Well after taking a bit more time and cooking for 4 people it’s now back to crazy at work and coming back home late, working weekends. So dinners have become simpler. It goes together with a typical March weather, when one day is rainy and cold and the next is warm and sunny. When you crave for spring vegetables but it feels like winter. In these times my best dinner solution us a plate of olive oil sautéed vegetables: sweet potatoes, new carrots, beet root and some boiled chick peas. Add a bit of curcuma, and a few snap peas for spring greens and it is ready. Simple, warm, colorful and vegan!
Canola – 菜の花
The season has come already for canola – 菜の花 – nanohana. They mark that we are now heading towards the coldest times of the year and slightly more gloomy. January is marked by beautiful weather and it moves slowly into more rainy days. The bright green of the leaves and yellow of the flowers are illuminating these cold days and given a very first taste of spring. They also offer a good green option to spinach and cabbage! They can be cooked in many different ways and are part of Japanese traditional preparation of the season. I’ve already presented a few different, not very classic, recipes with canola: a quiche, an omelet…
Today I tried a new preparation and used the canola as I would use broccoli or cauliflower. I prepared it with chickpeas (boiled before) and with carrots. I first cooked the carrots in a bit of olive oil, then added the chickpeas, a tsp of cumin powder, salt, pepper, then added the washed and cut canola, and cooked under cover for s few minutes until the green leaves become very bright. Then I just added a little of olive oil, stirred and served. That’s all!
Vegan light curry
Nature has not plan for us to eat alone! Most of the fruits and vegetables are so large that if you want to it several sorts you need to be more than one person or you need to eat the same food over and over! I don’t even mention how we humans have even forced that tendency with packaging by almost only offering the option to buy food in buddles. Luckily, in Japan this bundle sale is less common and it is possible to buy one apple, one carrot, one kiwi or 3 slices of bread! Yet cooking when you are alone snd want to eat several types of veggies is not simple, and A. is not back before tomorrow night…
Last night I was really tired after the intense time at work, so I prepared myself some vegan curry with a can of chickpeas , carrots, eggplants, sweetpotatoes and anise seeds. Of course to keep a good bslance with the amount of chickpeas I had to add 2 carrots, 1 sweet potato and 5 tiny eggplants all cooked in coconut oil. And so I made a lot more than I could eat… And it’s goung to be lunch for two today for me and my friend D. who is still visiting my lab.
Spicy stew
In the series of new preparations I really wanted to try fennel seeds together with north african style spices in a stew with plenty of veggies and a little bit of chicken. Something close to a tajine indeed, but served with a little of couscous for the full blast of energy. So I put one potato, ine carrot, a few green beans, one large tomato and some chickpeas and a few pieces of chicken breast together in a pan and cooked them in a bit of oil before ading some water, North African spice mix and plenty of fennel seeds. In the last minute of cooking I added a few okras. Served with steamed couscous. Enjoy!
Rice salad Japanese style
Japanese purists would hang me for that recipe!!! In the edamame gohan I’ve added boiled chick peas, and served this “mame gohan” with blanched green beans, cherry tomatoes and hard boiled egg. A sort of “salade de riz” as we call it in France, (so 70’s tupperware cooking!!!) but with a Japanese touch. Of course for the dressing it’s just a little of soya sauce if the green beans and tomatoes, the sacrilege doesn’t go that far!
Speaking of soya sauce, I’ve been selected as a finalist for a cooking contest organized by the soya sauce association! The finale is on August 20th… Let’s see what I can do. It’s my first cooking contest. I have no idea how it is gonna look like…
Back to normal… Socca lunch
Hectic weeks, busy week ends, when we arrived in Ohara last night it felt like we haven’t come for months. Everything in the garden has grown tremendously high and green, no cat was waiting for us… Of course H. came today but we are more a food supply than anything else so far… There is such work to do in the garden that we started early this morning and work until lunch, without even going to shop for frrsh veggies. So when lunch time came and we needed energy before our afternoon tennis game I had to fix something with what I had in stock: sokka and a few vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers and avocado. Sokka is a traditional dish from Nice in the south of France. It is extremely simple to make!
Socca (chick pea flour galette)
– 100g of chickpeas flour,
– a cup of water,
– a bit of olive oil,
– salt and pepper.
Mix all the ingredients. Preheat and grease with a bit of olive oil a frying pan. Pour some dough in the pan to obtain a 3-5mm thick layer. Cook, flip, cook again, serve immediately. It is also possible to do it in the oven but the pan is much more convenient for me.
Short but intense week
Yup!! Today is the last of the week for me!! But squeezing in a whole week of work in 3 days is quite a challenge. Plus this is the end of the year for students in Japan and that means a lot of thesis reading, preparation for presentations and grading. So from 8:00 to 22:00 it’s all busy. Adding a few round-the-world meetings late at night and the cup is full. So we’ve decided to retreat for a few days in the mountains, probably snowboarding, ice skating and hiking. Being so busy is ok for me, it’s kind of normal, but having to break my sleep habits is really the worst for me. My body stops to regulate its temperature and I feel cold often. So last night I wanted a warm and fresh, soft and crispy, colorful, and ready in 10min. It turned out in a one-plate with steamed spinach, sautéed shiitake, raw celery, chickpeas and creamy boiled eggs.
Chickpeas and cauliflower curry
Recently I’ve spent quite some time browsing my new cookbooks to ffind some inspiration and this time it comes from the “Encyclopédie de la cuisine végétarienne”. This book is really resourceful not just for receipes but also for a lot of techniques to prepare veggies or cereals, so I will come back to it quite often. One of the recipe that caught my eye at first reading was a chickeas curry with cauliflower and other veggies. I like very much the idea of having a plate all in shades of beige and yellows, and thought it’d be the perfect side for this beautiful piece of yellow tail (buri-鰤) I’ve found. Moreover I wanted to test something with the chickpeas water (heard that it could be used as a vegan egg white when whipped). The recipe for the curry is ultra simple. I used one can of chickpeas (remember I wanna try the whip thing), after draining them I heat some olive oil in a pan and roasted the chickpeas, then added chunks of cauliflower and roast them a bit too. Finally added curry powder, curcuma, salt, pepper and covered with water. Cooked at medium-high heat until most of the water is gone. Finally added a bit of fresh coriander. Ready to serve.
As for the whip, it works!!!! Talk about it soon.
Saturday bowl lunch
Back to our routine, lot of work and week end in the country. Saturday morning tennis and one-bowl lunch.
Today the market was really good, edamame, green beans, lots of fruits… So the lunch bowl was really simple: chick peas, edamame, green beans, cucumber, sesame seeds, with lemon juice and olive oil; and for the proteines chicken and black pepper balls. Simple, delicious.
