Tag: home-cooking

Omurice – オムライス

I am lucky to work with one of my students on the development of a system that proposes variations to things someone do depending on preferences… for developing such a system we decided to chose a concrete example, and the first idea that came to our mind was a system that could help you in making new recipes by trying adding popular ingredients. And to do a first real life experiment we needed something easy enough to prepare and with many possible variations. We picked omurice. The whole time we were meeting and discussing it reminded me how much I live omurice, and how little I cook it.

I also remembered that a long long time ago I promised to post the recipe of this popular wa-yo 和洋 recipe. But for some reason it seems I never did… so let’s fix this right now!!!

First of all let’s talk wa-yo food a bit. While Japan opened to the west for many things in the 19th century, it had continually had this very specific way of not copying but adapting to its own taste or resources the cultural elements of another civilization, such that in the end it creates a genuine Japanese part of culture. Food has many examples: curry-rice, castella, dorayaki, and omurice. It seems to be born in a cafe in Ginza in the early 20th century.

The first time I heard about omurice was when reading one of Murakami Ryu‘s novel: “coin lockers babies”. The translation and the way it was presented was that of a rice omelette. In my mind I imagined a batter of eggs with cooked rice in it, cooked in a frypan. How far from the truth I was!!! Omurice is a simple preparation for sure but with many variations. Each place that serves om-rice has its own recipe. It consists in three parts: the rice, the omelette and the sauce.

The rice: usually plain white rice, but can be also sautéed with green peas (my favorite) and small bit of pork… tomato sauce or tomato ketchup can also be added to the rice to give it a nice pink color. Mushrooms, chicken are also other options.

The omelette: it can be a rather straightforward omelette, or a more runny one, or something like very runny scrambled eggs. Usually plain. It is nice to have it a bit runny in any case as it mixes well with the rice.

The sauce: that’s where most of the creativity is, and often too much for me. One popular sauce in fancy om-rice recipe is the demiglass sauce デミグラスソース, made from red wine, beef consommé etc… but my ultimate favorite is just a splash of tomato ketchup. The simplest the better.

This time, I made omurice with brown rice and that was super delicious. A runny omelette on one side with 2eggs, a splash of tomato ketchup, and a side of blanched komatsuna.

Burdock – 牛蒡

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.

Completely in love with my sourdough 🤍🤍🤍

After the slightly difficult beginnings with my sourdough starter Lois, it’s been almost 2months and we have reached a nice cruising speed, I use it all the time now. I’m still a bit surprised that my starter hasn’t done any crazy bubbling so far, on the contrary, it’s been behaving very very well, doing regular foaming but to a reasonable volume, and when in need for food it smells a nice apple flavour.

Cooking bread with my sourdough starter at first was quite tedious, with the impression of starting from the scratch, in particular, I had to relearn how the proving and rising worked, cooking at higher temperatures, with many of my first breads that just imploded when baking, ending up with big cracks on the bottom rather than on the top, or being too dense. I also needed a bit of adjustment with the flour I was using. I am still searching for a steady supply of organic local flour (and I will make a post as soon as I find something that is worth mentioning). The ones I have used during the summer are now out of stock and it seems unsure when they will have stock again. Together with searching for supply, I steadily continued and learned from my mistakes, and now they are all fixed or so, and I have started to obtain a regular shape and beautiful crusts with fluffy crumble on a regular basis. I started playing again with whole wheat, wheat bran,nuts etc… In the end, it seems that lower room temperature and longer times work very well for my sourdough starter. That to say that the sourdough adventure is a beautiful one and the flavour of the breads are uncomparable with those made with yeast (dry or fresh), so even if it took me so long to make up my mind, that it is a hassle to travel with my sourdough back and force between Tokyo and Ohara, it is just a new habit. And if while in Tokyo I use little of the sourdough for baking (until I get my kitchen redone with an oven…), but the one thing that I find really amazing is to use the extra sourdough I have for flat breads and for pancakes. It brings the flavour to a new level, something quite addictive.

  • Flat breads
  • Hazelnut and walnut bread
  • Plain white bread

So if you have a sourdough starter that you don’t use much for bread baking like me, I highly recommend you continue feeding it every day and use it for anything that needs flour and water. If you have other tricks to use your sourdough please let me know I am curious about other uses. Indeed Lois is quite gluttonous and in 4 days it gets quite voluminous!
Actually I have already starting giving parts of it away to friends so if you are interested in a stable sourdough starter, please let me know!

