Rice salad Japanese style

Japanese purists would hang me for that recipe!!! In the edamame gohan I’ve added boiled chick peas, and served this “mame gohan” with blanched green beans, cherry tomatoes and hard boiled egg. A sort of “salade de riz” as we call it in France, (so 70’s tupperware cooking!!!) but with a Japanese touch. Of course for the dressing it’s just a little of soya sauce if the green beans and tomatoes, the sacrilege doesn’t go that far!

Speaking of soya sauce, I’ve been selected as a finalist for a cooking contest organized by the soya sauce association! The finale is on August 20th… Let’s see what I can do. It’s my first cooking contest. I have no idea how it is gonna look like…

July 7, 2016

Bayberry – 山桃

We have a bayberry tree in our garden. At first it was so much fighting with the surrounding trees it was small and not giving really fruits but now that we’ve trimmed trees around and at the foot remove all the weed and tiny bamboos it’s growing quite quickly and this year it is giving tones of fruits. A large part of them felt during the big storm early Saturday morning so I decided to harvest the one still on the tree and ripe enough, which means that I hervested 2kg of fruits. Bayberry are very similar to strawberry tree fruits but they are an Asian species. I only know the Asian version in syrup in cocktails in Asian restaurant when I was a kid! Actually they taste a little like cranberry while having a very different texture.

I didn’t know what to do with that many fruits thanks to IG followers advice and a bit of net browsing I managed to know how to prepare them:

wash them under running water
soak them 2h in slightly salted water to be sure there is no bug in: I collected a little worm only! Remove the stems.
wash them and dry them with a clothe.

now they are ready for any preparation. I did some sugar syrup with 700g of fruits and 700g of block sugar. Now I just need to wait for the sugar to melt and for the syrup to be ready. The other thing I had in mind was jam. Unfortunately without any pectin it does jellify apparently so my jam ended up in an other syrup that I used right away and o make jelly for dessert adding just agar agar to the syrup and using a mold. I like my jelly no too stiff do I used little agar agar, and added a fruit in each piece. I have also used the same syrup for flavoring a cake for our breakfast tomorrow. I removed the seeds and added the pulp and syrup to a yogurt cake mix without any oil or butter in. I am sure there are many more variations to think about!!!

June 26, 2016

Simmered plums

When I harvested the garden plums I had in mind to try one recipe of simmered plum from my Shojin cuisine book. So I kept 6 of the largest and greenest plums for that recipe. But busy with other things I didn’t prepare them right away and the plum have turned from green to a beautiful orange, and were ripening very quickly. So I decided to go for an other manner to cook them, simply preparing some kind of compote. I put the plums in ample water and boiled them at low heat for 2h under cover; then I drained most of the water and kept only 5 to 10mm in the pan, added 2tbs of brown sugar and simmered at low heat again for 30min without cover, or until almost all the syrup is gone. Instead I obtained a thick jelly (the brown paste in between the plum on the picture).

You can serve the plums warm, at room temperature or cold.

June 22, 2016

Shojin cuisine inspiration

Since I got my Shojin cuisine book I only tried one recipe but many others are really simple and delicious. So I’ve decided to try (and slightly adapt) two other recipes. One is a classic, the otherone is rather new for me. But even the classic I gave it a little twist. I really love green beans salad, alone, with potatoes or with tomatoes. It’s a real simple dish perfect with thin little green beans or flat beans that my mother cooked very often in season. I used the recipe of miso green beans as a base and mixed it with my childhood memories. So I added small ripe tomatoes. So it’s just blanching the green beans, just a few minutes, they should remain vivid green and crisp, mixing with miso of you choice, adding the tomatoes in quarters (bottom left of the picture).

The second recipe is eggplant and edamame. The colors and mix of textures and tates really attracted me and I was very happy with the result. The recipe apparently used fava beans or broad beans but the season is over and the season for eamame just started so I replaced them. Also in the recipe the beans were sweetened with sugar, but I didn’t find it necesary, the edamame being already super sweet. So you need half little eggplant per person and a handfull of shelled edamame for two. Halve the eggplants, in a frypan greased with oil cook the eggplants, skin size first, the turn them. They must be soft but not overcooked. Keep to cool on kitchen paper skin up. Boil the edamame, when ready shell them and peel them. The thin skin over the beans must be removed for a smooth preparation, and is actually super easy to remove. Place the beans in a mortar and crush them but not too much. Cut the eggplnt in bites and top them with the edamame.

Both recipes are perfect served at room temperature.

