Fresh home-made food every day
Delicious for a rainy day like today, I made an apple and chai cake with big apple from Aomori I bought at the coop market. For the chai I made a mix of cinnamon powder, cardamom seeds and fresh gratted ginger. The rest is just flour, baking powder, brown sugar and a bit of vegetal oil. All stired well and baked 30min at 170deg. Served with chai tea for breakfast or tea.
Again mushrooms on the menu and sure more to come! I simply love them all! This time a big combo of shiitake, white shimeji, maitake, mushrooms, eringi slightly sautéed, then mix with tofu and eggs and set in a chesnut flour dough. Topped with a bit of grilled bacon if you like. A delicious tart with sweetness and crispiness of the chestnut dough that perfectly contrasts with the filling!
The ginkgo tree is a symbol of wisdom and it is particularly beautiful in late november when it turn a vibrant yellow. Its leaves have also a very pretty and typical shape, symbol of Tokyo University.
But ginkgo are doomed because they bare the most ignominious fruit: the ginkgo nut. If you have ever tasted ginkgo nuts you probably can’t imagine where it comes from; if you have ever been close to a ginkgo tree in autumn you probably can’t imagine that the ginkgo nut is actually edible. The ginkgo nut is protected by a yellow-orange thick and watery skin that when broken generate an extremely nauseous smell. The nuts have the bad habit of falling on the ground and get smashed by pedestrians, cars… in town and to rot in the country, still smelling so bad that the tree is a real nuisance! Yet gingko nuts are delicious!
The nuts are usually collected once they’ve fallen. Luckily the little typhoon that passed over Kanto last week, blown down all the nuts and I managed to collect them before they rot and stink. Always use gloves when collecteing the nuts!!!
The next step is to remove the stinks. For that plunge the nuts in a bucket of water for a few hours. The soaked skin is easy to remove (again, use gloves). And brush and wash the nuts until none of the flesh is visible. Finally dry the nuts in the oven at low temperature for about 2h, while shaking them once in a while. This year I collected so many nuts that I gave away most of them to my neighbors because I didn’t have the time to peel and wash them all.
Now the nuts are ready for cooking and harvesting!
Perfectly sunny days, chilly wind in the morning and in the evening, warm temperature during the day, beautiful colors and beautiful light,
Yes! Autumn is here and it’s beautiful in Japan! Before the leaves turn red there is yet so much to enjoy! While Europe is turning gloomy, rainy and cold, Japan is bright, quiet and perfectly warm. Probably the best season to visit the country.
And with autumn coming fruits and veggies are slightly changing, fish too. Sanma, green yuzu, matsutake, lotus roots, sweet potato, kabocha, kaki… are now the most available seasonal ingredients and I love to cook them!
I love to prepare autumn veggies sautéed in a wok for lazy lunch or dinner. So simple, so colorful and so yummy. The one on the picture is just made out one sweet potato, one carrot, a quarter of kabocha, and a handful of shimeji, a bit of oil and salt. Served alone or to accompany something, all option are possible!
We are weeks before Christmas and this year again I plan to bake the traditional pompe à l’huile for everyone. So right now once in a while I bake one just to polish my recipe. And I think I got it right this time! The pompe à l’huile is a traditional Christmas dessert in Provence. It is often mistaken with Gibassier. Pretty much every family has a recipe or a preference. Pompe brioche, with orange, with neroli, with anise… In our family we like a thin rather dry one, with neroli and a bit of orange peels.
Since it is an olive oil base dough it is extremely easy to knead and with the neroli it smells extremely good. A real pleasure to prepare!
For a 30cm pompe à l’huile I used: 180g of flour (regular flour not the strong one), 6g of dry yeast, 3g of salt, 35g of brown caster sugar, 60g of water, 75g of olive oil, 1 table spoon of neroli, a few candied orange peels, or a zest of orange.
I mix all the ingredients and add the orange peels in the last few minutes of kneading. I knead until the dough is smooth and soft as usual. Then I wait for 2 to 4 hours depending on the room temperature before shaping it. I roll the dough in a circle, cut and if you want you can strech the dough so that the cuts open loose for 1 cm. Then wait for a few hours before baking at 180deg until it goldens. While still hot with a cooking brush apply a thin layer of olive oil.
While in Paris last month I was curious about going to Maison Plisson since I read so many fantastic reviews about it in magazines, blogs etc… Maison Plisson http://www.lamaisonplisson.com, for those who don’t know, this is a Parisian grocery select store that has opened last May. It offers selected products from a variety of places mainly French but also from Europe.
As they also have a cafe and a restaurant we first went for lunch there before checking the adjacent shop. It was an awfully rainy day so eating outside was not an option, so we had a tiny table squeezed between other tables and it felt quite exiguous. Like the whole place was designed as a cafetaria for 10 year old kids. Luckily the food was really nice, simple, home-made like.
My main disappoinment was the grocery shop. I was expecting a huge store but it’s rather ridiculously tiny supermarket on the ground floor, with low ceiling, and a basement that is even tinier and lower. Passed the disappointment of the entire space, what about the products? The cheeses and charcuterie looked nice but it was not an option for us since we couldn’t cook or bring back any to Japan. The fruits and veggies were scarse and not too appaling, bad timing maybe. And I was hopping a treasure trove grocery shop, but it didn’t impressed me at all, in the basement it is super tiny, a few shelves only, mainly foreign products and processed bins and sweets, it looked rather like a gift shop… I was hoping to find some delicious lentil from Auvergne, big white kidney beans from Toulouse, buckwheat flour from Brittany, and other wonderful things… But I didn’t. The wine shop is also a small corner in the basement…
So unless you can bring back fresh products home or live in Paris, for me Maison Plisson’s shop = Non!
The pictures of this post come from Maison Plisson Instagram account.
Refraining myself from cooking and letting my husband take over I feared that my dinners would invariably be pasta-steak. Hum… Not really my cup of tea… But hopefully with a fridge full of delicious veggies I got plenty of nice things and he cheated once by taking me out. Probably the most elaborated dinner was this soba one-plate with sautéed zucchini and sweet pepper, green beans and tomato, just seasonned with soy sauce. Thanks darling for this week!
No better excuse than a typhoon to induldge with a cup tea and a piece of cake. The other day I bought beautiful limes in Ohara, so I decided to use them and make a lime cake, then I found a little piece of ginger in the fridge and found that it’d be the perfect combination. Et voila! How the lime and ginger cake recipe was written and executed.
I mixed half flour and half corn starch, baking powder, brown caster sugar, a bit of oil, eggs, stired well. Added the zest of one large lime, and the juice too. Added the gratted ginger (a little piece is enough). Stirred well again. Greased a cake pan, put the dough in, baked in the oven at 150~180deg until golden. Ate with a nice cup of Earl Grey. And kept the rest for breakfast!!!
I like okara very much but we don’t eat some too often. For this recipeI wanted to prepare a 100% vegan meal and I come with the idea of a sort of galette. I mixed okara with finely cut tomatoes, fresh green beans slightly boiled, flax and sesame seeds, and salt. I shaped them in round and grilled them in the oven until the top it slightly roasted. I was very much pleased with the sweetness and juiciness of the tomato contrasting with the crunchy beans and flax seeds. It was hard to fell the sesame taste. I regretted not to have used tahine or suri-goma (crunched sesame seeds) for more flavor instead of just the seeds. But I’m fairly happy with this use of okara.
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