Cooking contest!

And the jury + α: soya sauce association top members, Dr. Hattori, cooking specialists and chef from a big hotel restaurant, itimidating

The D-day finally arrived and I left home Saturday morning under a raging thunder storm to join the cooking contest finale at the Hattori nutrition college. I felt totally unprepared and a bit stressed. On the same day they were having entrance exam for the college and college tours so it was a bit crowded and confusing. We were 10 finalists from 75 applications. Some were people working in the cooking business, most just cooking fan like me all from different country so looking at their recipes was really interesting. The relaxed and nice atmosphere helped me a bit to cool down but seeing there recipes actually made me nervous, and seeing at how most were prepared I kind of freaked! Cooking in a pro-kitchen under cameras and photographers and a jury was really intimidating and the worst part was having to deal with ingredients I didn’t choose. I tried to do my best but I was not quite satisfied with the result. The dough was perfect I found but the filling it was not quite right… The plating was hell! I am so bad at plating. And the photoshoot of the dish afterwards was really though. I am probably not going to win that contest (I realized afterwards that my cooking habit of doing everything from the scratch with only seasonal and lical products may not suit everyone) but I really enjoyed the opportunity, the very friendly atmosphere and the very helpful staff from the college. Thanks also for the jury: Mr. Yukio HATTORI (President of Hattori Nutrition College), Ms. Remi HIRANO (Cooking expert and Chanson singer), Ms. Akiko WATANABE (Cooking expert), Mr. Isao IIMURA (Executive chef of Royal Park Hotel). It was fun to chitchat with them while cooking!! . Thanks Japanese Soya Sauce Association and I will for sure challenge myself with a new recipe next year!!!

August 22, 2016

Getting ready!

On August 20th I will cook for the final of a cooking contest. It’s my first cooking contest and I have clue how it works. For me cooking is quite an intimate experience, I usually cook alone and enjoy it very much, so cooking in front of people is going to be a fun challenge!!! For the contest I needed to write down the recipe of the dish I will cook and more difficult the quantities required. Since I cook by feeling, on the spot, with the ingredients I have I don’t keep track of what I put in exactly, hence I started this cooking diary to keep track of my ideas, but not the recipe in detail as you may have noticed. So I wrote down some numbers in my recipe but I needed to check if they were actually ok. For example with 100g of buckwheat flour and a bit of rice flour can I roll a dough big enough for a 20cm pie dish etc… I guess I could, but I needed to be sure before the contest. And since tomorrow I leaving Japan for more than 2 weeks (going to the US and Canada) and I won’t have much time when I come back, I finally did it last night. And everything seems to work well!!! I didn’t put to much effirt on the shape, but the taste was amazing!!! I have a winner I’m sure, hope to convince!!!!

July 28, 2016

Saturday lunch

Baguettes, farcis and pissaladiere in the oven

Tonight we had the I. For dinner. It was a dinner to thank them for all they are doing to help us with the house, and in particular with the cats and the kittens. I wanted to cook for them French familial food, things that they wouldn’t have in restaurants. And the market was perfectly in sync with what I had in mind. So I spent a large part of the afternoon cooking: baguettes of course, a pissaladiere, stuffed vegetables my grandmother’s way, capsicum and tume my mother’s way, and neroli sable to accompany some fresh fruits. So the lunch was rather simple: chicken balls, cucumber and radish with miso and rice.

June 12, 2016

Setting priorities

Recently I found this urgent need to prioritize both at work and at home to get the best of my time. I don’t know if it’s specific to my job, or to being in Japan where working long hours is common yet with poor productivity, but I feel inefficient. At work it’s quite difficult to prioritize because for me the most important is research and teaching, but I spend most of the time doing paperwork, administration, budget plan and research proposals, though what I really want to do is spend more time with my students and read and write more. In the lab I’m on my own, without any assistance and a growing number of problems to solve, all being more pressing and paying often for others poor organization. At home it’s much more simple and rather the contrary, I have a lot of help, good organization and sharing tasks allow to always have time for urgent matters, and for cooking. Which is absolutely important for me because the kitchen is the place I can make the transition from work to home, set my brain to a quieter pace after the bustling day by keeping it busy with thinking and inventing but on a diffferent topic, by keeping my hands busy with a knife requiring velocity and precision. The more veggies to cut, the more relaxed. And only after that can I sit and relax. That’s why for me going to the restaurant after work is hard because I lack the transition.

