Tag: cucumber

Power lunch

My husband and I usually play tennis together every Saturday morning for aboug 2h, and sometimes the stakes are really high: we play for the color of our new car, its model, the options,  and sometimes even what we’ll have for lunch. That’s how my husband win his piece of meat ;). After our game we usually head to the beach for a refreshing swim, so once we’re back home we’re literally starving so I need to fix something quick and nourishing. Japanese rice is always a good option because it can be cooked unsupervised and gives me enough time to drop by the shower! Cucumbers, tomatoes and all other vegetables that can be eaten raw, Japanese pickles, scrambled eggs… are also very handy. Finally, leftover and tofu make our lunch look like something awesome.

This time it’s a mixture of all that. Plain white rice topped with some sesame seeds, sesame-tofu from Mount Koya, miso green beans, and raw cucumber.

Japanese dinner at home

When we have visitors from Europe for dinner and it’s there first time in Japan I usually cook Japanese for them, but I cook what I call “soft Japaanese”. I don’t try to impress them with my skills in cha-kaiseki cuisine with elaborated tofu mixes, plain white rice and strongly miso tasting fish and Japanese sweets for example. I prefer to introduce them to flavors their palate can identify and distinguish if they don’t. And if they come on week day, since I don’t have the luxury to spend more than 2h for grocery shopping+cooking, I need to be very organized.

This time our guests have been in Tokyo for a few days already, and travelling the world before arriving there so I crafted a menu where they can enjoy Japanese food while still feeling the casual home made touch: 

somen with a chicken meat ball as a starter,
ginger grilled pork (buta shoga yaki) with white and whole rice,
miso soup with silky tofu and mitsuba.
for dessert, just fresh summer fruits in salad: Japanese grape, Japanese plums and Japanese green melon.

If the main dish and dessert are quite common, for the starter I composed a recipe from cha-kaiseki and adjusted it to the market. The original recipe is using snapper and togan, a kind of summer gourd; but I couldn’t find neither so I replaced the fish with chicken meat balls made out of grinded chicken breast and startch, boiled in konbu dashi, and the togan was replaced by thinly sliced cucumber. The whole thing seasoned with a few drops of soya sauce. And I added two slices of dried shiitake. Since it is almost summer I chosed somen and served the whole refregirated. Bonus: since It is refrigirated you can prepare the bowls and just take them out of the fridge to serve!

The starter: somen with chicken meat ball and cucumber
The starter: somen with chicken meat ball and cucumber

One-bowl lunch

I love bulgur and it’s very handy because it takes little time to cook it compared to rice for example. So I find it very convenient when I want to fix something for lunch after playing tennis. And this time the fix was really quick: pork and parsley balls, mini tomatoes, cucumber and bulgur. For the balls I roughly chopped parsley, mix it with an egg and grinded pork and cook then until golden in a pan. Ready in a very short time, full of energy, proteins and colorful! Yummy!

Potato salad

It’s funny because I like potatoes but I seldom cook some except to make gnocchi and I have no idea why I don’t prepare more potato-base recipes. So I had two potatoes in the fridge that were waiting there, and suddenly I come up with a potato salad idea. Here in Japan usually potato salad (just like macaroni salad) means a lot of mayonnaise and I hate that. My potato salad is completely different: for 2 I used 2 new potatoes (about the size of an egg) boiled with the skin; 2 branches of celory; 1 cucumber (Japanese cucumber, right?); one boiled egg chopped; a few slices of smoke salmon; pumpkin seeds; flax seeds;  olive oil. Et voila! A super delicious salad, but that doesn’t look so on the picture! And many more ideas for potato salads!

Back to the basics

Ballard Sunday farmers market
Ballard Sunday farmers market

After a whole week in Seattle, it’s good to be back home. Though the city has numerous farmers markets, with very attractive food, the hotel life allows only for limited purchases and preparation. There are also a lot of food trucks but honestly the idea of having lunch standing or seated like punks in the street is not very attractive, though the food looks good. As for restaurants, food was ok, fresh but I didn’t find anything outstanding. The best we had was surely grilled salmon or grilled halibut with asparagus. There might be some nice places serving local food (not limited to seafood, which is not what I like best) but we couldn’t find them… It’s really a pity because driving around Seattle one can find  again tones of organic farms selling their products, fruits, veggies, delicious yogurts…

Chimacum local farmers shop
Chimacum local farmers shop

So being back home it is time to go back to the kitchen and improvise some summer recipes with fresh food and light enough to beat the jetlag and the heat. So we’re back to the basics: quinoa and bulgur as a base, baby leaf salad, cherry tomatoes and cucumber, yellow zucchini, ocra, and to finish pumpkin seeds, flax seeds and white chia seeds. Back on the tracks!!

Plate from iittala
Plate from iittala

Cold buckwheat noodles salad

Soba is the Japanese word for buckwheat and by extension buckwheat noodles. You can find soba-ya: restaurants serving soba pretty much everywhere and there are several places accross the country famous for the production of soba that it makes them something really common. I wanted badly to mske my own noodles but on that day I realized I had no buckwheat flour, and couldn’t find some around. So I bought dried soba noodles, which are basically like dried pasta. And I prepared a cold buckwheat noodles salad with seasonal vegetables: snap peas, green peas and cucumber and served with some pork meat balls. 

I just boiled the noodles, quickly boiled the peas, sliced the cucumber. 

For the additional balls it can be made out of tofu or okara for a vegan dish. This time I promised some meaty dish to my husband, so I mixed some pork meat with and egg and bread crust, salt pepper and then cooked them in a frying pan under cover until golden.

For the overall seasoning I mixed a little of ponzu and sunflower oil.

Spring salad

With all the new vegetables and the sunny days I’m preparing more and more cold salads this year. This one is really taking advantage of spring green peas, little radish, lettuce, cucumber, tofu and spelt, all with a little of olive oil, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Fresh, colorful, tasty, perfect!

Vegan donburi

A donburi in Japan is basically a rice bowl topped with something, anything. I really like the concept and you’ve seen a few of my original recipes yet. With each time changing in what I top it with depending on the market and time available. 

This time it’s a 100% green topping with avocado, cucumber, cresson and lettuce. A bit of sesame oil and sesame seeds and lunch is ready in just the time to cook the rice! 

One-plate dinner

Days around Tokyo are getting warmer and the golden week (a few days of bank holidays in a row) is really beautiful this year!  A lot of fresh fruits and vegetables just bought at the local farmers market. With this beautiful weather we spend a lot of time outside and crave for fresh tasty meals, so I concocted this one plate for dinner: a bit of cucumber with fresh mint and fromage blanc; a fake ratatouille: just tomatoes, onion, zucchini stewed in olive oil with a bouquet garni; and to accompany the whole thing some chick pea flour and linen seeds pancakes. 

For the vegan chickpes pancake it’s really easy: just mixing chick pea flour with water, linen seeds and a bit of salt and olive oil to obtain a thick mixture that can be shaped in small pancakes with the hands. And then grill them or fry them in okive oil.

Bon appetite!

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