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.
The frenzy of Christmas leaves me more and more perplexed and this year, having the opportunity (if one can says so) to spend it at home, just like a normal day off was actually more than welcome. Since we’ve been in Japan, rare are the years we haven’t spent Christmas with our families in Europe. While a family reunion is nice, Christmas is a time I dislike being in Paris, it’s dark, gloomy and cold. We are always suffering from jetlag, waking up at 5:00am when it’s pitch black outside and it will stay so for another 3 hours… better yet when we spend Christmas in the south of France, or even better in Italy. I love so much better the Italian spirit… But jetlag and dark mornings are not the only reason why I dislike so much this period, what I fear the most about Christmas are the long dinner and lunch that go with it, the sudden abundance in food like it were the only day we can eat and we have to eat them all from the appetizers to the mignardises… in magazines, instagram and wherever else… giant turkeys, creamy cakes, chocolate overdosed buches…
This is millions miles away from my conception of good food and good eating. Why shall you wait for Christmas or new year eve for champagne, caviar, foie gras and truffle and presents??? For fine chocolates and treats??? Why on earth would you get them all on one day??? For me, everyday is a cooking feast and every day is worth a present, I love the concept of unbirthday we should have an unchristmas too! I can’t wait 365 days and then just have to take it all in a snap! This is too ridiculous. Maybe also because my birthday is so closed from Christmas. Also, for me, a festive good meal doesn’t need to have fancy ingredients (actually I dislike most of them…), it just needs love in the kitchen and at the table and a few basic products. So the very best part of a European Christmas is undeniably the breakfast, really early, in the kitchen overlooking the garden still in the darkness: pieces of pompe a l’huile or slices of panettone dipped in a cup of hot black tea and tangerines peeled carefully and eaten slowly🍊 is what makes me the happiest. When all is still quiet.
Pompe a l’huile and tangerines
This year, no travel, no jetlag, no dark morning , no family reunion, and no Christmas party with friends, it was just the two of us in our country house. Perfect. I prepared rustic potatoes and smoked ham ravioli for Christmas eve, and pompe a l’huile for the morning breakfast, which wasn’t dark as in Japan the sun sets early, and early enough to catch up with family still on Christmas eve. Luckily Isumi is well stocked in tangerines groves, so it’s really easy to find some good ones… ours from our tree are long eaten! And that was a perfect Christmas.
I wish you all a happy holiday season!
Christmas ravioli, just the usual ravioli filled with smoked ham and potatoes, dressed with onion and shiitake
While we are celebrating the 8th anniversary of the purchase of our country house, I thought it was time to reflect a bit on how this purchase has modified our lives, probably more deeply than we could have expected or maybe realized and in many ways how this house and its surroundings have changed my shopping and cooking habits, and play now a central role.
Here’s the quick story on how we bought a house in Isumi. After a few years living in Tokyo, we realized that with earthquakes, and the real estate in the city it wouldn’t be reasonable to buy a house there… yet… owning a Japanese style house was something we fancied, and we spent hours day dreaming on the catalogue of country houses and properties of furusato.com, a website that sells all kind of properties in remote Japan. The seed was there. Our friends’ house and their life style in Tsunan probably helped a lot in making the idea grow, and one day, out of the blue in June 2012 we went to visit one house in Yokosuka… ocean view, pool, but not quite it… the next Friday, A. sends me a link, I call the real estate agent. Appointment to visit the next morning. It rains as usual in June, the hydrangeas are blooming, the garden is a mess of lush greens, the house needs serious refurbishing and reform but no serious work. This is it! For the sake of pleasing the agent and being sure of our choice we go to visit another one, but our minds are all set. This is the one! And in a snap the deal is done.
The day we bought our house in Isumi
We often work like this. We mature something for a loooong time, but when we’re set we’re set, and never regret. It took us 3 years to decide to buy our first car, 1 test drive to settle, it took 7 years to decide to buy a country house in Japan, 5min to settle.
So now that’s when things get even better than we could have ever imagined… Every year has its reforming and embellishments. Of course we were not totally stupid on our choice. We decided to pick a house in a not too touristic place (avoiding the big weekend crowds of Hakone, Karuizawa, Hayama…), quite rural, and nearby the ocean. And 100km away from Tokyo, so that the driving wouldn’t get too long. While our plan was to go every once in a while, we quickly got addicted to being there, the space, the light, the green, the quietness. Keeping yourself busy with something in the garden or in the house is something that is priceless. Being outside, in the open air, surrounded by greens or the ocean made me stronger, and more confident. It also has given me a lot of time to think, while the hands are at work trimming and pruning, about the career moves I wanted to do or not do, to understand where and when I was in perfect equilibrium. It also constantly makes me question what I do and why. This country house and the life we live there show me the absurdity of our societies and help me understand its profound problems. Of course it doesn’t give any answer, there is no magic here… just learning to observe more, be more patient in the kitchen garden, manage frustration when a parasite destroy your crop…
All these changes happened slowly, when we discovered little by little the communities living there, the amazing resources, the many enthusiastic and passionate people we meet. We learn about Japanese wood craft, we learn earthware craft, we learn about farming. We now live on food that is produced right there (some people challenge themselves to live on food that comes from less than 100miles, we could say that most of ours comes from less than 10miles, and we don’t even need preserves as each season has its harvest!!!). Isumi is rich in all kind of food from vegetables to fruits, sea products and cattle farming. The dairy, the eggs, the seaweed, the fishes, the pork, the rice are incredible… there is a community of permaculture farmers and organic farmers… Living in Tokyo had given me such a limited choice of food and quality, even when I was shopping at local farmers near work, they didn’t have the choice we can have here. Living in Isumi, I discover new greens every season!!!