So here is a little pasta dish, nothing too exciting but still delicious with trofie, plenty of leek cut in small pieces and diced tomatoes, olive oil of course too! Something that just require the perfect amount of time to move on and of knife manipulation to stay focused. Happy Wednesday!

January 27, 2016

New cookbooks

For Christmas I had a few new cookbooks from Europe that I am now reading (yes, they are this kind of cookbooks that you read) before trying any of the recipes. The first one is a vegetarian encyclopedia cookbook in French with a lot of inspiration to take such as quinoa soup. As the name suggests it’s quite a big book. It’s the same series as my beloved Italian cookbook so I’m quite familiar with the structure and the way it reads. The book as many pictures and most of the recipes are quite simple, the one that just need a little “gentiane” touch to be done for dinner in a really short time. The one that one can easily use. So there’s plenty to extract from it very quickly. If not already done!

The second one is a completely different approach, not exactly the kind of book you actually bring to the kitchen (even thicker than the previous one!!!), but the one you read and mature. It presents extensively the Nordic cooking from of course Northern Europe but also Iceland and Greenland and covers all the possible ingredients from herbs to whale (yes you read well), and I reckon that there are some recipes that will never make their way to my kitchen! But they retain some interesting historical components just like we also have in France “boudin noir”, blood sausage… It is richly documented, with beautiful few pictures and really interesting because I see many common things with Japanese cooking tough the climate is completely different. It is half a cooking book half a research paper so I really enjoy reading it. I think if I were to write a book on food that’d be something like that!

In any case both are very refreshing and different than Japanese super practical and thin cookbooks! What are your recent cookbok pick?

January 15, 2016

Gnocchi

Here we are in Sicily and the first dinner I cooked for the family wath plain gnocchi. We’ve found these beautiful potatoes in Menfi and some greens (something they said was between spinach and rucolla) so it was just simply boil and mixed with some olive oil. Of course served with some delicious Parmegiano. It was fun actually preparing gnocchi for 8 persons, usually my sizing is 2, eventually 4, so it took quite an other dimension!

December 21, 2015

A strange experience

My husband helps me a lot at home and we share the house chores, but he likes to joke and say that he is the one doing everything at home, once he has just finished washing the dishes once in a while! So l’ve decided to let him experience what it is really to do everything! He is now in charge of the grocery shopping, the laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, the driving, the bill paying, the movie picking, the holidays planning and so on. Funnily enough but totally un-correlated this experience coincides with a number of studies I’ve found and discussions I’ve had about how men are happier when sharing house chores with their partner, about how important a supportive partner is to a woman’s career etc…

I’m having an other busy week at work so I won’t enjoy it too much lazying around and I must admit for this first evening it was quite strange to sit on the sofa and browse Wired while he was cooking (or let say struggling) in the kitchen. I felt like I was sick, which happened may be two or three times in the 15 years we’ve been together, I also felt like jealous not to have fun cooking in the kitchen with him, but I felt grateful for the simple meal he prepared for us! Last night the experience was more delectable. I had a late call for work (damned time difference!) and I was delighted to see the dinner ready when I finished, a delicious set of grilled eggplants whith pasta.

With this experience I realized that many of the things I do at home are mechanical and it takes a lot of effort for me not to do them. They are part of a sort of routine just like brushing teeth and require no effort. Also that I easily accept to give away tasks in which I don’t especiacilly take pride in, but cooking!!! this is much harder… For me it’s like sleeping, exercising or going outside, I need it! Please! Give me my kitchen back! I just can’t stand seating and doing nothing while you somebody else is in my kitchen!

September 30, 2015

My Rolls Royce

No it’s not my new car but my new amazing rice cooker.

I have had rice cookers for a long time. My first one was offered by Gentiane when I moved to Paris. It was a nice one, classic Chinese style (I mean a round one with a top like a lid). I used it all the time.

Then ten years ago, during a stay in Tokyo I decided to buy a Japanese style one. I went to Bic Camera, the temple of hi-tech, cooking and toys. I spend a lot of time to choose it. There were so many kinds. I chose a quite small one (3 cups), very simple, white. Back in France I was helped by Japanese friends to understand how it works. And I also bought a really big adapter to use it with french electricity damned 220V vs 110V.

Last month, when I moved to my new apartment, I left it in my old appartement and decided to find a new one which doesn’t need the adapter anymore. And because in my kitchen I have a lot of black stuff, I was looking for a black one.

I found it. French one, bigger (5 cups) than I wanted but so nice!

And now I can cook almost everything with it (rice, seeds, lentils, pastas, even yogurt, cream and more). I love it.

September 20, 2015