Tag: green beans

Tofu ae – 豆腐和え

This recipe is a classic from Japanese cuisine and Japanese cha kaiseki cuisine. I’ve eaten it many times when going to typical Japanese restaurants and I learned how to make it properly when I was taking cha kaiseki lessons. I use the same base in a persimmon recipe I created and it’s called tofu ae. It’s a sort of vegan creamy tofu dressing in a sense, that you can accommodate with many different vegetables all year round. In the fall with persimmons, winter with spinach, in the spring with green peas, and now with green beans, edamame… A full version of the recipe would include a bit of dashi, but I prepared a simpler version with only tofu and sesame, and a bit of salt. Here it is

Tofu ae

– a piece of hard tofu

– 4tbs of sesame, white or black depending of color effet wanted

– a pinch of salt

Drain the tofu with a weight on top. Once well drained, squeeze in a clothe to remove more water and obtain a paste. Grind the sesame (if you don’t have sesame, or the tools to grind it, just use gomasio)

Mix the tofu and the sesame, add a pinch of salt.

Boil a vegetable of your choice: green beans, edamame, broad beans… and mix with the tofu dressing.

Potatoes and green beans

If there is one combination I love it’s potatoes and greens: green peas, green beans, broad beans… usually I would prepare them with new onions blanched and olive oil. Today I decided to try for new sauce, a lazy mayonnaise. Mayonnaise requires that you emulsion the oil, the egg yolk and the mustard together. It requires a lot of beating, and a lot of oil. A lighter and lazier option actually exists, and plus you use a whole egg so no wondering what to do with the remaining white. Here is my recipe. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Oh! We’ve also eaten up all the potatoes I’ve harvested last week. I’ll harvest some more tomorrow if the weather is not as bad as today… so there’s gonna be potatoes recipe coming again very likely…

Potatoes, green beans and lazy mayonnaise

– 3 new potatoes (billiard ball size) per person if a main dish, less if a side

– a handful of green beans

– 1 egg

– 2tsp of mustard

– olive oil

– pepper

Wash the vegetables. Boil the potatoes until just soft. Boil the egg for 6min. Blanche the green beans. Peel the egg.

In a bowl, crush the egg, the mustard and the oil until the mixture is creamy. It’s ok if the white is roughly crushed. Dressing is ready!

Cut the potatoes in four, cut the bean in two if they are long. Add the dressing, stir well and it’s all ready. It warm, at room temperature or refrigerated.

Spring greens

My kitchen garden seems to be doing ok! Every week I harvest something, and recently it’s been focused on snap peas and herbs. Two plants of peas actually have been producing a handful of snap peas every week, which is just the perfect amount for us so far, as I used them mixed with other vegetables. The mint and coriander are doing good and I’ve harvesting quite some too for daily use, same with some kind of salads my neighbor gave me (we exchange crops). I like the idea to just walk down in the garden and pick what is needed for preparing a meal. I’ve also checked that potatoes are coming, though I am worried the soil may be too rich… we’ll see… it’s not easy to be a beginner gardener and not to be able to check every day!!! I’ll learn from my mistakes and successes I guess and do better next year!

With all this greens, not only from my kitchen garden but also from the farmers market I was thinking of new recipes and inspired by Giula’s zucchini and saffron pasta recipe (that was super delicious) I prepared a fava beans and greens pasta sauce. The kind that is so delicious that you want more!!! Here’s my recipe.

Fava beans pasta (for two servings)

– 125g of dry penne or macaroni or some similar pasta

– a handful of fresh fave beans shelled

– a handful of fresh snap peas

– a handful of green beans

– a handful of shelled greens peas if you have some (I couldn’t wait and already had eaten up all mine!!)

– 5-10 leaves of fresh mint

– olive oil, salt and pepper

Boil the pasta. When al dente drain and keep.

In the meantime, blanche the fava beans and peel them. Blanche the green beans, the green beans and the snap peas. Puree the fava beans, add olive oil generously, salt and pepper. In a large pan at low heat, heat the fava beans purée and then add the pasta, and the other vegetables, stir well, add the mint washed and chopped. Serve and eat immediately!!

Have a great week!!

