I like to grill or pan grill my pieces of swordfish, with or with marinating it. Now sudachi, the small green citrus fruits ate in season, and swordfish marinated with the juice of 2 and some soya sauce and then grilled was a great and simple recipe!!!

How do you cook your swordfish???

Making bread

In the summer 2012 when we bought our house in Isumi I never imagined how much it would be a life changer. At first it was purely a fancy project to have a Japanese house and a garden, a place to do little DIY projects (since there’s nothing we can do in a rented apartment in Tokyo) and interior design… but these 6 years have provided us with a lot of opportunities for thinking about our life style, what we care for, and we want. But all that I’ll write about later. One thing, among a few others, I really got into is making bread (why and how is there). Handmade bread. Hand kneading is such a quiet and nice moment to talk and think after a busy day in the garden, at the seaside or on the tennis court. At first I was just trying to make bread and brioche with regular flour I could find in the supermarkets but I wasn’t happy with non organic flours, then started to bring back organic ingredients from our trips to France: fancy flours, dry sourdough, dry yeast, seeds and cereals. But this solution was not sustainable since my travels to Europe are irregular, that most of the organic products are usually contaminated with pests and they don’t suffer the Japanese climate to well in particular our house temperature variations and humidity variations are quite dramatic. From 2deg to 28deg and from 10% humidity to 90%. I’ve started back then to keep them in the vegetable drawer of my fridge, which is exclusively used for that now. You can keep them very long and without any pest and they don’t loose their taste. But little by little I learned about the locally produced flours and organic flours have started to appear on shelves here and there. Hokkaido is a very nice wheat producer and they have high quality flours. Cuoca offers a great variety of products when you make bread and a variety of Hokkaido flours (they also have French). I personally don’t shop online, I’d rather go to the shop in Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi where I can buy also fresh yeast and choose the flours I like on the spot. But one other great source for finding flours is when traveling around Japan. If you travel a bit in the countryside you’ll discover that many other regions than Hokkaido produce wheat, but likely at a lower scale, and are only sold locally at farmers cooperatives. Try “michi no eki” 道の駅 and JA fresh products markets, they are always a great place to find local food and locally produced rice, beans, and flours… I remember buying amazing black wheat flour near Shiojiri in Nagano prefecture and some super fine white flour in Nasu in Ibaraki prefecture. Options for making bread locally makes me feel better, they are more fit to the Japanese climate and I don’t have to carry kilos of flours anymore with me on my long haul flights! I still carry other staples that I can’t easily find in Japan… recently it’s been semolina, dry fruits, olives, olive oil, but that, it’s another story!

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