You may be very much used to miso soup as a warm bouillon served either with just a few things in: a slice of shiitake, a peel of yuzu, a few leaves of mitsuba, or with rather plenty of small mushrooms, daikon…
But with the summer heat, a chilled soup is very much welcome and a chilled miso soup version is also possible and it’s delicious!
It just requires to prepare a little ahead so that the bouillon can cool down. This recipe is inspired by a soup we were served for lunch at a small vegan cafe we went for lunch to on our way back from Hoki Museum (by the way, well worth the visit).
My recipe features somen, the Japanese vermicelli, but you do without.
Chilled miso soup (2 servings)
1 dry shiitake
1 small eggplant
2 tsp of miso
1 small cucumber
4-6 leaves of fresh green shiso
Optional: 100g of somen
Optional: 1 fresh myoga
In a pan boil 1l of water, add the dry shiitake to make a shiitake dashi. Let it boil for a few minutes, when the color goes brownish, turn off the heat and leave it to rest.
Cut the eggplant in bites and bake it or cook it in a frypan until soft.
Wash and slice very thinly the cucumber and the shiso, and the myoga of you use any.
Boil the somen and keep them in cool water.
In the serving bowls, serve one spoon of miso each, top with the drained somen, add the eggplant, the cucumber and eventually myoga, finish with bouillon that covers almost everything, and add the shiso.
For extra chill effect, add a few ice cubes and enjoy!
Last week we went out for dinner to try Cimi Restorant, a restorative kitchen that proposes an interesting concept, with only 10 guests all sitting at one table, in an old house, redesigned for the restaurant, in a mix of old and new. Most dishes are plant based. All the dishes they served were very simple, using a few ingredients very carefully chosen, from farms producing organic, biodynamic or in permaculture. Though I was a bit confused that they do not use more local ingredients as part of reducing the environmental footprint and being furthermore restorative.
One of the plant based on the course menu was a cold cucumber soup. And it was obvious after the very first spoon that it was not just cucumber, there was also some green bell pepper and a few other vegetables. It was refreshing and very tasteful.
Perfect timing, last Sunday we got some cucumber from a lady with whom we played tennis, and I had just bought green bell pepper. So I decided to try a simpler version if that soup at home. The result was way over my expectations at first try! So here is my recipe.
Summer green chilled soup (2 servings)
2 Japanese cucumbers (or one European)
2 green bell peppers
1/2 cup of vegetables consommé
Salt and pepper
Optional: olive oil and a slice of sourdough bread
Prepare the vegetables consommé and let it chill.
Wash the vegetables. Cut the stems and remove the seeds of the bell peppers, and of the cucumber if it feels like that (not necessary with Japanese cucumbers).
Put the vegetables and the consommé in a blender and liquify. Dress in adequate plates or bowls. Top with z pinch of salt and freshly ground pepper (I used a mix of pink and white peppers).
If you feel like it add a drizzle of olive oil. Or cut the slice oc sourdough bread in bite size and roast them in a bit of olive oil in a pan. Top the soup.
It’s the season for cauliflower and I am a big fan, so it always makes me happy to prepare some.
Until recently I would either eat it raw, steam it to melty-crunchy, or make a puree or a soup for some classic recipes. Or use Indian inspiration and cook it with spices.
Yet this year I started to make a sauce for pasta with it, like you would with broccoli. My first attempt was good but needed a bit more elaboration. My attempt today reached the perfection I was expecting. So here is my recipe. Simple but so delicious.
Cauliflower pasta (for 2 servings)
120g of dry short pasta (I used farfalle, but penne, macaroni etc… would work very well)
1/2 cauliflower
2tbs of olive oil
Salt, pepper, turmeric, paprika
Boil the pasta. Steam the cauliflower until very mushy.
In a pan, puree the cauliflower and add the olive oil and the salt, pepper, turmeric and paprika, a pinch of each. Stir well. Add the cooked and drained pasta, stir to obtain a well mixed mix. Serve.
You can add grated parmesan on top if you like it.
Harvest from the kitchen garden: plenty of green peas, fava beans and herbs.
