Tag: healthy

Blanquette… don’t misunderstand with blanket!!!

Blanquette (pronounce “blanket”, but don’t get confused) is a very French, very traditional dish that my grandmother would often prepare when we had family lunches. She would make it with veal meat. But I guess everyone has its own recipe. Hers would also includes some green olives. It’s been a long time since I have quit eating veal… and a few times, long ago, I prepared some with chicken breast, but to be honest this is something I have not prepared in years if not a decade!!! Yet with carrots and mushrooms in the fridge, it suddenly reminded me of blanquette, and felt like I would do a vegetable only version, and eat it with steamed basmati rice for a change. When you use only vegetables it is rather quick to prepare and ended up being a great dinner dish after work and workout. So here’s my recipe, and a few variations possible to twist it to your liking! Enjoy!

Blanquette (2 servings as main dish)

  • 3 carrots
  • 5-10 mushrooms depending on size
  • 1 leaf of laurel
  • Salt and pepper
  • 15g of butter
  • 1tbs of flour
  • Water

All the following are optional

  • 10 green olives
  • 1 chicken breast
  • 1 leak…

Melt the butter in a pan. Wash and cut the vegetables. Cut mushrooms in four, carrots in bite size, leak in small chunks, chicken in bite size. Add to the melted butter and stir well to coat them, at low heat. Add the flour little by little while stirring, to make the roux, then add water to just half cover. Add salt and pepper and the laurel. Cook at low heat until the liquid turns into a thick and creamy texture (if too thick just add a bit of water and cook a bit longer, same if you think you want your vegetables more tender). Add the olives if you use some, stir again. And serve hot with rice (not Japanese rice, better with long grain rice)

Myoga!!!

This little wild flower bud is really too delicious and its distinctive flavor quite unique. As you know, from all previous posts, I love it!!!

We are lucky to have some growing wildly in the garden, and it’s quite easy to find some when going for a walk in the woods. Apparently there are two seasons for it, one in spring and one right now in the early fall. Our garden has more of the latter and for me myoga is a fall flavor!

There are many many ways of preparing it and eating it (again, check my previous posts on the topic!). Raw or pickled would be the most common and my favorite. Raw particularly. It is so simple and it goes well with so many things!

Today two super simple recipes with myoga, one is a classic, the second is more one of my classic.

Eggplant with myoga

  • 2 myoga
  • 2 eggplants
  • 1/3 tsp of salt
  • 1tsp of sesame seeds or a handful of katsuobushi

Normally for this you could do it with raw eggplants like I suggested here. But to male it faster, instead of waiting for the salt to slightly pickle the eggplants, I cook them.

Wash and cut the eggplants in their length, then in 4-5mm slices. In a tiny pan start cooking the eggplants, add the salt and stir often. I do not add water nor oil. When the eggplants have softened add the myoga washed and thinly sliced. Stir well. Add the sesame or the katsuobushi. Stir again. Serve and eat now or chilled.

Myoga potato salad

  • 2-3 myoga
  • 1 Japanese cucumber
  • 8 small potatoes
  • 2 eggs
  • 1tsp of mustard
  • 2tbs of olive oil
  • pepper

Boil the potatoes with the skin and the eggs. When done let them cool down. Wash the myoga and cucumber. Slice them thinly. Peel the potatoes and the eggs.

In a bowl, cut roughly the potatoes and the eggs, add the cucumber and myoga, the mustard and oil. Stir well and serve.

That’s really as simple as that!

Coral lentils spicy stew

I love lentils of all sorts, but when I see coral lentils on a shelf, I can’t help being attracted by their beautiful color. And every time I forget that the color will somehow fade away when cooked (contrarily to some fancy pictures you see on the internet… or they have a well kept secret…)

So I usually get excited starting cooking them and thinking about the beautifully colored dish… and 20 minutes later… damned! It’s yellowish brownish… Nonetheless the recipe I came with yesterday was really delicious, and worth remembering. So let me share it with you.

Coral lentils spicy stew (2 servings as whole meal)

  • 100g of coral lentils
  • 5 little potatoes
  • 1 onion
  • 1 eggplant
  • 1tsp of curry powder
  • 1tsp of turmeric
  • Ground black pepper
  • Salt

In a large pan put the lentils and cover generously with water. Cook at low heat for 15min or until the water is gone.

Peel the potatoes, cut them in 4. Cut the onion in bites, and the eggplant. Add to the lentils. Almost cover with water, add the spices, salt and pepper and cook at medium to low heat for 10min, or until the water is almost gone. Serve and enjoy!!

Summer…

Damn I love summer, the heat, the cicadas, the trips to the beach and all the summer foods!!!

