In my quest of an ever changing breakfast menu, I decided to try to make soya flour thick pancakes. It is as simple as making soya flour pancakes but the fluffiness obtain with the thick layer of dough is really changing the whole experience. For this recipe I used a mix of white flour and soya flour (only soya flour makes a strange consistency), 2 eggs, 1 pack of baking powder, a bit of brown caster sugar and a bit of salt and water. After stirring well all the ingredients, in a greased heated pan I form the dough in metal circle and cooked at low heat until the top is almost not moist anymore, then fliffed the crumpets with the circles and cook a few minutes more. Delicious with any kind of topping!
Sometimes (often) I don’t have much time to prepare dinner so I really like to prepare sautéed fresh seasonal vegetables (carrot, lotus root, potato, okra), and this time I accompanied them with a fluffy tofu omelet. Yes fluffy again, after yesterday’s pancakes recipe!
In a bater I mixed 3 eggs and a block of silky tofu roughly drained, and beat well. I cooked it in a frypan under cover at medium heat both sides until golden.
A new variation of a classic bread: buckwheat and plain flour bread. It is really simple it consists in replacing half of the flour by buckwheat flour and add a little more yeast. It has a subtle taste perfect for breakfast.
An other of my simple vegan dinner, this time 100% Japanese. With a konbu dashi miso soup with tofu and myoga and a bowl of rice topped with sauteed veggies: shishito, carrots, burdock and potato. No seasonning, just the pure delicious taste of each ingredient.
Back to our routine, lot of work and week end in the country. Saturday morning tennis and one-bowl lunch.
Today the market was really good, edamame, green beans, lots of fruits… So the lunch bowl was really simple: chick peas, edamame, green beans, cucumber, sesame seeds, with lemon juice and olive oil; and for the proteines chicken and black pepper balls. Simple, delicious.
Multi grain and whole wheat little bread made for breakfast
At first when I started to bake my own bread I didn’t know much about it and I didn’t know how to chose the ingredients. As in any preparation the quality of the ingredient is crucial and it is not easy to understand what is a good flour and what is not, and also there are so many types of flours and bread that it took me some time. More over as I access information about bread mainly from French sources adapting to the Japanese available products was a hard task!
After using a lot of French organic products and random flours I could find in Japan, I think I have found a good set of resources locally. My main source of ingredients and in particular raw yeast is Cuoca. They have a wide selection of products, you can order on-line, but for me the best is that they have a shop that covers half a floor at Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi. My favorite flour there is the “Tradition Francaise” by Viron, perfect for every white bread, and in particular baguette. For most of the bread now I use the organic flour I can find in the supermarket. It is not a local product but the whole wheat flour and the hard flour are really perfect for my breads. For the seeds, I haven’t find yet something that satisfies me fully in Japan. A lot of the seeds are not organic or comes from China, which I must say worries me because of pollution problems. Right now I use seeds that I buy in France in any organic shop such as Bio C Bon, Naturalia etc… but I hope I’ll find something suitable soon in Japan!
Happy week-end, for me it’s going to be a lot of baking I know!!!
After being away from home for more than 10 days I’m really happy to be back to my kitchen. After eating out a lot (even though recently it’s been easier to find simple food in restaurants in France) I really need to get back to my basic diet. As soon as we were done with unpacking, I went down for grocery shopping, grabbed some fresh Japanese mushrooms: shimeji and maitake (kind of oyster mushroom), and some sprouts. I cooked some plain rice, grilled the mushroom in a pan with a bit of butter, add just before serving some sesame seeds and a drop of soya sauce, and served the whole as a vegan donburi.
Mushrooms and sprouts donburi
In the following weeks you’ll see that while in France I packed a few ingredients I love and still can’t find easily in Tokyo, some herbs from my parents’ garden in Aix, some flour for baking bread, tones of quinoa… and I’m really looking forward to using them!
I’m still a bit suffering from jetlag, and I wake up early, but in France it’s all dark until 7:00am, so there’s not much to do. So let me introduce an other recipe of delicious veggies, like I already miss them!
Grilled veggies are the best! Potato, sweet potato, kabocha and broccoli. I just added a few pieces of prosciutto. An other pre-travel meal perfect to empty the fridge and to sustain my hunger for veggies.
Before and after traveling I feel like needing more than ever fresh fruits and veggies and super simple recipes. So let me share with you a new idea I add. I wanted to eat mashed potatoes, I love them! But I don’t make some too often. So for this recipe I prepared simple mash potatoes with only a bit of butter, then I added some little chunks of broccoli, and finished with an egg, and lot of pepper. Simply delicious!
