Fresh home-made food every day
A simple piece of horse mackerel marinated in soya sauce and oven grilled; dashi blanched green beans and eggplants, white rice and umeboshi make for a perfect dinner in this rainy season period. Simple, tasty and colorful. I wish you a nice end of week!
The best way to enjoy umeboshi is with simple plain white rice in my opinion. Since I got a big pot of freshly made little shiso umeboshi from our neighbor (mine are big plums without shiso), I really wanted to try them. I prepared simple white rice, and to make it a dinner I added a little of ginger grilled pork and some little radishes grilles too.
The plum are just freshly pickled and in their juice to they are salty-sour-sweet, very tasty and melting in the mouth. Actually they are delicious without rice too and now I understand why a Japanese traditional snack for kid is umeboshi. There are so many ways to prepare them and so many ways to eat them!!
Sometimes things are just like that: in the fridge there is a yellow zucchini a yellow capsicum, new carrots and eggs and the first things that comes to mind with this chilly grey weather is curry-rice. In the end it gives a all yellow everything plate. Simply delicious and tasty, but very well presented I reckon!!! I need to work on my plating again… How do you do your plating for everyday’s food that has no real shape like curry-rice?
It’s a fact rare enough to be mentioned: I’ve cooked shrimps!!! Indeed it is awfully rare that I cook shrimps: 1. Because it’s not so easy to find wild shrimps; 2. Because I prefer them without head, don’t you think too these giant eyes are kind of weird? 3. It smells quite strong after… Anyway, I found some wild shrimps prepared for sashimi: head removed. They were not giant prawns like I like best but still a lot of conditions were there to give it a try. And I decided then to prepare them with what might already the last zucchini of the season (extremely short season in Chiba) with ginger and rice. So I gratted fresh ginger and marinated the shrimps in. Then I grilled them on a hot pan. I just steamed the zucchini and added small pieces of ginger and soya sauce. Served on top of Japanese rice, decorated with black sesame seeds. That’s all!!
We have a bayberry tree in our garden. At first it was so much fighting with the surrounding trees it was small and not giving really fruits but now that we’ve trimmed trees around and at the foot remove all the weed and tiny bamboos it’s growing quite quickly and this year it is giving tones of fruits. A large part of them felt during the big storm early Saturday morning so I decided to harvest the one still on the tree and ripe enough, which means that I hervested 2kg of fruits. Bayberry are very similar to strawberry tree fruits but they are an Asian species. I only know the Asian version in syrup in cocktails in Asian restaurant when I was a kid! Actually they taste a little like cranberry while having a very different texture.
I didn’t know what to do with that many fruits thanks to IG followers advice and a bit of net browsing I managed to know how to prepare them:
now they are ready for any preparation. I did some sugar syrup with 700g of fruits and 700g of block sugar. Now I just need to wait for the sugar to melt and for the syrup to be ready. The other thing I had in mind was jam. Unfortunately without any pectin it does jellify apparently so my jam ended up in an other syrup that I used right away and o make jelly for dessert adding just agar agar to the syrup and using a mold. I like my jelly no too stiff do I used little agar agar, and added a fruit in each piece. I have also used the same syrup for flavoring a cake for our breakfast tomorrow. I removed the seeds and added the pulp and syrup to a yogurt cake mix without any oil or butter in. I am sure there are many more variations to think about!!!
A. asked for croissants for breakfast last weekend and I really wanted to try making some again after my last trials that were so so. Indeed I tried twice before to make croissant and if there was always something to complain about. For my first trial they had the consistency and taste of brioche, delicious but not a croissant at all. My second trial, more than one year ago, the taste was perfect but they didn’t really grow fluffy so they were tiny and heavy and slightly unbaked because it took actually more time to cook them and I was worried they would dry. This time I used the same recipe as before but the temperature was higher so they grow bigger, but I made a little reading mistake when finalizing the shapes and instead of one layer of dough I rolled two: heavier, less fluffy than expected and twice less croissants! But perfectly baked with the longer time and very promising. I’m getting close! Can’t wait to try again!!!
With the leftovers of the salmon filet and the Swiss chard I prepared a soup for our dinner tonight. Simply by boiling some little pasta (some Sicilian pasta for soup I had left from our trip to Italy last December) in salted water and adding the cooked fish and Swiss chard 3minutes before serving. Added olive oil and black pepper and served hot.
This winter I talked a little about the cooking books I got for Christmas and I tried several recipes from them. I also use them as source of inspiration. Recently I was attracted by the Nordic cookbook and in particular by salmon recipes. I wanted to prepared cured salmon. So finally I bought a nice salmon filet and was about to prepare it when A. told me that he rather have it right away than wait for 48h for the cured fish… Well.. I left the cured fish for an other time and opted for a butter grilled one. And just blanched the beautiful baby colorful Swiss chard I found at the farmers market and baked some 100% buckwheat pancakes. Added some pickled cucumbers and served all together. Simply delicious. For a Nordic experience I guess that cream and dill would have been on the plate too, but I didn’t have any!
While in search for new recipes and tastes to change my routine cooking I’m testing cooking ideas, one at a time. Some very simple like these okara croquettes served simply with pickled vegetables (nukatsuke) and rice. The recipe for the croquettes is just so simple: I mix one egg with half a little bag of okara, add flavoring: this time I used shichimi (7 spices – 七味) and stir well. In a slightly greased pan I cook at low heat on both sides until golden.
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