Another year without travel has taken us to our usual refuge for the holidays, where we’ve been spending more and more time thanks to telework. Escaping for one full week Tokyo’s heat, the Olympics fuss, and the again increasing rate of contaminations is just perfect.

Holidays are usually spent between morning and afternoon surf sessions, playing tennis, when the weather allows, gardening (we’re expanding our garden so there is quite a bit of work to prepare the new plot soil, as we plan to use it as an orchard and kitchen garden partly), talking, reading and sleeping a lot, and cooking less than I always originally want…

I must say that the fresh fruits and vegetables are so delicious eaten just the way they are that it doesn’t invite to be creative!!! Simple melons, blueberries, blackberries, and now the nashi season has also started… though in the past I tried some nashi tart and baking them, I love them just the way they are… simply peeled and eaten just out of the fridge, that’s when their cold and sweetly perfumed juice is so refreshing! (Top picture)

Breakfasts = fresh fruits and sourdough breads

The one thing I steadily do is baking breads and tarts and quiches. Whole wheat, buckwheat, plain, seeds, focaccia, pizza… everything is good for my sourdough! And blueberries tart are also a favorite at home!

I’ve been also making quite a bit of skewers. Simple but easy to serve and grill in a pan… fish, chicken breast, pork filet… everything is good! My favorite is to roll the fish or the meat in green shiso leaves, that for sure feels like summer. Shiso everywhere! Topping a salad, in white rice…

For our new plot, I hope we could try to turn this desert land into a permaculture forest garden… my experience and skills in growing a kitchen garden are rather close to zero but I really would love to have one of these beautiful forest gardens that populate Instagram… one day maybe… but planning is fun anyway.

  • Surfin’
  • New plot

Enjoy your summer!!

Cucumber 🥒 love

If you like cucumbers you surely like even better Japanese cucumbers. They are tiny, crunchy, juicy, with much less seeds. Chilled they are perfect for the summer. Slightly pickled or not we love them and eat some every day in the hottest season. They are good just cut and dipped in miso for a very rapid snack, or prepared in light pickling with salt or with umezu 梅酢. You can find many of my recipes including cucumber here. But today I came up with a new idea, of a simple cucumber salad, with Japanese flavors. And it is so simple that t is going to be a new summer favorite.

Summer cucumber salad

  • 1 Japanese cucumber
  • 2 myoga (Japanese ginger)
  • 1tsp of umezu (otherwise a pinch of salt and 5 drops of soya sauce)

Wash and pat dry the cucumber. Slice it thinly. Put in a bowl add the umezu and stir with the hand. Wait 5 minutes, in the meantime, wash and chop thinly the myoga. Gently press the cucumber with the hand and remove the juice. Add the myoga and stir. Serve chilled and enjoy!

Ready to eat!

Malaysian inspirations – fragrant rice

In search for new inspirations and continuing with these inspirations from our travels around the world, after Italy (which I must say was an easy one!!!) I decided we would travel back to Malaysia.

A long long time ago we traveled to Malaysia for a few days in Kuala Lumpur and then north to Langkawi. In Kuala Lumpur we were super lucky to spend time with some local acquaintances that were total food fans and introduced us to all the possible food that exist there, discovering the Malay, Indian, Chinese… influences of this very original cuisine. I came back from our trip with a cookbook in our suitcase. A book in the end I enjoyed looking at but barely made any recipe from because I’m always missing an ingredient…

This time I decided I wouldn’t care and would just do with what I had, assuming that what I don’t have in my pantry is something I don’t like much. Hopefully, recently I bough some jasmine long rice as a change from round Japanese rice, because this is probably what would make the most difference. So I did a super simple rice recipe. Of course I didn’t have all the ingredients and adapted it to our taste. I served it with some vegetables simply cooked in a bit of coconut cream.

The recipe was mentioning that it is traditionally served for weddings. But I am simplifying it so much that I don’t even want to use the original name of the dish to call the recipe I have prepared. Yet the degree of satisfaction for that recipe was really high so I invite trying it!

Fragrant rice Malasia-style (4 servings)

  • 300g of basmati or jasmine long rice
  • 350g of water
  • 20g of butter
  • 2tsp of ground cardamom
  • 1tsp of coriander seeds
  • 1 stick of cinammon
  • 2 star anises
  • 2tsp of soya sauce
  • a pinch of salt

The first thing to do is to prepare fragrant water. In a small pan, heat the coriander seeds, the cinnamon stick, the star anise and the coriander for a few minutes. add 50g of water and bring to a boil, add the butter and keep heating until half of the liquid is gone. drain to keep the water and remove the spices. Keep the spices for decorating.

