If you’ve been following me for a bit you are no stranger to the fact that I LOVE pasta. All kind!!!
Wafu pasta are a common thing on our table, even if for Italian people I reckon this is a terrible thing. But honestly… it is delicious, and since it mainly involves spaghetti or capellini, one could almost consider them as noodles… sorry if I make a big leap here!!!
Wafu pasta to me are a mix of Japanese vegetables, soya sauce, sesame oil, sesame or nori topping etc… this time my recipe is super simple and really tasty: leek, mizuna, sesame oil, sesame seeds and a good doze of soya sauce, with half whole wheat spaghetti. That’s how much simple lunch can be!!
I often talk of recipes with lotus roots. It’s a Japanese staple easy to find when in season and super very versatile to cook and delicious. I love it in Japanese classic preparations such as stuffed or with vinegar, but also in more western style like on pizza or in quiche… lotus root is reaching the end of the season but there are still a few more weeks to enjoy it luckily!!!
Lotus root in pizza and quiche
In Japanese supermarkets, you pack your shopping goods after the cashier on dedicated tables that have small bags, tapes and usually a few advertisements for local things or recipe cards. I like to look at these recipe cards, they sometimes remind me of a recipe long forgotten, an ingredient cooked last too long ago or just an idea for a new recipe. That’s how the lotus root burgers came to my mind. The recipe is rather simple and very tasty, it is made with chicken meat but it can easily be replaced by hard tofu for a vegan version. So let me share it with you.
Lotus root burgers (2 servings)
10-15cm of lotus root, about 4-5cm diameter
100g of ground chicken breast or drained hard tofu
2tbs of miso
50g of panko
1 egg
A bit if oil for frying
In a bowl mix the meat or the tofu, the miso, the panko, the egg. Stir well.
Peel the lotus root and cut 12 regular slices of 4-6mm. Chop the rest of the lotus root and add to the mix.
Pick one slice in your hand. With a spoon cover with the mix to obtain about a 10mm layer, sandwich with another slice.
In a non sticky pan slightly greased with oil, fry the 6 burgers in both sides. Serve with rice, and add the juice of a yuzu for an even tastier experience. Et voilà!!!
“Lucky” store in Isumi not only sales wines, sakes and rare whisky (they still have some aged Hibiki, which is quite rare to find now), they also sale a few local products with a small stall of cheeses. So while A. browses the liquor shelfs, I usually check the local cheeses from a tiny cheese factory. I like their ricotta, their cottage cheese and the sort of dried mozzarella they make. More than often the shelf is rather empty… but last time I got lucky as there was some ricotta. Ricotta… hum… together with the spinach season starting… that means ravioli!!!
I planned to do them on Saturday night originally but I got busy and wanted to sleep early before my first bodyboard contest, meaning waking up before sunrise… so ravioli making was postponed… until last night when A. was having meetings until rather late so I had a bit of time to cook.
The longest wave I’ve ever ridden and got the highest score with in the first round of the contest!!
But I had not too much time either, so it had to be quick… and in Tokyo my kitchen is tiny and my pasta machine is in Isumi so it would be hand rolled pasta… I also realized I was out of eggs so that would be vegan pasta, a bit more difficult to roll, adding to the challenge. I decided that paper thin pasta would be for another time, so I prepared something almost like some Russian pelmeni… It was truly delicious!!! So here is my recipe below, enjoy!
Quick ravioli (2 servings)
For the vegan pasta
100g of flour
2tbs of olive oil
A bit of water
For the filling
100g of fresh ricotta
A few bundles of spinach
A handful of walnuts
Salt and pepper
Mix the flour and the oil, add a bit of water and knead to obtain a smooth dough. Add water if needed drop by drop. This shouldn’t take more than 10min to make. I did it between two meetings!!! Let to rest for 1h or 2 under a moist cloth. That gives time to work a little longer!!!
For the filling, wash the spinach and blanched them. Drain very very well. In a bowl mix with the ricotta, salt and pepper. Squeeze the walnuts as fine as possible, and to the mix, and stir well.
30min before dinner time, roll the dough of a surface tipped with flour. Set about a tea spoon of filling for one ravioli. Save a tbs of filling for the sauce. Cover with a layer of dough, close and cut the ravioli. Cook a large pan of boiling water. In the meantime in a frypan add olive oil and the leftover filling, stir. When the ravioli are boiled move them to the pan without draining them properly, and cook them two more minutes in the pan, covering them well in the sauce. Serve and eat! You can add a bit of freshly grated parmegiano.
