Chick peas and spinach soup "my way"

After 2 days of cold rain, which is not so common, I needed a sunny and warm dish. Since I just bought Koganei-grown spinach I come up with the idea of chick peas and spinach soup. And the idea went very well for a ready-in-ten-minutes dinner!

I cut roughly the spinach and boiled them in water where I’ve added a few carvi seeds and veggie consommé. In the mean time I’ve cooked some couscous with a few sultanas and pine nuts, and a bit of olive oil. When the spinach were soft I’ve added drained tinned chick peas (yes! Sometimes canned ingredients can be of tremendous help!!). And it’s ready!!! The slightly spicy soup goes very well with the slightly sweet semolina, a perfect match!

Curry-rice

One of the easiest Japanese dish to cook is curry-rice (pronunce “karey-rayiss”). I like because it is quick to prepare, and it’s a warm dish you can make with whatever you have in the fridge: perfect for a Sunday lunch after spending hours in the cold treaming trees in the garden. You can use only vegetables, meat, fish or mix vegetables with meat or fish. The variety of ingredients has only the limit of your imagination! So once decided what to put inside it is super easy. I always start with an onion or a leek that I cook with a bit of oil (olive or not) or butter. Once almost brown I add carrots, sweet potatoes, potatoes, meat if any… And half cook them. Then I add a spoon of curry spice, the quantity depends on how strong you like your curry, I like mine tasty but not hot.

Then add some grinded black pepper, a bit of Japanese 7 spices (shichimi). Now it’s time to prepare the roux. For that add flour and stir well the vegetables. Finally add water. In Japan there are all kinds of curry-rice, some very liquid, some quite compact. This just depends how you like it and how long you cook the roux, anyway, you can add water anytime if you find yours too thick.
In the last few minutes of cooking I sometimes add a few other veggetables tgat need short cooking time: brocoli, cauliflower, green peas… 
Ready to serve with some white Japanese rice (for some reason I find it much better than with briwn rice). Japanese eat that dish with a spoon!

Classic ravioli

I love ravioli and in Japan it is not easy to find good ones. So the best option I’ve found is to make my own.

Using my pasta machine things have become much easier.

For the filling, since my husband doesn’t eat cheese I use a traditional filling with porc meat. And for the accompanying sauce a fresh tomato, olive oil and oregano. 
The result was very nice, though I think I still can improve it a little.

Who are the Tokyo-Paris sisters?

We are two real sisters Prunellia, the eldest and Gentiane (me!).

We’re both French and we were raised in the South of France at the foot of Paul Cezanne most famous mountain: the Sainte Victoire. We both like interior design, cooking and fooding and beautiful things,

Prunellia is an architect-interior designer-web designer based in Paris. She has been interested in Japanese architecture and Japanese culture for more than 25 years now and visiting Japan quite often since the early 1990’s. 
Gentiane is a roboticist in Tokyo. Being much younger she has been introduced to Japan as a teenager when Prunellia was meeting Japanese students studying in Aix. (I really enjoyed our parties with our Japanese friends Shotaro, Tomoko, Kotomi etc…)
Though being completely different we do share a lot, probably from our upbringings. That’s how the idea of a journal four-hand started.

Another quick dinner fix

An other evening when I needed a quick fix for dinner (to be honest it’s almost every day!!), thus a “one plate” and a happy husband!
In these situation quinoa is particularly adequate because you can cook it very quickly, it’s full of proteines, so perfect for my almost veggan diet.
I quickly cooked red quinoa, and added a bit of raw avocado, a slice of wild smoke salmon (not mandatory, it can go veggan), some sprout and young leafs, and a few brocoli that were just 2min in steam (you can steam them on top of the quinoa). For seasoning a bit of lemon juice, olive oil (olives from Provence), salt and pepper. Always simple, always delicious. Plates ready to eat in less then 10 min for 2 (the quinoa os basically what takes the longest but you’re free handed in the mean time!).
 

Hot veggie and bean soup for cold evening

Japanese winters are very sunny and dry in Tokyo area. If there is not too much wind day time sun is fairly warm, but as soon as it gets dark the temperature drops and it becomes freezing cold. A hot veggie soup is perfect to warm and rehydrate at the same time.

My classic is a base with 1 leek, 2 big carrots, 2 small potatoes. I diced them and cook them in water with 1 leaf of laurel and a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper.
Then if I want something a little bit more nourishing I add this marvelous Italian mix of lentils, beans and barley that I buy at one of the NYC Eataly shops in Tokyo.

And once all well cooked I serve it with a bit of finely grated parmigiano. Et voila!

  

Flea market in Tokyo

There are several flea market in Tokyo selling pretty much everything, many for refurbish clothing and shoes. But if you’re looking for some Japanese old stuff and some antic my two best picks are Monzen Nakacho flea market and Yasukuni shrine flea market. The latter is my top favorite.

It’s every Sunday morning in the side alley going to the shrine. The number of people depends highly on the weather, and it might not take place during the special festival of the shrine. Every time I go I find something!!
A few years ago I found this beautiful iron lion head that I’ve offered to my sister for her Parisian-Japanese interior.

This time I found some bamboo baskets used as flower vase, but I’m thinking of using them as lamp shade for the country house… We’ll see…

A well deserved tea time

After a short but really intense week at work, and the perspective of working* for the entrance examination this week-end. I treated myself with a good Earl Grey (I really love the Empress Grey from M&S), and a toast (not home-made this time) with butter and my marmalade made last week-end. And I must say that I am very very pleased with the results. It’s the third year I make some, and this year is the best: it’s not too bitter, not too hard and very tasty. The peels are of good size too.

* I don’t if I can say “working” because our job is to dispatch problems and answer shits to the students, stand or seat without doing anything for 80min, collect the answer shits, count them, and repeat that 5 or 6 times in the day… which is not my normal job…

Go organic!

A few months ago my local grocery store in Koganei changed its branding (probably due to some group acquisition). After a few days a lot of the products I was buying vanished from the shelves, replaced by low quality products and I was left with almost nothing decent to shop there. No more delicious organic lemon, no more Italian honey soft candies… I started to shop elsewhere. 

A few weeks ago the shop went under massive renewal, and recently I’ve been checking in again and realized that they’ve completely changed their pitch: now half of the products are organic from fresh vegetables to smoke salmon, tea, spices… and they even have a nice selection of familiar imported products of good quality mainly from France and Italy!
It seems that the organic trend is finally making its way in Japan, after years of undergroud unlabelled existence… How good is that going to be?

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