Tag: Japanese

Nabe four hands

After a cold day walking accross rice paddies, nothing better than a good nabe, home made of course. 

Nabe is a traditional Japanese soup with vegetables (Chinese cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, leeks…), tofu (here we have yuzu tofu), shitaki (white Japanese konyaku pasta) and fish cut in small peaces (or meat, as you like).

In a big pot, on a fire in the center of the table, add the vegetables to the konbu and katsuo dashi bouillon. 
Then, add tofu, pasta and fish (and if you like small shells). You can also go for a 100% vegan version, delicious too.
When it’s cooked, everyone can help himself directly in the big pot. Add a drop of ponzu sauce, if you like you can add grilled mochi, rice to put inside and Bon appetite!
Made together by Prunellia and Gentiane!

Plum – 梅 – Prune

In February the first trees to bloom in Japan are the plum trees. They’re not as famous as the Japanese cherry tree, but I like them much more for the vibrant colors of their flowers from white to dark pink and for their beautiful round petals and because people are much less silly than when the cherry trees start blossoming.
Plum tree blooming in our garden
In Japan plums are used in many ways. The most two famous are probably umeshu (plum wine) and umeboshi (kind of pickled plum) made out of the fruits harvested in June. But they are also used to make some sweets, mainly jelly that I love!
Sweet plum and red shiso jelly
The plum flower is also largely used for decoration for Hina-matsuri, the dolls festival literally, or festival for the girls on March 3d.
Hina-matsuri sweets decorated with plum flowers

Let’s talk umeboshi! The season for making some is far ahead, but since it is a preserve method they are eaten all year round, and known to be good against fatigue among other virtues. For many non Japanese people it’s an infamous sour thing that is often found in lunch boxes: small and hard, or in onigiri (rice balls 🍙): soft and juicy. I personally find it extremely delicious when home-made or of very good quality, but I wouldn’t recommend any of the cheap things from conbini. My favourite are the large and soft ones with a lot of juicy meat. It is often prepared with red shiso and is delicious eaten with plain white rice, with grilled chicken breast or with canned tuna (my lunch plate today).
Oh! And Prunellia arrives tonight in Tokyo!!!

My umeboshi favorite lunch plate










Fukinoto – ふきのとう

Fukinoto growing in our garden
As a lot if places, Japan is full if wild plants that are edible. A lot of them come as a set called 山菜 (pronounce that sansai, literaly the “mountains vegetables”). It includes kogomi, tara no me, warabi and fukinoto. Most of them are great fun to pick, just like mushrooms. Depending on places they are more or less abundant and they grow at different times. For example fuki no to grow in January-February in Chiba prefecture, while in the Niigata mountains they are snow piercer and grow in May.
The first time we ate fukinoto, we actually went to pick them in Tsunan machi area with some friends connoisseurs. Later, I realize that we have some in the garden!! Fukinoto are delicious, with quite a strong taste easy to identify. They are better eaten while still at the bud stage (not as opened as the picture show them). They are often prepared in tempura (I skip this since I don’t deep fry at home), in a mixture with miso: fukinoto-miso which allows to preserve them longer, and in miso soup.
Today I tried the miso soup with tofu!

For that you need a good katsuo dashi, or konbu dashi for a vegan experience (I promise to prepare something about dashi soon), some miso (I prefer white or light colored miso for miso soup, which is also what is used for winter miso soup in cha-kaiseki), a piece of silky tofu, and some fresh fukinoto. Once you’ve prepared the dashi, mix in a spoon of miso per person. In the bowls put a few dices of tofu (after draining it), top with the finely chopped fukinoto (for a softer taste of fukinoto you can boil them once chopped in a net for 30s) and finally add the miso soup. Et voila!
Plain rice and fukinoto miso soup

Japanese Valentine

In Japan Valentine is not celebrated as in Europe or North America. In Japan, on Valentine day girls are supposed to offer chocolates to boys. It can extend to nonlovers  too: offering chocolate to your colleagues  etc… Not to say that the chocolate business is at its climax and prices are skyrocketing. So a lot of people make their own chocolates and you can find all the necessary goodies in any supermarket. 

Since I have a chocolate addict husband I can assure you the Japanese Valentine pleases him very much, and if we’ve never celebrated Valentine before we were in Japan, now I always try to prepare something. Usually it’s chocolate truffles, and this year again that’s what I’m preparing.
The recipe is simple and there is no possible way to make it wrong: melt 125g of dark chocolate with 40g of butter, then add 1 egg yolk, 40g of ice sugar, vanilla, stir well and keep refrigirated for 1h or 2h. Once the ganache is hard ise a spoon and roll some in yours hand then in cacao. You adjust the size to your taste.