Negimiso – ネギ味噌

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.

Quenelles…

That’s something I haven’t cooked for 4 years!!! Can you believe that??? The last time I made some was for that post back in 2016!!! And then… nothing… strange enough because (1) I like quenelle very much, (2) it’s not difficult to make, (3) it requires only simple ingredients I always have in the pantry… So with the weather getting chillier it was a good time for turning the oven on more than usual.

I used the recipe from my previous post and slightly adjusted it, it is for regular quenelles, they don’t become very fluffy… I still don’t know how to make them fluffier, I need to work on it. But even not fluffy it tastes great. This time also I used fresh cream, but I realized once again (I rarely use cream so I have a tendency to forget) that Japanese fresh cream sold in supermarkets is not very good for oven cooking, it dries out and only the fat remains, which looks buttery and not creamy anymore… Milk to cook the quenelles first and adding the cream later is probably a better solution…

Still here is the recipe adjusted.

Quenelles (2-3 servings)

For the quenelles

  • 150 flour
  • 2 eggs
  • 50g of butter
  • a pinch of salt and nutmeg

For the sauce

  • 6 large shiitake or the equivalent of other simple mushrooms
  • 4tsp of fresh cream (if you like it) or olive oil can work…
  • 1 cup of milk
  • salt and pepper

In a pan the butter. Heat until the butter has melted. Add the flour, and cook at low heat for 8min. If you have a hard time mixing in all the flour add a few drops of water.

The final dough after cooking and smoothing

Cool down a bit and add the eggs, the salt, the nutmeg, and stir well. You should obtain a smooth dought that doesn’t stick. If it sticks add a little more flour, if too dry add a bit of water. Cut the dough in 8 pieces and form the quenelles as shown in the picture below. Boil a large amount of water and poach the quenelles until they float.

Set in an oven dish, add the milk. Wash and slice the mushrooms, add to the whole. If you use fresh cream (not Japanese) add it now. Add salt and generously add pepper. Pre heat the oven at 200 degrees. And bake for 30min. At 20min add the cream (if you use Japanese cream). They get golden brownish on the top when ready. Serve and eat immediately.

A twisted “nimono” recipe

I love nimono, that is not new… I learned how to make them right with Japanese cookbooks and when I was going to cha-kaiseki classes, but for some reasons, I often wrongly thought that it takes time to make a nimono dish, and so not cook some as often as I should. But as my cooking evolves with time and changes subtly every month, every year, nimono has been more and more often on the menu. Enough often for me to test twisted versions of nimono, using different ingredients for flavouring and always managing to get it right. I also understood clearly that it can be really quick to make depending on the ingredients chosen. One ingredient that goes really well with nimono is green bell peppers. They fit perfectly the recipe and also are a good match with any white fish. And for white fish, we are lucky, in Ohara it is easy to find delicious local fresh ones: snappers of all sorts, sea bass, flounder…
As I don’t often cook with sake, I recently replaced the sake in the classic recipe by my ume-dashi pickled soya sauce. It adds a bit of sourness and a delicious flavour and when in season I love to add a few slices of lime, or of green yuzu, or any other green citrus fruit. So here is my twisted nimono recipe for a simple Japanese preparation that everyone can make!

Twisted nimono recipe (for 2 servings)

  • a nice piece of fresh white fish
  • 4~6 green bell peppers depending on size (red, yellow, orange can work as well but not as good…)
  • 1/2 lime or 1 green yuzu…
  • 2tbs of soya sauce, better ume pickled in soya sauce
  • 1tsp of cooking oil
  • 1/2 cup of water

Wash and cut in rough pieces the bell peppers. Cut the citrus fruit in large pieces. Clean the fish and cut in large byte size. In a wok or pan, heat the cooking oil, add the fish and wait until half cooked, add the bell peppers. stir gently. Add the soya sauce, the water and the citrus fruit. Cook at medium-high heat until the liquid starts to reduce significantly and thicken a bit. Stop here the cooking and serve not too hot, with some white rice ideally.

Tonkatsu!!! No, hirekatsu!

What the heck!!!