June 19, 2016

25year old umeboshi

I must say that when our neighbor told me she would give me some 25year old umeboshi, like if it were a very special gift, I was a bit suspicious. Who keeps food for that long? I mean we can keep alcohol but pickles? Then I did my homework and found out that 100 year old umeboshi do exist and are still edible so what’s 25 years?! And then she bring me a little bag of the treasured plums. And finally we tried them. I wanted something really simple to try them to actually enjoy the taste so I simply prepared gomadofu (sesame flavored tofu), a red cabbage salad with jakko, and rice, plain white rice. I was worried they might salty, or sour but actually they weren’t. The flesh is rather dry compared to umeboshi of the year, but the taste was really amazing. Rather sweet with a strong plum taste, not sour at all. I guess they would be perfect for ochazuke when the plum flesh can get a little more moisture. But they were worth trying! And since she gave me quite many actually you’ll see umeboshi a little bit more in the future!

June 15, 2016

Pre-talk lunch

During the winter I didn’t give many talks and plenty of new results came in, so when I was invited two weeks ago to Kyushu Institute of Technology and today to Tokyo Institute of Technology to give talks I wanted to include plenty of our new material and shape new talks. When I work on these kind of things I really enjoy being home, I am much more productive, focused and I memorize my talk very easily. Unfortunately it is not always possible for me to squeeze in this time during week days, so I often work on my talks on weekends. Recently I am managing my time much better than I used to (may be it’s the low tide after the panic of business from last year) and I can prepare my talks more calmly and better. And this means having lunch at home which is also really nice. I can cook simple things that are just the perfect food before giving a talk: light and energetic. Today, I went for a simple arrangement of steamed zucchini and couscous with olive oil, salt, pepper and fresh mint from the terrace. Ready in 5min, but so delicious!

June 14, 2016

Rainy season – 梅雨

梅雨 literally the plum rain is the perfect word for the Japanese rainy season. In June it’s getting hot and humid and this is the season for harvesting plums. So everywhere it’s about ume-everything: umeshu, umeboshi, ume jam… We have several plum trees in the garden producing every year dozens of kilos of fruits. Unfortunately in the past we haven’t been there in June for the harvest season. Only last and this year we managed to be in Japan and harvest our plums. Last year with the help of Mrs I. I made some umeshu that I’ve just bottled, and is apparently delicious (I can only enjoy its beautiful smell since I don’t drink alcohol anymore). It was actually more simple to do than I expected only it takes a whole year to wait to start drinking it.

This year I decided to make umeboshi with our 85year old neighbor. She promised me this winter to teach me and since then I’ve looking forward to it. The day finally came! I harvested some of our plums Saturday, washed them and had then bath in a lot of water for a whole night and yesterday I prepared my first umeboshi. Here again it was much simpler than I expected. It’s only salt and plums. And time. Bonus before I can enjoy our umeboshi obasan gave me 25year old umeboshi. Something I’m looking forward to try too very soon!! I’ll keep you updated!

One more thing I love about this season too, this is also the season for vibrant greens and colorful hydrangeas blooming under grey skies, giving this special and beautiful rainy season light and colors to the country.

June 13, 2016

And a last one!

Yup! I’m done with this grant application and with many other things that were bothering me and keeping me too busy at work. So here is the last one-plate of this series, the last just before finishing the grant things. From tomorrow I will be back to some more elaborate cooking and trsting new products that I have on the shelf for a while but wasn’t decided to try yet.

So on the plate today: raw radish and cucumber, bamboo shoots, fried tofu, rice with sesame and grilled carrots.

June 8, 2016

And an other one

Indeed, I am still crazy busy at work with this grant application, but hopefully it should be all done today. In the meantime we still need to sustain ourselves and the Japanese one-plate is on the menu again with an unexpected variation. Indeed, I prepared the green beans with miso and the pickled onions, but we have some fresh simmered small bamboo shoot on the plate now, that I didn’t prepare!

There exist two types of bamboo shoots, the big one I’ve been cooking quite often because you can find them everywhere and the small one that are more let’s say “wild” and that one needs to pick in the forest. Picking bamboo shoot is a real fun sport, basically it’s hiking and them crawling in bamboo groves. We’ve had the chance to go bamboo shoots picking with our friends from Tsunan once and it was really awesome. Like wild mushrooms picking it takes some time to figure what to pick and to know the good spots. Unfortunately in Isumi we don’t know yet these spots and people keep them secret, like everywhere!! But one of the guy we met on the tennis court came to bring us some small bamboo shoot simmered with sesame oil. There is something here quite unique with Japanese, is that they love to offer us food they make and local products. I think it goes together with this tradition of food souvenir etc… I need to do some research about that!

Anyway that’s how we ended with a perfect Japanese one-plate, with only fresh and delicious local products.

June 7, 2016