What is more comforting than a warm soup when you have spent the whole day outside and the temperature have suddenly dropped? Every year I am shocked by the sudden change of the temperatures in Japan in autumn. There is always one day in November when you start the day wearing tea shirts and short pants, and go swimming in the morning and then turn on the heater and cashmere sweat pants and sweater in the evening are more than necessary. When this time comes, I crave for warm vegetables soups. A. always complains as he prefers them to be velouté. I love any style, but rarely bother using the blender, and prefer listen to A.’s complaint… 😉
One thing that I love with soup is when they come with croutons, but I also have amazing memories of rural vegetables soup with fresh sourdough bread eaten at Mme Fages’s place in Mas Saint Chely. Something that I would be so happy to have, warming up near the fireplace after a mushroom hunt in the cold. That and her chocolate mousse!
Now that I have Lois and make only sourdough bread, it was perfect for this kind of very simple dinner: a piece of bread remaining from breakfast, many vegetables waiting too long their turn to be prepared, a pan with the juice of a long cooked piece of pork. That’s what this soup is made of, and here is the recipe.
Vegetables soup and bread (2 servings)
1/2 sweet potato
A piece of kabocha (3cm slice)
1 little turnip
1 carrot
2 bundles of komatsuna or spinach
Water, salt and pepper
Bouillon of your choice, mine comes from the pan in which I slowly cooked a piece of pork
2 generous slices of sourdough bread
In the pan I cooked the pork I add about 600ml of water and heat. I wash, peel and chop the vegetables and add them to the bouillon in order: carrot, turnip, sweet potato, kabocha, greens. I cook at medium heat until the vegetables are soft or mushy. Add salt and pepper. Blend and serve. Top with the bread roughly cut, and eat right away.
With the fall, burdock 牛蒡 gobou is back in season. This long root that looks like a salsifis but is firm and ressembles in texture artichokes, and a bit in taste too… is a classic flavor in Japanese cuisine. Probably because of a rather country style strong flavor and its fibrous texture, it often appears in simple recipes with other strongly flavored ingredients: chilly pepper in kinpira for example, or in very small quantities. Given that a burdock root is quite big, and one can keep for rather long, it is a very handy vegetable!!!
I love to cook it in different preparations. Creamy soup is one of my favorite but it takes quite some time and requires a blender. Last night I came up with a simple recipe that mixes daigaku imo recipe inspiration with gobou in a light version. I’ll talk about daigaku imo later… The recipe with burdock is really simple and super tasty. It is perfect with a bowl of rice or whatever you like.
Burdock & sweet potato (2 servings)
1/2 burdock
1 sweet potato not too big (fits in the palm)
2tbs of sesame seeds
1tbs of sesame oil
2tbs of soya sauce
1tsp of sugar
Wash and peel the burdock. With a peeler make kind of gobou flakes. Boil in water until it softens. About 15min probably. Drain. Wash the sweet potato and cut in sticks not too big.
In a pan greased with the sesame oil, start cooking the sweet potato. Add the burdock drained. Stir well. When the sweet potato changes to darker yellow or golden, add the sugar the soya sauce, and the sesame seeds, stir well again. Cook another 2 minutes while stirring. And serve. Eat warm or chilled.
There are plenty ways of eating miso in Japanese cuisine: miso soup of course but not only! I have quite a lot of miso remaining from the past years I made some and in 2-3 months the miso I made last year will be ready, so it is time to start emptying a few pots.
One thing I like very much is grilled miso, either on onigiri or on vegetables. Turnips and daikon are great for that, and the season is now starting. So when I bought a cute purple daikon at the farmers market, I decided it would be eaten with miso. Normally it would have been plain miso but I happened to have bought also leeks, and it reminded me that there is a nice recipe called negimiso ネギ味噌 of miso with leek, and I decided to make some. Negimiso can be eaten as a dip, or as I did here, to be grilled with rice or vegetables. It is really delicious and easy to prepare. Here is my recipe. You may find others with more ingredients, but this one fit my liking: no uncooked sake, and no mirin.
Negimiso
1/2 leek
2tbs of miso
1tsp of sesame oil or flavorless vegetal oil
1tsp of sugar
Optional: a bit of katsuobushi
Cut thinly the leek and cook it at low heat in a pan with the oil until soft bug not golden. In a bowl mix the miso, the sugar and the katsuobushi. Add the leek. Stir well. It’s ready!!!
Now to use like me, you need a piece of daikon and dashi of your choice. Peel the daikon and cut 2-3cm slices. Boil them in dashi until soft. Drain and pat dry, spread negimiso on top and grill until the top starts to become golden brown. Enjoy! Alternatively replace the boiled daikon by plain onigiri.