Simple food

There is one thing that I always think about cooking when in a rush to prepare our meals and want to eat some Japanese food, it’s simple seasonal vegetables sautéed, deglazed in a bit of soya sauce, served with rice and pickles. It is so very simple and yet so delicious that it beats any other recipe. It requires no thinking, a very short preparation for the vegetables and then everything in a pan with a few drops of oil, under cover, just stir once in a while. Which frees the hands to do something else! Perfect when the week is super busy with many deadline at work, friends and family visiting, a weekend away in preparation and A. leaving for Europe for 10 very long days…

Autumn version of sautéed vegetables (one plate dish for 2 people)

– 1 Japanese sweet potato

– 3 shiitake

– 2 little turnips (long or round) 

– any other seasonal vegetables: a little piece of kabocha, a few green beans, gingko nuts, shishito, eringi…

– 2tbs of soya sauce

– some vinegared pickles: I love rakkyo (Chinese onions) which are served with curry.

– 1 cup of Japanese rice

Star cooking the rice. Wash and cut the vegetables. In a pan greased with a bit of oil add all the vegetables (except if some have very short cooking time like green beans) cook at high heat for two minutes and stir. Lower the heat and cover. Cook for 12min and stir once in a while. Add the soya sauce, and stir for one minute. Serve all together.

Soba salad

I’ve been so busy at work running from one place to an other and with some tension when our robot was making its debut on stage, and with the moving that I barely cooked and even barely thought about writing a post to share with you a delicious recipe. .. for which I must apologize!

But as little as I cooked I still found some very nice combinations for a simple Japanese meal that can be prepared everywhere else than Japan since the ingredients are easy to find. What you need is a pack of dry soba noodles (I use only 100% buckwheat flour noodles, but it’s up to you), some green beans, a few fresh okras, some spinaches or mulukhiyah, a piece of fresh cod fish, soya sauce, 1 kabosu or 1 lime. That’s it! Blanche the spinach, the okra, the green beans and bath them in very cold water. Grill the cod in a slightly greased frypan. Boil the soba and bath them in cold water. Squeeze the kabosu or lime, add the same volume of soya sauce. In a bowl add the soba well drained, dry with a cooking cloth the vegetables, cut them and add to the soba. Top with the cod that should crumble. Finish with some dressing. Enjoy! 

Green beans salad

For very hot and humid days like it was today, I like to prepare extremely simple, fresh meals with mainly vegetables. A green beans salad is a classic for me, but instead of preparing it with potatoes like I would usually do I prepared it with hard boiled eggs and fresh ginger and myoga thinely chopped. It gives a very interesting twist to the whole recipe. I guess adding potatoes is still possible.

Summer salad

Well well summer is really here and it’s just the beginning, temperature are going to rise even further I guess. So preparing simple fresh food is really my main cooking focus, yet each time I want to prepare something different, new, even if most of the basic ingredients are the same: new potatoes, green beans, zucchini, cucumber, okra, tomatoes… 

So for this simple salad I pan fried a few new potatoes, then added some boiled green beans, a cucumber, some beautiful tomatoes and, finished with hard boiled eggs and sesame seeds. Dressed with some olive oil and sesame oil. That’s it!!!

Today I am going to Ngoya for work where it’s going to be even hotter!

Curry soup

A few weeks ago, one day when the weather was awfully rainy, we went out for lunch in a new place we haven’t tried before: Green +. It’s a small cafe a bit remote with a chef that cooks vegan local food using tones of herbs and mild spices. The lunch menu is rather simple: curry soup, or a choice of 3 little dishes. All served with fresh salad, miso soup, brown rice and homemade pickles. Everything is delicious, but the curry soup was a real discovery. I like tasty soup but not too spicy. With the summer settling in, I thought that I won’t make any curry soup anytime soon, but last Sunday the weather was again very rainy and windy and chilly, and I was also sad and worried because our cat didn’t show up for the whole weekend. A warm spicy tasty vegetables soup was perfect for a warming dinner.

I used vegetables I just bought at the farmers market: a few baby corns, a handful of green beans, three little potatoes. one carrot, and one big ripe tomato. All in a big pot, covered woth water. I then added a tea spoon of curry powder, sprinkled a bit od cardamom, cinnamon and nutmeg, added just a bit of black pepper. Cooked under cover for 30min, and served right away.

Minestrone inspiration

A plate of pasta with vegetables is always good and easy to prepare. But rather than pasta with sauce or vegetables I wanted vegetables with pasta. I took the inspiration from the minestrone recipe but at the time of adding the tomatoes I found that the all green dish was a perfect match with the green outside in the garden now that most of the azaleas flowers have fallen and left only the green leaves. So it gave a beautiful plate with Sicilian ring pasta, celery, zucchini, green beans and basil, olive oil and that’s it. I boiled the pasta. And in a wok I simply cooked (briefly) the vegetables in olive oil, added the pasta, stirred well and served. So simple so delicious!

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