Learning new recipes

We are now in Hakuba for the second stop of our little Japanese road trip. Staying as usual at La Neige Higashikan where we are pampered as usual. We spend our days hiking and visiting the surroundings, which are very different from the winter. It’s the first time ever I go to the mountain in the summer (I am more of a sea person) so seeing all the lifts, and the lush green pasture is very new to me and going up the mountains and hiking among the streams and the flowers was a great experience!!! 

What was really great is also to have dinner at our favorite Hakuba restaurant: the humming bird. The chef and his wife received us like kings! They opened the restaurant just for is and cooked us some delicious local cuisine, like awabitake: some delicious mushrooms from Nagano area, rhubarb compote… and some home made pickles that tasted very different than what we usually eat. The secret of such sweet taste was very simple but new to me: to pickle it they used plum syrup!!! 

Pickles in plum syrup: 

– plum syrup in enough quantity to cover the vegetables

– cucumbers

– 1 dry red pepper (togarashi) 

Wash the cucumbers, remove a bit of the peel to create stripes. Cut the red pepper in thin slices. Add the red pepper in the plum syrup. Dip the cucumbers and wait a few hours to one day. Remove the cucumbers, wash them briefly. Cut and serve.

Have a beautiful month of August!!! 

Special guest: cooking in Tsunan

We are back to our friends’ place in Tsunan for a few days and as usual having fun cooking with K. the local products and vegetables from their kitchen garden. In the summer they grow a lot of tomatoes that are always super delicious, a lot of eggplants and cucumbers too. K. is very good at cooking, she knows a lot of different inspirations from their travels and she mixes it quite well to Japanese traditional cooking and Japanese ingredients. Cooking with her is always very inspiring for me, and I learn a lot helping her in the kitchen. But I also cook for them some dishes, this time a blueberry tart.

Even if there is often some meat in many of her recipes, she uses a lot of fresh vegetables from their garden and she always make a twist to Japanese traditional recipes. This time she prepared shabu shabu, but served it with celery, fresh lettuce, sprouts, mizuna, pickled cucumbers, snap peas and soya sprouts… the vegetables only where so delicious. And of course there was as always, one of her wonderful tomatoes salad. K. always peels her tomatoes for the salad and serves them with many different dressings: sometimes just black pepper and salt, or just green shiso (perilla) sometimes with more complex preparations. This time she prepared a sesame dressing with roasted and grinded sesame (about 4tbs), soya sauce (3tbs), rice oil (3tbs).

K. in her kitchen
K. in her kitchen
S. kitchen garden  
S. kitchen garden  
Modest harvest of the day
Modest harvest of the day
Modest harvest of the day
Modest harvest of the day

Wind of change

As crazy as can be it’s the first time we are taking summer holidays!!! Back when we were leaving in Paris we usually would take holidays in the end of September, and since wéve mived to Tokyo holidays mainly rimes with business trip of one or the other, except for Christmas. But this year I was finally relieved of any summer duty at the university and A. could take some vacations easily, so we decided to took off. After investigating several options: Belize vs Buthan vs Road trip in Japan, we opted for the latter. Enjoying Japan in the summer, visiting some friends in the mountains and discovering places we’ve always have had on our bucket list convinced us. Also the attraction of no plane/no jetlag was very strong. Free to go at anytime. It seems that a bit of wind of change is blowing right now with our first summer holidays (actually second, when we were still students we once went to Berlin for a week in the August), and we’ve decided to ride on! Enjoy the present! For those in holidays, have fun, and those still working in emptying cities, enjoy! Summer is too short to let it go!

Before going, a last oneplate dinner, with just a few things: rice, pickled radishes, tomatoes, okras, and some satsumaage (fish paste fried) with some burdock.

Summer butternut squash

If two or three years ago it was not so easy to find butternut squash (see my previous post about it), now it is almost on possible to find it all year round at the farmers market… and since it is so easy to cut and peel and so quick to cook I’ve thought that it would be perfect even in summer. Of course no pumpkin spice or warm and rich preparation in summer, but rather a very simple one: cold soup.

Butter cold soup:

– 1 butternut squash  

– water

– salt

– pepper black and pink

– curcuma  

Simply peel and cut the butternut and remove the seeds. Boil it in water until very soft. Remove the water to have the butternut just covered. Smash and stir with a spoon or a fork until almost smooth (or blend). Add salt and curcuma. Cool in the fridge before serving. When dressing the plates add some black and pink pepper. 

Salsola – okahijiki

Trying new vegetables is always fun! In particular when you can easily imagine how to prepare them! So when we went to the farmers market and I found okahijiki-おかひじき  I simply couldn’t wait to cook them. And with the super hot weather I thought of a simple Japanese meal again with rice, grilled fish and umeboshi, and I wanted to have some miso soup with red miso (the one more appropriate for the summer). And to make it more country-like I didn’t use katsuo bushi but rather niboshi from sardines -鰯 for the soup base. I simply added the okahijiki after washing them and removing the hardest parts to the broth and cooked them 2min. I added the red miso as usual in the end, just before serving.

Have a beautiful week!!! 

Fresh quinoa salad

If my weeks are busy with work my weekends are none the less busy with other activities: going swimming in the ocean in the morning and in the evening, working on some of my sewing/embroidery projects, gardening, baking, playing tennis, socializing… and when it’s hot outside I feel like eating nothing else than super fresh simple food: tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, melons… so for a boost of energy, adding red quinoa to a simple tomato/cucumber salad and making a dressing with olive oil, yogurt and  fresh basil is exactly the kind of lunch that I love. It takes 5min to prepare (and just 10min to boil the quinoa, but if you’re smart you can boil it before) and it’s fresh and light, which is perfect before 2h of tennis playing.

What is is your favorite summer food? 

Simple Japanese meal

With friends at home for the whole weekend I ended up not cooking Japanese at all, and since Friday I was still craving for some simple Japanese taste. Finally last night I got it done! A. is good at preparing Japanese rice, which saves a bit of time when I am finishing work rather late, and I had some perfect fresh Japanese vegetables for a simple meal: onion for Shirako, white carrots and new lotus roots. I simply wash/peel and cut all the vegetables, heat a bit if oil in a pan and cook them under cover until almost done (the onion being probably the most critical) then I remive the cover, add some soya sauce and cook at high heat for 2 minutes, and serve with the rice. It’s not very elaborated but it tastes perfectly Japanese!

Blueberry tart

This year I have the impression that there are more blueberries than in the past, and I bake more more fruits tart where I make a simple dough with a little of sugar for the pie crust and then just add fruits on top. I bake that for 20min at 190-200. It makes perfect simple desserts, tea-time sweets or breakfast. With blueberries I was worried that not adding sugar to the fruits might be a bit too sour, but the fruits are so ripe that actually sugar is not needed.  Actually I have noticed recently using less and less added sugar and salt to all my recipes and enjoying very much the result.

Plum compote

You remember probably that I bottled my plum syrup last weekend and I wasn’t sure what to do with the plums. Trashing them was such a waste, and after they had macerated so long in sugar and their juice they’ve lost a lot of sourness and were quite sweet. So I decided to make some compote. I simply put them in a pan, covered with water, boiled them until the water was gone, and magically my completely shriveled plum came back to fleshed ones. I just removed the pits, and that’s it. You can add some kanten to make plum yokan also. In both cases the seasoning is perfect and the taste very mild. Delicious recycled food!!!!

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