Now I’m supposed to wait for White day (March 14th) for the  counterpart present when boys are supposed to offer something to girls…
Happy Valentine!

u no hana – うの花

I really love okara. It’s basically the pulp of soya beans remaining after the fabrication of tofu and soya milk. It’s full of proteins and it as a very mild taste. It is easily found in supermarket in Japan (together with tofu, nato and yuba) and also very easy to use in several recipes. The most famous okara recipe in Japan is probably u no hana (うの花). A mixture of okara and cooked vegetables.
Since I found nice okara, I wanted to make u no hana, but as always I twist the recipe. Usual u no hana is often very mild in taste and in color, and recently I like colorful plates for dinner (see my recent post). So instead of the classical ingredients I used carrots, purple sweet potato (again!), shiitake and na-no-hana (rapeseed).
I cut in small stick all the vegetables and cook them in the above order in a bit of oil and finally added soya sauce, a little of sugar, a little of sake (the original recipe has mirin in it, but recently I don’t use mirin anymore, for it’s too strong taste that covers the taste of the other ingredients).
Finally I added the okara and stirred (a little too well so that the purple color of the potato transferred to the white okara:( ).
A delicious colorful vegan dish, served with rice and ume-boshi.  

DIY lamp in a basket

The other day at Yasukuni Shrine flea market I bought 2 bamboo baskets for 500Y. Usually such baskets are use for flower composition, but I liked so much the bamboo pattern of one of them that I wanted to make a lamp out of one to enjoy the projection of the pattern on the walls.

With such basket it was really easy to mount as a lamp, and here is the result!
How do you like it?

Turnips filled with miso and pork

Sunday as a side dish of the buta shoga yaki I prepared an experimental recipe of some turnips filled with a mixture of miso and pork. This idea comes from two Japenese dishes, one is quite classical: boiled daikon in dashi topped with chicken and miso (for the recipe please contact me), the other is more refined and learned it at the cha-kaiseki cooking class (I’ll write more about that soon and introduce some recipes) I used to take, we once prepared some turnips filled with a mixture of shrimps. Actually I wanted to repriduce that dish, but I find it extremely difficult to find good shrimps (by “good” I mean wild shrimps that haven’t grown in shit-pools, sorry for being gross!). Being unable to find what I was looking for I decided to take the safe path and go with some Isumi pork (again…). That being decided the recipe needed to be adjusted.

I peeled the turnips (they were rather small ones), boiled them in salted water but could have been dashi, until soft (use a little wood toothpick to check), then removed a bit of the top and cut the base to make them stand. In a bowl I mixed the grinded pork meat with miso (with a ratio of about 1/5 of miso for meat). Then with a spoon I filled the turnips, lined them in an oven dish and baked them until the filling was well cooked. It’s better to serve them while hot. Since the turnips were small it made a lovely one bite size.

Ginger and pork

Isumi in Chiba (where we spend most of our week-ends) has very good pork meat. It is not as famous as the one from Miyazaki in Kyushu, but it’s as delicious and local, which for me is enough. I don’t eat much meat anyway, only pork and chicken breast, and only when I know where it comes from. 

One of my favorite Japanese recipe to cook thin slices of pork cutlet is the “buta shoga yaki” (grilled pork with ginger). It’s one of the basic Japanese recipes. It’s also a standard in lots of Japanese style cafes. It’s usually served with rice.

Today I had nice thin slices of pork cutlet and a piece of fresh ginger, a good opportunity to make some grilled pork with ginger. 

My version is simple: I grat (I use the daikon oroshi type gratter) the fresh peeled ginger on top of the pork slices in a container. Then I add a bit of soya sauce and a little of cooking oil. I close the container and shake well before I leave to rest for 5-10minutes (time to start cooking the rice). Then I heat a frypan and delicately put the slices to grill. Since I’ve put already a bit of oil in the mixture there’s no need to add more. I like my pork to be golden brown, so I cook it until it has the desired color.

And since I really like ginger, I also used the fresh ginger roughly sliced to treat myself with a “hot ginger”. For that I just top the ginger slices with boiling water and a spoon of honey!

The dish on the bottom left are some turnips filled with miso and grinded pork. An experimental recipe that was really nice. 

Curry-rice

One of the easiest Japanese dish to cook is curry-rice (pronunce “karey-rayiss”). I like because it is quick to prepare, and it’s a warm dish you can make with whatever you have in the fridge: perfect for a Sunday lunch after spending hours in the cold treaming trees in the garden. You can use only vegetables, meat, fish or mix vegetables with meat or fish. The variety of ingredients has only the limit of your imagination! So once decided what to put inside it is super easy. I always start with an onion or a leek that I cook with a bit of oil (olive or not) or butter. Once almost brown I add carrots, sweet potatoes, potatoes, meat if any… And half cook them. Then I add a spoon of curry spice, the quantity depends on how strong you like your curry, I like mine tasty but not hot.

Then add some grinded black pepper, a bit of Japanese 7 spices (shichimi). Now it’s time to prepare the roux. For that add flour and stir well the vegetables. Finally add water. In Japan there are all kinds of curry-rice, some very liquid, some quite compact. This just depends how you like it and how long you cook the roux, anyway, you can add water anytime if you find yours too thick.
In the last few minutes of cooking I sometimes add a few other veggetables tgat need short cooking time: brocoli, cauliflower, green peas… 
Ready to serve with some white Japanese rice (for some reason I find it much better than with briwn rice). Japanese eat that dish with a spoon!

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑

Verified by MonsterInsights