Fresh home-made food every day
When the winter market decide for you what will be on the menu, it’s veggies, veggies, just veggies simply oven cooked with thyme and a very little of olive oil. From top left: purple sweet potatoe, potato, romanesco, red carrot, shiitake. Copy paste and get a dinner for two after baking for 1h at 170deg in the oven. Serve as it is or add a splash of olive oil and a bit of salt.
The weather forecast is not making me too happy: rain, rain, rain for the next 3 days. No tennis, no gardening, no walking out. Being indoor is kind of making me sad… So to cheer up the rainy mood a good vegan soup with fresh veggies and plenty of lentils, barley and beans is just perfect!!!
Recently I found this urgent need to prioritize both at work and at home to get the best of my time. I don’t know if it’s specific to my job, or to being in Japan where working long hours is common yet with poor productivity, but I feel inefficient. At work it’s quite difficult to prioritize because for me the most important is research and teaching, but I spend most of the time doing paperwork, administration, budget plan and research proposals, though what I really want to do is spend more time with my students and read and write more. In the lab I’m on my own, without any assistance and a growing number of problems to solve, all being more pressing and paying often for others poor organization. At home it’s much more simple and rather the contrary, I have a lot of help, good organization and sharing tasks allow to always have time for urgent matters, and for cooking. Which is absolutely important for me because the kitchen is the place I can make the transition from work to home, set my brain to a quieter pace after the bustling day by keeping it busy with thinking and inventing but on a diffferent topic, by keeping my hands busy with a knife requiring velocity and precision. The more veggies to cut, the more relaxed. And only after that can I sit and relax. That’s why for me going to the restaurant after work is hard because I lack the transition.
So here is a little pasta dish, nothing too exciting but still delicious with trofie, plenty of leek cut in small pieces and diced tomatoes, olive oil of course too! Something that just require the perfect amount of time to move on and of knife manipulation to stay focused. Happy Wednesday!
Recently I’ve spent quite some time browsing my new cookbooks to ffind some inspiration and this time it comes from the “Encyclopédie de la cuisine végétarienne”. This book is really resourceful not just for receipes but also for a lot of techniques to prepare veggies or cereals, so I will come back to it quite often. One of the recipe that caught my eye at first reading was a chickeas curry with cauliflower and other veggies. I like very much the idea of having a plate all in shades of beige and yellows, and thought it’d be the perfect side for this beautiful piece of yellow tail (buri-鰤) I’ve found. Moreover I wanted to test something with the chickpeas water (heard that it could be used as a vegan egg white when whipped). The recipe for the curry is ultra simple. I used one can of chickpeas (remember I wanna try the whip thing), after draining them I heat some olive oil in a pan and roasted the chickpeas, then added chunks of cauliflower and roast them a bit too. Finally added curry powder, curcuma, salt, pepper and covered with water. Cooked at medium-high heat until most of the water is gone. Finally added a bit of fresh coriander. Ready to serve.
As for the whip, it works!!!! Talk about it soon.
Because fresh rice cakes, or mochi 餅 come in a bundle of 6, I had some to eat so I decided to experiment a little with a vegan curry not served with rice, but with grilled mochi. Something in between a nan and rice! And it worked super well!!! So here’s what I did: in a large pan greased a little I cut 1/2 leek, 1 potato, 2 little purple sweet potatoes, 1 turnip, 1 carrot, 1 red carrot, after it started to get golden I added some water just to cover, and 2 table spoons of curry powder, 1 tea spoon of tumeric (curcuma), 1 tea spoon of carvi seeds, 1 tea spoon of coriander seeds, grinded black pepper, a little piece of cinnamon and cokked until most of the water is gone. In the oven I arranged the rice cakes on a sheet of aluminum foil and baked them until they grown (I love to watch them in the oven, moving, breathing…) and the tip is golden. Then served all together.
This weekend I tried quite a few new recipes, mainly for breakfast and teatime and we spent quite some time outside in the garden preparing for spring: there’s still loads of fallen leaves, and trees to trim… So when it comes to a meal, something warm and energetic was really important. I had a piece of cabbage that I really wanted to use, and some beautiful winter red carrots. The leftovers of whole rice, and fresh rice cakes (mochi) that I bought at the local farmers market (I love rice cakes but my husband don’t like them to much so I don’t buy fresh ones too often). So I decided to prepare a two way dinner, one a vegan chahan (sautéed rice) and the other a kind of o-zoni (the soup for new year with rice cake in). In a wok I cooked the chopped piece of cabbage and one carrot sliced with a bit of oil and then a bit of water. In the mean time I prepared some konbu dashi by boiling two pieces of konbu in 0.5L of water. I then moved roughthly half of the veggies in the soup and cooked a little longer, while in the wok I added the whole rice already cooked, a bit of sesame oil, and some sesame seeds. I grilled the rice cake to soften it, and added a large spoon of miso in the soup (ideally white miso, but I didn’t have any).
I served both, added the rice cake in the soup, and ready to eat!
When we left Japan in December it was still the end of autumn, in our garden the Japanese mapple trees were all red, the gingko had just lost all its leaves, the camelias were starting to bloom. 15 days later, the mapple leaves have all fallen, at first sight only the camelias haven’t changed, but with a closer look, the daffodils are blooming, the magnolias and the plum trees are full of buds already big, and the garden is metamorphosing slowly towards spring. From now on it’s going to be the coldest days, but the garden needs a lot of attention to get ready for spring: tree treaming, weed removing, cutting, grooming, planting… So we spend a lot of time outside in the cold, and there’s nothing better to start such days with a warm energizing rustic bread for breakfast. My recipe is simple: 50g of rye flour, 200g of white flour, 170g of water, 14g of sordough, 4g of natural dry yeast, 6g of salt. 20min cooking at 230deg, plus 5min in the oven cooling down. Perfect with jam, honey, butter or whatever pleases you!!!
In Sicily it’s easy to find delicious artichokes in December and fields covered with artichokes can be seen everywhere. They are little purple artichokes perfect for raggu and hot pot preparations. Delicious with onions, tomatoes…
They are really easy to prepare, you just need to remove the outer leaves, cut the leaves at mid height or more (until tender), cut then the artichokes in halves or quarters, add a bit of lemon juice in water to prevent the oxydation. In a large pan, heat some olive oil, add a chopped onion, then the artichokes. Cover in water and cook until completely soft. Serve warm or cold. Perfect as a side dish. Variations include adding a peeled large tomato, white wine, bacon, salty cod…
Still enjoying some local Sicilian products, the fennels are, just like the cauliflowers a must of the season. Fennels are also found everywhere and are beautiful. For me in particular it’s a feast because in Japan it’s not easy to find fennels and they are usually small and not too good eaten raw. So I’m really enjoying eating plenty, raw, cooked, braised… And since soups are a big favorite for dinner in our family, the fennel soup we prepared with our mother was a big success. For 8 people we used 2 onions, 2 little tomatoes, 2 big fennels, olive oil, salt and pepper. First we cut the onions, the tomatoes, and the fennels and slightly cook them in olive oil (no need to say, Sicilian olive oil is amazing) . Then cover with water and cook for 40min. Blend and add some olive oil and serve. Simple and so delicious, perfect before the Christmas feast!
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