It’s summer, it’s hot and still a bit humid, the farmers market is full of beautiful and ripped tomatoes, the last asparagus and green beans. And I was craving for a thin tart with a thin and crispy dough. So I prepared a brisee dough with 2/3 of chick pea flour and 1/3 of wheat flour, olive oil and water. In a large tart dish I set the dough and add raw asparagus, green beans and diced tomatoes, and finish with eggs mixed with a little of water, salt and a lot of grinded black pepper. Then bake for 20min in the oven at 210deg. Simply delicious!
Long time no baking recipe because I’ve prepared us a lot of pancakes, crepes and similar in the past days for breakfast, but with the hot days baking bread has been so much easier than in winter that it would be a shame not to enjoy the warm weather.
This time I prepared a rye Vivarais bread. It’s a French traditional large bread, delicious anytime of the day. For one large bread I used 250g of rye flour, 250g of white flour, 155g of water, 13g of dry sourdough, 2g of yeast, 5g of salt. The process for manual kneading is always the same. Only shaping the bread differs. Here it gets a little more tricky, because after shaping the bread you need to cut it quite deeply, turn it on a floured clothe for 90 minutes and then bake it the floured face up, 10min at 230deg, and then 15min at 210deg. My nread was delicious but I’m not 100% sure I got it all right!
It is rare that I cook desserts, unless we have guests, because we usually snack around 17h and dine around 21h, so I prefer to fix us something good for our five o’clock snack: small cakes, tarts, crepes, always with fresh ingredients, seasonal fruits etc… and skip the dessert. But with the heat recently, we’ve just snacked on fresh fruits and I decided to prepare something that I don’t often cook: fruits crumble. It’s strange enough that I always forgot about crumbles and bake tarts often. Maybe because it always ends up with no shape and it’s not as elegant as a tart or a clafouti where the fruits are perfectly aligned (control freak!). Well tonight I’ve made one and I wish I could share with you the delicious smell of my kitchen!
I used a random recipe (without really caring for the quantity but more the texture) for the crumbs mixing flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, butter and vanilla. For the fruits I used fresh blueberries, peaches and plums. Cut the fruits in bite size, make a layer of fruits in a pie dish and then add the crumbs on top. Baked 30min at 190deg. And it’s ready to eat after it has cooled down.
Yesterday was holiday, and when Monday is holiday I get lost in the days of the week we are, so I have the impression there was two Sundays this week! Not bad!
Spending one more day in the country, swimming in the ocean in the morning and fixing things in the house at the hottest hours didn’t give me to much time for cooking. So I fixed a rapid one-plate lunch with raw tomatoes and sweet peppers, boiled eggs, soft bread that I made for breakfast and that leftover, for the dressing drip-yogurt (I’ll explain in a later post), salt and pepper. It made a super delicious “open sandwich”.
Myoga, also named Japanese ginger is a little plant that is often used in Japanese cuisine. It looks a bit like shallots, but with a fresh and strong taste. The most classic use is in miso soup, with a simple dashi base, miso and finely cut myoga. Other option will be with silky fresh tofu and soya sauce. At home we love the taste of myoga and I often use it. One recipe I came with is to top some simply steamed green beans. Just like for the miso soup I finely slice the myoga, steam the green beans, or better boil them in some dashi, and last season with soya sauce. A simple dish that goes perfectly with rice and other small Japanese dishes.
For the last recipe of eggplant, I’ve decided to cook some eggplant with other vegetables and to add some curry. I find that eggplant accomodate very well in Indian curry so I decided to use curry but in a dry manner. So in a little of oil in a pan I put 2 little new potatoes, 1 carrot and 2 little eggplants cut in large bites. Once golden I add a spoon of curry powder and a glass of water and continue cooking at low heat until the water is gone, serve and eat!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this eggplant week, and tomorrow is a new week ahead!
The first time I came across a recipe with raw eggplant I was quite suspicious, but then tried it and realized it was really good. So in this “eggplant week” I’ve decided to prepare a raw eggplant salad rather than offering you the more than classic stuffed eggplant, or mozzarella grilled eggplant…
For two as a side dish I used 1 Japanese eggplant, 1 sprout of myoga (wait a little there’s a post coming very soon about it), a little of katsuo bushi, soya sauce. You can add shiso leaves if you have some, I didn’t this time. I cut the eggplant in small bites and drain the water with salt (like you may do for cucumbers), then I slice the myoga finely, (and the shiso if any). Then mix the eggplant and the myoga (and shiso). Serve on a plate, add a bit of soya sauce top with the katsuo bushi and it’s ready to eat!
This recipe is an old recipe found in a magazine probably 20 years ago and that I love very much for it’s simplicity. Actually I do a little modification anytime I do it to adjust to my envy of the moment.
The eggplant millefeuilles consists in thin slices of fried or sautéed eggplant filled in between with eggplant purée . The original recipe was also featuring a sweet pepper sauce, but except for the color I don’t think that taste wise it is necessary, I’d rather play with adding spices and herbs to the eggplant purée, this time a few cumin seeds.
For this recipe I used 2 large eggplants. First I cut thin slices: the feuilles, and oven grilled them in a bit of olive oil. I peel the rest and steam them then mash them to obtain a purée, add a bit of olive oil and the herbs to season. Then I just mount layers of each up to the size I want it to be. 3 layers of each is for me a good balance.
This quite simple Japanese recipe is really delicious and I like it very much now, but for sometimes I hated it because the first time I tried to prepare it, it was a terrible failure. The first and only time I prepared something to eat that ended up in the trash because it was not edible. I surely made a mess of this delicious recipe! Probably a problem with the mastering of Japanese ingredients at the timeand the proportions! Indeed when we arrived in Japan, cooking was a quite interesting task and grocery shopping an even more startling! Almost every evening we would go to our local supermarket and starre at what at that time we found strange mushrooms, awkward fruits and unknown fishes. So after a few weeks I decided to buy a beginners Japanese cooking book and to try most of the recipes to get familiar with techniques and basic products. The book I picked was in English of course and was clearly written for foreigners, so it was really helpful! However most of the recipes in this book make use of mirin (together with sugar), a Japanese cooking ingredient that I find unify the taste and is not very interesting (a bit like glutamate in Chinese cuisine). So I will give you my version of miso eggplant, the one that is just perfect and doesn’t use mirin.
For two as a side dish I use 1 or 2 Japanese eggplants (they are quite small); a spoon of miso; a tea spoon of grounded sesame or “surigoma”; a little of vegetal oil. After removing the stems and cutting in halves the eggplants, fry them in a very very thin layer of oil. In the mean time, mix the miso the sesame and a very little of oil if necessary to obtain a paste. Once the eggplants are cooked, set them on a serving plate and delicately spread the paste to obtain a thin layer. Decorate with a little of sesame. You can also set the eggplants on a cooking shit, spread the miso, and grill them 3 min in the oven to obtain a roasted miso thin crust.