Late spring brings in so many vegetables! Our modest kitchen garden produced a beautiful crop of green peas. Not over a long period of time like last year, but a few kilos in a very short time. I also harvested a lot of sansho pods, and while looking at the recipe to prepare them in my book of Shojin cuisine, I just found a recipe that so far curiously never attracted me before but was perfect with what I had in the fridge: bamboo shoot and green peas sushi rice. It took just one second to verify I had all the ingredients I needed and my mind was all set. I don’t eat fish and seafood sushi, but I love sushi rice, slightly vinegary and sweet. It is very easy to prepare but somehow never make any…
It was time to change this!
Here is the recipe I prepared, slightly modified from the original.
Bamboo shoot and green peas sushi (4 servings, side dish)
2 go of rice (or 2 cups but that would be more)
A handful of fresh green peas
1 fresh bamboo shoot
A pinch of salt
2tbs of rice vinegar
3tbs of sugar
1tbs of soya sauce
A few sansho leaves
Cook the rice. In the meantime, peel the bamboo, cut it in 3mm thick slices, and the cut the the slices in 2cm strips and boil it for 15min. Drain. In a pan set the bamboo and the green peas, add 2tbs of water, 1tbs of sugar, 1tbs of soya sauce. Cook at medium heat until almost all the liquid is gone. Mix the vinegar and the 2tbs of sugar with the rice. Stir well, add the vegetables and stir gently. Add the sansho leaves and enjoy!
Do not refrigerate, the rice would become hard and flavors would vanish.
While A. is on business trip while my days at work are super busy, I’m oscillating between experimenting new recipes and easy to prepare but very satisfying food such as cheesy toasts and ochazuke… In my experiments, the sweet potatoes gnocchi with a 100% sesame pairing was definitely a huge hit! It mixes perfectly a traditional Italian recipe with Japanese flavors. A must try if you love sweet potatoes and sesame. Bonus, it is one of the easiest recipe ever… and here it is!!!
Sweet potato gnocchi and sesame (two servings)
1 large sweet potato
Flour
1tbs of sesame seeds
1tbs os sesame oil
Salt and pepper
Steam the sweet potato. When tender let it cool down. Peel it and mash it. Add flour little by little to obtain an almost non sticky dough. Shape the gnocchi. In a pan boil 1-2L of water and poach the gnocchi. Drain and serve in plates, top with a bit of sesame oil and sesame seeds, add salt and pepper. Eat immediately.
The summer is slowly reaching its end and the end of summer vegetables start to arrive such as butternut squash and kabocha, but before the summer ends for real, let’s enjoy a little more the summer vegetables: eggplants, cucumber, edamame and jute mallow…
When I was a child, my mum would come to pick us at school for lunch, then we would walk to the car and somedays, on the way stop to buy some bread at Mr. Richard bread shop. And one bread in particular, fougasse. His signature fougasse unless most other bread shop was not the one with olives, or whatever else you can put in, it was the simplest plain fougasse, and instead of the classic shape it would little hearts cuts and you could pull the little hearts of bread. We lived to eat the little hearts on the way back to the car, and even more when the bread was still warm!!
While fougasse is eaten all year round, I like to have some ready in the summer. It makes the perfect meal with some fresh vegetables and a piece of grilled fish. And it is even more perfect when you have it ready when you get back home after a surfing session at sunset. I love to go surfing on Sunday evening after 17:30, when most day trippers are leaving and you get the ocean for just you, your friends and a couple of regulars. I love driving back home at dusk, seeing the sky becoming purple and the rice paddies turning yellow. And then I am hungry and the fougasse and a fresh cucumber from the garden are waiting to be eaten!
Fougasse
250g of flour
20g of olive oil plus some for the finish
20-30g of sourdough starter
8g of salt
70g of water (may need adjustment depending on flour and sourdough)
Mix all the ingredients and knead lightly. If the dough is too dry add a bit of water, if too wet a bit of flour. The dough must be rather hard and have not much moisture.
Wait a few hours until it has grown.
Then flatten the ball with the hand and wait 15 minutes. After that, roll the dough with a cooking pin to obtain an oblong shape of about 2-3cm thick. With a shaped cutter of the shape you want, I chose plum because I didn’t have hearts like Mr. Richard’s fougasse, cut a few places with the design you fancy.