In a pan set the rice, top with 300g of water, add the fragrant water you just made, the salt, and the soya sauce. cook undercover at low heat until all the water is gone. Stop the heating and keep everything in the pan, under the cover for another 5minutes before serving. use the spice for decorating if you want to.

Amaranth leaves – ヒユ菜

Every time I think I have seen all the possible greens they grow in Isumi, every time I happily discover a new one. I am most attracted by greens and naturally when I see a new leaf on a shelf I can’t help buying it.

This time our local farmers market surprised me with hiyuna – ヒユ菜 apparently amaranth leaves. A nice green leaf, very tender and mild in taste. It is so mild in taste that I found it fits perfectly western cuisine, despite its Chinese origins! While most recipes I found were stir fry pr soup, I used the nice green leaves for omelette or pasta sauces. A bit like spinach. No wonder why one of their name is Chinese spinach!! And a rapid look at its nutritional value showed that this little leaf is packed with iron, potassium and several vitamins, another good reason to enjoy it.

I also found it was easy to prepare, and it goes very well with eggplants as in the picture below. And with tomatoes as in the other picture below. Enjoy if you find some!!!

Okara muffins

In Japan okara is a very easy to find and very cheap product. Indeed, as it is a by-product of soya milk and tofu, there’s quite a lot of it. Up-cycling it in your cooking is also very easy. Apparently it has a good nutritional balance, but what I like with it is the little something different it brings. Added to an omelette for example it makes it extra fluffy and slightly pancake like. In a batter it adds some texture and firmness. Okara flavor is usually very mild and it is really the texture it adds that is interesting .

Okara: soya pulp after pressing to make tofu or milk

Okara is used in traditional recipes such as u no hana, or often in croquettes. I had times when I bought some often, but it was months if not years I didn’t. Probably because I liked one specific brand that was sold near the university but the shop selling it has closed and Has been replaced by another one that don’t have it. So when we went grocery shopping the other day at the local store and with the tofu there was fresh okara from the tofu maker I jumped on the occasion. I made some of the usual recipes aforementioned, but I really wanted to test okara in sweet preparations. I opted for chocolate muffins. I simply added okara instead of part of the flour. Added chocolate chips for the tiny ones and made a melty chocolate heat for the larger ones. And bet what…??? A. just loved them!!! And so did I!!!

The garden presents…

On a rainy Sunday like today we met with what would be our little hideaway and resting place. (More about how we ended up here here)

Hydrangeas in our garden

The few things that I found charming as soon as we arrived was the hydrangeas, in full bloom under the rain, with their vibrant gradation of blues and purples. The abundant plum trees covered with fruits, and the lush green of the Japanese maple trees, the gingko, the pine and the azaleas. Everything that makes a Japanese garden, Japanese. I obviously didn’t see many thing that were also there: the loquat tree, the strawberry tree… After 8 years I now know pretty much all, even if I am uncertain about the 3 or 4 different types of plums we have, and every year I harvest more fruits than we can process! In particular the plums and the strawberry tree fruits. So I give away a lot. This year 15kg of plums went to my secretaries at the university!!! And used 5kg for syrup and 3kg for umeboshi. The rest is for the birds, the worms and the ants ;).

June garden harvest: plum, loquat, potato, strawberry tree fruits

After years of struggle making umeboshi and failing, I realized umeboshi are not so difficult to make if you have the proper instruments. I use to make them with whatever I had, before investing in a proper pickle box, that is wide enough and has a lid with a spring where you can apply sufficient pressure and get rid of the heavy stone, the overflowing ume juice and the failure… largely due also to the fact that I cannot check them every day. So if you plan to make umeboshi I highly recommend you invest in the proper recipient. I use a pickle box called Picre.

Umeboshi

  • 2kg of Japanese plums (yellowish rather than greenish)
  • 360g of salt

If your plums are really hard or toi greenish, dip them in water a few hours before starting.

Wash them and pat them dry carefully. Remove the stems.

Sterilize your recipient. It should be 3-4 times the volume of your plums to avoid overflowing accidents. Set half of the salt in and create an even layer. Organize the plums on the layer in order to remove space between the fruits as much as possible. Sprinkle a bit of salt. Create a new layer on top remove space as much as possible between all fruits. Sprinkle salt and repeat until all plums are well organized in a compact manner. Sprinkle the remaining salt on top.

Sterilize the lid and set on top to gently squeeze the plums. Set a heavy weight or pressure on top. After a few days the liquid from the plum will start to be released and a brine will be created. This is umezu. A precious liquid to use for pickling, energy drinks etc… after a week, the liquid should be about the height of the plums. It will continue rising and can be 2-3 times the height of your original plums height hence why choosing a recipient big enough.

Leave that way until the end of July. And see you then for the next step!!!

Plum work: after overnight in the water, day 0, day 7

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