As the summer fades away, autumn days are slowly settling in. Autumn in Japan does not mean yet fallen leaves, cold mornings etc… we’ll have to wait at least another month for that! October is usually a fair month with warm days and just chilly enough evening and mornings to enjoy a walk or a bicycle ride. The food stalls start changing in colors and products too. The new rice harvested in August, the pumpkins and kabocha, the lotus roots… of course some of the summer food will still be around for a while: the super ripe tomatoes, the last crunchy cucumbers…
Combined together late summer and early fool ingredients are perfect such as in this pasta recipe below: tomatoes, butternut, lotus root… simple but delicious.
With the more chilly evenings, it is nice to curl under a little blanket and eat a warming dish, warming by its color and flavors. So I prepared a slightly spicy soup with fresh vegetables and chicken meat-balls, in a bouillon of spices and fresh lemongrass. Here is my recipe, it’s super simple!! Hope you’ll like it!
Spicy soup (2 servings)
1 carrot
1 2cm slice of butternut squash
A handful of green beans
100-150g of chicken breast grounded
1 tsp of potato starch
1 pinch of turmeric
1 pinch of chilly pepper
1 pinch of coriander
1 pinch of salt and pepper
1 leave of fresh lemongrass
100g of vermicelli or thin noodles (optional)
Actually you can adjust the vegetables to what you have around… I sliced the carrot with the peeler to obtain very thin slices, but you can also do a julienne or small stick… it’s up to you…
So in in a large pan I heat 1L if water, add the vegetables and the spices. Then in a bowl I mix the meat and the starch. Make small balls (1.5-2cm diameter) and toss them in the boiling bouillon. After 10min all is ready. 5min before eating I add the noodles. They cook very quickly and you don’t want them to become thick and too soft. Serve immediately. Yes… that’s it!!!
Well… while this week has been crazy busy with work, I also was very excited with my sourdough experiment… and things turned out almost as I expected they would… with utter fun when Lois grew and foamed and in utter disappointment when it stopped, finishing in a nauseous mess that stunk like I couldn’t imagine it would. Sourdough is not for me, I knew it…
Lois on the 2nd day, gently bubbling
I read books, blogs, websites about sourdough before starting (it took me 5 years to get ready for the commitment!!!!) and while I was observing it growing. I wanted to do right, not to waste precious time and resources. Then I was almost desperate when it started to stink, read even more about all the possible tricks, tested them all: sugar, malt, fridge, not fridge, more food, more mixing, rest, splitting it and starting afresh… nothing seemed to have worked truly. Almost 1kg of mixture went down the drain in a terrible smell. The rest is sitting in the kitchen in a desperate hope I can still save it. The smell is gone but no foaming and bubbling as I thought it would… part of the passive mixture was used for pancakes this morning…
But before things went south I had on the third day just enough to make a tiny bread to test it when it was still good! And damned! Even if I rushed it a bit ( temperature went down with the rain so the rising was too slow for the impatient me!) the crust was perfectly crusty, the crumbs were moist and soft, and the taste of whole wheat and sourdough was amazing. Enough to keep me trying to save what is left of Lois… so now I am in this terrible situation where I want to stop hoping I can grew a stable relationship with my sourdough, but I can’t take the final decision to trash it all, as the taste of sourdough bread was so perfect…
As you already know, I am a great fan of greens and even more in the form of beans: green beans, fava beans and of course the famous Japanese edamame. You have seen this year already my edamame ravioli, and many years ago edamame rice, but there is so much more to do with edamame!!!
I tested the gyoza version of the ravioli: pasta without egg and fried in a pan instead of boiled and that was scrumptious. But that’s not all!!
One thing that was on my to-do list with edamame was a soup, like that with fava beans or green beans, so I was more than happy when my IG friend Junkikat posted a recipe of edamame soup inspired from Korean soy beans and noodles: Kong-guksu. I am not familiar with Korean cuisine very much, but I was very much attracted by the simplicity of her recipe. I adapted further to my liking and pantry and ended with a delicious recipe that was extremely simple. In a sense it reminded me ramichelles, even though it has nothing much in common but the thin noodles that are so delicious in summer!!!
Edamame soup and noodles (2 servings)
75g of dry somen or vermicelli
1 handful of boiled and shelled edamame (about 3 handfuls of edamame in pods)
Water
Katsuobushi thin flakes (furikake style)
If your edamame are not boiled boil them, it’s ok to overcook them a bit. Remove the pods and skin. In a mortar, puree them. Add water little by little to obtain a very creamy paste. Once the creamy paste has been obtained, add further water to obtain a thick liquid. Boil the noodles and drain under cold water to cool them.
In a bowl serve half of the soup, add the noodles, top with katsuobushi flakes. Eat at room temperature or refrigerated.