Bake at 230deg for 15min or until golden. When out of the oven spread a layer of olive oil with a brush.
I have tried many things in the kitchen garden during the past 10 years. Eggplants, cucumbers, snap peas, tomatoes, cabbages etc… most of which were total failures, eaten by the kions, or the snails, or whoever was around. My most successful crop, by far, has been potatoes for a few years now. Except for this year, I tried green peas and that was a big hit… My specialty is actually purple potatoes: vitelottes. I like to grow them and harvest them and I love the color they bring to the plate. And those potatoes are absolutely impossible to find if you don’t grow them (at least for now), so this is why I keep growing some.
This year I grew them in the new kitchen garden. The soil is still under making so the harvest was not as good as I expected, even though I expanded the surface by two, but there were quite enough to make several meals and enjoy their bright color. The way I like to cook them best is simply washed and boiled, then sliced and eaten with other colorful ingredients. Perfect with eggs and cucumbers, dressed with plenty if mustard and olive oil for a classic potato salad, or simply fresh green leaves and tomatoes with olive oil for a fresh and lighter version.
I am quite proud to say that, except the tomatoes and the eggs, all the vegetables and herbs come from the garden. I cannot say that we’re successful with cucumbers but by far the best harvest we’ve ever had, and salad leaves, celery and herbs are doing rather well. The regular potatoes come also from our garden, from a few old potatoes that started growing in the fridge and I decided to plant. I don’t know how you love your potatoes but I’m sure it’s delicious!!!
OK… after a little time struggling with WordPress I’m back!!!
When I was living with my parents, a long long time ago, my mother always had some kind of homemade preparations such as yogurts, that I was very reluctant to try, and I am still for some reasons not to much tempted by. But when we were at my parents’ place last month, I had a chance to try my mother water kefir. At first I was just wondering what this drink may taste like, and when she told me she only put water, lemon and dry figs in it, and has been drinking every morning for the past few years… I was thinking that I may not die from trying and nothing in it could justify I don’t try. And to be honest I really loved it, and even A. did. So instead of packing tones of tasty cheeses from France I packed a bin of water kefir grains that I smuggled in Japan. (Honestly I don’t know if this is a prohibited product or not… information about water kefir grains are just as scarce as mystic…)
And since we came back, I have been making some every two day or so and we’ve been drinking some every day. I follow strictly my mother recipe but the process of making water kefir is still new to me, and I have been having a lot of questions about it that have been mainly unanswered. This is incredible really to see that such an ancient practice is so little documented, and even the scientific research papers on it are just too little.
The first question that popped to my mind when I was making my first batch was what happens if by mistake I release a kefir grain in the drain and it goes to the river that goes to the ocean… would there be at some point (and kefir grows really quickly) a giant kefir blob on the beach? Am I going to create inadvertently an ecological catastrophe like many have been created. Don’t you know about the terrible taxifolia algae in the Mediterranean sea, escaped from the Monaco aquarium? Or some kind of strange animal like ninja turtles… apparently my mother asked herself the same thing… we couldn’t find any answer… but assuming that water kefir exists for a very long time, if that were to happen, wouldn’t it had happened already?
The second question was, what happens if I drink the liquid and the fermentation is not over. Would that be poisonous? And if by mistake I ingest a grain? Same here, I couldn’t find a clear answer.
But one thing that I learned trying to find information about water kefir according to one paper, is that making water kefir drink industrially seems very difficult. So water kefir can only be made on small batches! Isn’t that amazing? And the other thing is that the kefir grain composition varies from one place to another. Not totally surprising but interesting… which means probably, like with sourdough, that each one produces a drink with a signature taste!
Mine is very mild and I like it’s refreshing taste and very slightly sparkling. I do not store it in an hermetic bottle to make it more sparkling, nor add any other flavoring such as fruits during the second phase. We just drink it like it is, after the first phase I just filter it. And I prepare it solely with dry fig and lemon, and a bit of sugar, but not too much either, may be that’s why the sparkling is very subtle.
I’m still learning and searching for solid info on kefir, so if you have good resources…
Making kefir: dry figs, lemon slices, a bit of brown sugar, kefir grains
