Cauliflower pasta

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.

Sushi rice and spring vegetables, the perfect combo!

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.

Dumplings again and again…

While spring is on its way and nanohana are everywhere, and I can’t wait for the spring vegetables to be there, I am also happy to enjoy a little more the winter vegetables: the leeks, the cabbages and the very last kabocha until they’ll be back next fall.

By now you must very well know that dumplings are among my favorite food, from wherever they are I love them! Recently I have been making a lot of vegan gyoza and wontons because I found a very good dumpling skin that contains nothing else than when I make it myself: flour, water and salt. But I still prefer the ones for which I make everything from the scratch, the kneading and rolling are so much fun!

One thing that I love particularly to make is dumplings with a puréed filling, when you can fill a lot in one, they are plumped, with a melty heart. Sweet potatoes and kabocha are the perfect ingredient for that. So of course with a kabocha in the fridge I couldn’t help but make some simple kabocha dumplings. Here is the recipe. Enjoy!!

Kabocha dumplings (2 servings)

For the filling

  • 1/2 kabocha
  • 1/2tsp of ground cinnamon
  • 1/4tsp of paprika
  • 1/4tsp of salt
  • Ground pepper

For the skin

  • 120g of flour (+ a bit for dusting)
  • Water
  • A ponch of salt

In a bowl mix the flour with the salt and water little by little while kneading until the dough is smooth but non sticky. Leave to rest.

Cut the kabocha in chuck and remove the seeds, keep the skin. In a pan steam or boil the kabocha ( the less water the better so steaming is more recommended). When totally soft mash and add the cinnamon, the paprika, salt, pepper. When puréed you can start rolling your dough. For that, cut a bit of dough, the size of a walnut, and roll it into a circle. Put a generous tea spoon of filling and close, remove all the air as much as possible. Repeat.

For cooking the dumplings you have several options: steaming, boiling, pan frying or pan steaming. I pan steamed them this time: in a greased and heated pan I set the dumplings, then add 0.5mm of water in the pan and cook under cover for 7-8 min then removed the cover to let the rest of the water evaporates and served adding ground pepper and a pinch of olive oil, but you can serve with soya sauce.

Home alone experiments

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.

My summer favorite: edamame paste and pasta

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…

Fougasse

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.

Potatoes my friend? Yes, but vitelotte, please!

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!!!

The mysterious drink you can make at home

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

The minimal kitchen

When on travel, eating out for every meal has always been a problem for me. Too much food, too rich, too many ingredients, too much preparation, too far… not enough simple food, not enough traceability… there are so many reasons why I love homemade food… I have been used now for a long long time to making my own food even with the simplest ustensiles and in the most rudimentary kitchens, but for long stays cooking with a kettle, a plate and a knife used for eating, that would be a little too constraining. So when we decided to travel to Paris I had one strong requirement: our hotel room should have a kitchen. We found a place that checked all the boxes finally: the Majestic hotel. The kitchen wasn’t even tiny, with a great opening on the terrace, but minimally equipped: a frypan and a pan. I bought a kitchen knife, a wooden spoon and a bottle of olive oil, and I was ready to cook for 10 days. I need nothing more than that.

The farmers market down the street on President Wilson Avenue on Wednesdays and Saturdays provided us with all the basic, local and seasonal ingredients we would need. The fish mongers, the cheeses and the organic stalls are really great. For breads there is also a nice stall. You can also find there beautiful flowers, kitchen knives, and a few Italian food stalls, perfect for ravioli and others stuffed pasta. We didn’t test the meat stalls, as I barely cook meat, but there are a few with a nice selection.

May in France is the season for strawberries, the very first cherries, green peas, asparagus, artichokes, new potatoes, new carrots etc… I focused my shopping on products I would usually not eat in Japan. Artichokes and white asparagus definitely were on the top of my list.

Nearby you can also find one of the trending patissier-boulanger shop: Cyril Lignac, which is the first one to open in the area: 7:00AM. With the jet-lag it’s almost too late, but we could manage to postpone breakfast until then and eat fresh pastries for breakfast. I would particularly recommend their pain aux raisins. Extremely delicious.

As a result, I tested some classic recipes and also created a super simple white asparagus recipe that I’d like to share with you.

White asparagus in tomato sauce

  • 5 white asparagus/person
  • 2 ripe and large tomatoes/person
  • 1tbs of olive oil
  • A pinch of salt and pepper

Wash and peel the asparagus. Cut in 3cm long chunks. Blanche them. Drain, let cool down and pat dry. In a pan add the olive oil and the diced tomatoes. Cook until it has reduced enough and it becomes a thick tomato sauce. add the cooked asparagus. Stir well and serve. That’s it!!!

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