Tonkatsu is the famous, and usually most beloved by foreigners, Japanese fried pork cutlet. It is a fatty part of pork, further rolled in panko and deep fried. It’s heavy, fatty and honestly the rice and the shredded cabbage on the side cannot help pumping the fat!!! We never eat it. But there exist slightly better version of it: hirekatsu – ヒレカツ (filet katsu…). Instead of the fatty cutlet it is the most meager part of pork: filet. That makes thing more bearable and not without reminding me the veal escalope my grandmother was making. My father and A. are big fans of it and I would usually (before it closed) buy hirekatsu at Genji in Isumi, and we would have it altogether. So about once a year or so!! Another option would be Saboten, a chain store in Tokyo that prepares on the spot a variety of fried meat and fish and croquettes.

With the travel ban, my parents didn’t come in March and so A. didn’t have had much a chance to eat hirekatsu in the past year… so the now that it is rainy and chilly, I could venture in making some richer food, and just had a nice piece of pork filet from Isumi. All set!! Of course I don’t deep fry, so it is a panfried version, but it works as well… and here is my recipe, but really you don’t need one for making this!!!

Pan fried hirekatsu

  • A piece of pork filet
  • 1 egg
  • Panko
  • Frying oil

Cut the pork filet in 5mm~1cm slices (count 4 slices per person). Break the egg in a bowl and make and egg batter. Set the panko in a plate. Heat sufficient oil in a fry pan at high heat. Dip one pork slice in the egg batter the in the panko until fully covered and fry in the pan. Continue until all done. Turn the piece on all side until golden. There’s really nothing special about that preparation in fact!!!

Serve with some shredded cabbage for Japanese style, or anything else if you prefer: I served with steamed carrots.

Koyadofu – 高野豆腐

There is more than one ingredient in Japanese cuisine that is intriguing, konyaku, fu and koyadofu are some of them. So let’s talk about koyadofu this time…

Koyadofu 高野豆腐 or freeze-dried tofu is a product that has been used in temple vegan cuisine and for traveling warriors for about 500 years. It is a way to preserve tofu for long times in a compact way, and very rich nutritionally. Indeed koyadofu is packed with proteins and fat. It’s a kind of space food in a sense, or one of its ancestors. To be honest, at first koyadofu doesn’t look like an attractive food: it is truly like a very thin sponge, and usually served soaked after simmering or in some kind of bouillon. For those that find tofu insipid, and I know many may think so, they should probably pass on Koyadofu because taste is even thiner and lighter. However, when well prepared it is a very nice ingredient to use and it adds an interesting texture to dishes. Most recipes of koyadofu will be found in buddhist and macrobiotic cookbooks. I find my inspiration from my two favorite of the kind: “good food from a Japanese temple” and “玄米と野菜のワンプレートごはん”. And the recipe I present today is inspired by both, it’s a curry with seasonal vegetables koyadofu served with brown rice. It is really simple and delicious.

Koyadofu curry-rice (serves 2)

  • 1 cup of brown rice, cooked
  • 6 blocks (2cmx2cm) of koyadofu or one large
  • seasonal vegetables of your choice: carrot, potatoes, butternut squash, tomatoes
  • a handful of peanuts (it’s a seasonal and local product in Isumi, so I used fresh ones simply boiled)
  • 1tsp of curry powder
  • 1tsp of ground coriander
  • 1tsp of ground turmeric
  • 1tsp of cumin seeds (carvi seeds or anis seeds can work…)
  • 1 pinch of ground red pepper
  • 1 pinch of salt
  • 1tsp of cooking oil of your choice

Koyadofu always needs to be returned to a moist status. So put the blocks in tepid water for 5min, then drain by squeezing gently, and rinse/squeeze under running water until the water turns clear. It’s basically like washing a sponge… now it’s ready to use.

Peel, wash, cut the vegetables. In large pan or wok greased with cooking oil, toss the vegetables in order of cooking time. And stir once in a while. Add the koyadofu. Stir. Then cover with water, add all the spices, and the peanuts. Cook at low heat until the liquid is almost gone, by then the vegetables should be just cooked. You don’t want to overcook them, to keep an interesting mix of texture. You can serve with the brown rice and enjoy!!!

Have a good day!

Autumn warmth and color

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!!!

Have a good day!

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