Italia!

What was supposed to be a nice and peaceful trip to Italy and France started with quite a bit of a commotion with a few centimeters of snow in Paris… and I landed in Paris at 4:00AM only to learn a few hours later that the flights to Florence I was successively checked-in were all cancelled and I decided to fly to Roma instead and take the train and I arrived in Florence 12h later than expected… My long expected visit to the San Lorenzo market, to buy fresh fruits, vegetables, pasta, flowers and cheese was postponed… but not for long! As soon as I came back from work in Pisa on Thursday I went grocery shopping and I could enjoy cooking again the seasonal vegetables that we don’t have in Japan: chards, corn salad…  Sometimes with pasta, sometimes with gnocchi, always with fresh cheese. Here is one of my favorite recipe with corn salad, a fresh simple recipe but really tasty (picture below). I spare you the chard recipes because they were really too simple and the pictures talk for themselves.

Corn salad one plate: 

– 100g of corn salad

– 2 branches of celery

– 6 green asparagus  

– a handful of pine nuts

– freshly grated Parmigiano

– olive oil, salt and pepper  

Wah the vegetables, blanche the asparagus. Chop the celery in dice, chop the asparagus. Mix them together and add the pine nuts. Stir. In the plates, start with corn salad, top with the mixed celery-asparagus-pine nuts, add olive oil, salt and pepper and finish with grated Parmigiano. Enjoy!

Have a great week ahead! 

Mushroom and chard millefeuille

No news from the TPS yesterday? Well, it seems that we’ve lost the connection with the Parisian sister… As for the Tokyoite sister I’ve been really busy with my day job, working late and whole Saturday spent at the university. I’ve had also a number of work dinners to attend. Hopefully yesterday we managed to take some time to see friends and go to the opening of the Foujita exhibition at the Tamenaga gallery (they have two drawings of cats that are sumptuous and one beautiful water painting) , and I could finally spend some time in my kitchen.

 I had in my fridge this beautiful chard and some lovely kind of oyster mushroom, and I was thinking of making ravioli with it. So I slightly cooked them together in a bit if olive oil and salt, and blend half of it to obtain a creamy green paste. Then we went out, and came back right for tea time, so I made us a little cake and used up all my eggs… oups! How would I make fresh pasta without an egg? Well I decided to change my recipe into some kind of millefeuille of little chestnut flour and flour crepes. So using a mix of chestnut flour, wheat flour, water and a bit of olive oil and I made about 10 little crepes. On each I spread some green paste and layered them, I topped the whole with some mushrooms and added the remaining veggies that I didn’t blend. Add some fleur de sel and some grinned black pepper. Simply yummy, but I still want to eat ravioli…

Pie

This something that I never cook but that I actually love a lot. Pies are so delicious and so easy to make. And just like tarts there are so many variations that everything works! What I like very much with pies compared to tarts is that 1. You don’t need the egg base, 2. The filling is kind of steamed in the pie so it doesn’t dry, 3. The double layer of dough!! When I started this recipe I was thinking of a tart first but I changed my mind on the way and decided to make a kind of coca or calzone, and finally it turned out being a pie! That’s why the shape is not very pretty because I was rolling the dough in a different shape at first.

For the filling I used hard tofu, drained, shiitake cut in cubes, and chicory leaves (well I am not perfectly sure about what it is actually, but it something like chard). For the dough I used spelt flour, water and butter (which can be replaced by vegetal oil). I split the dough in two and rolled quite thin, but not too thin. I set one in a pie dish, add the veggies and the tofu (as on the picture) then cover with the second one, close tightly the edges together, made a small hole in the middle and added a little cheminey in cooking paper. I baked in the oven for 40min at 170 deg. Serve while it’s still hot. Bon appetite!

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