Having a lot of variety in food is nice, learning how to prepare it is just even better. Thanks to new friends and neighbors I have shared so much. My 89 year old neighbor teach me not only to sew, but also to garden and to cook or prepare local products such as umeboshi. Our other neighbors and friends too. We make umeshu together, miso, we exchange seeds…
Yet one thing was missing from the city: the good bread shops from Tokyo for our breakfast. And that’s when I took on baking bread. At first it was just a once in a while thing. It was tedious, not always very successful but I didn’t give up. I studied, and tried over and over. I enjoy the kneading, the shaping, the eating! I also teach friends about some local French breads making…
The other thing I learnt to deal with was the uncontrollable humidity/dryness and heat/cold in the house that prevent you from being able to keep any non Japanese staple longer than 6 months. Forget about having a bag of almonds or cookies in your pantry, they turn bad in no time. Who cares I’d say… I realized that making pancakes, crepes or scones takes only a few minutes and they are much more healthy and delicious!! Making cookies also is just that simple too!
So this little house with its green surroundings has been the source of a constant amazement and bliss, every single second I think about it, even when I am worried about it when a typhoon passes or the earth shakes, I feel it was a very good decision and we got lucky. Japan (but not only) countryside is full of surprises and being able to discover and experience it in deep is now an essential part of our lives.
Now why didn’t we make a bold move to the country is another question I’ll answer later…
Yes… it’s Saturday 22:00, the picture is me in the kitchen wearing an apron over my working cloth, as we just arrived in the country after I flew away from work. As soon as we arrived, I wore my rain boots to check the garden and pick some parsley, and headed inside to start cooking right away. This picture depicts me perfectly…
With all the traveling these past and future weeks, and the long working days that overrun the weekends I dream more and more of a simple country life. I love my job and how interesting it can be, but coming back home late everyday and doing some minimal cooking frustrates me. Boiling pasta and throwing some fresh but too quickly prepared vegetables on top of it is not cooking… it’s bare survival… and the whole week has been like that. I didn’t even make pancakes for breakfast as I had meetings early in the morning too…
Survival plate
I think the weather might be again acting on me too… it’s been raining 75% of the time since I came back from Canada, when the season calls for beautiful blue sky and beautiful days seems to be only for the days when I am stuck indoors at work… I crave for being outside, for working in the garden. Last week between two showers I harvested a few things in the garden: peanuts, persimmons, celery, herbs also, a poor harvest but still… I am happy to have something. I cleaned the kitchen garden that was covered in weeds after 3 weeks without maintenance and planted red onions while thinking about all the plants I could plant in the spring, now that I have a small nursery space to prepare seedlings. I’m testing chickpeas right now with a mitigated success…
When I pass others’ kitchen gardens I look at them with envy, fancying the beautifully aligned plants, the lush greens, the dark soil, clean and nourishing. One day mine will look like that… maybe… For the moment mine is tiny, messy and produces little, but hopefully our garden is not limited to this and the season for persimmons, tangerines, yuzus and later other citrus fruits is happily coming and walking around the garden seeing the trees covered with fruits pleases me very much.
I won’t tell you any recipe today as I did little cooking, maybe tomorrow…
Every once in a while we go to visit our friends and their cat in Tsunan, in the Niigata mountains. We originally planned to go for new year but the snow has stopped us: our car is not equipped for snow… so we took the opportunity of the long golden week to drive up and to stay 2-3 days there. We’ve been there 10 times or more, at each season but it’s been a while we haven’t been in spring and it was the perfect timing for sansai as you already from my previous post, but also cherry tree blossoms and beautiful river streams full of the recently melted snow.
Each time we discover something new, but we also have a few habits. Let’s start with the habits:
Always stop by the COOP shop in the village to buy 三八五 – sanhachigo to make pickles. They also use to have delicious apricot jam but not anymore…
Drive up to Sakae to buy honey and pollen. I started eating pollen a long time ago, under the pressure of my nutritionist mum. At first I hated it, but after years, now I really find it easy to take a spoon of pollen every morning before breakfast.
Stop at the sake factory, not for sake but for some carrot juice! They grow 雪下人参 – yukishitaninjin literally carrots under the snow, and they give a very nice and sweet carrot juice. You may also find the juice other places.
Stop at the local antique shops. Well, actually this time we didn’t since K. gave us plenty of ceramics and glassware.
Take a walk to the geo-park to see the cliff and the river. We really love that place, even if a few years ago they transformed the little path into a wide wheelchair friendly road, with an artificial pond… the view hasn’t changed a bit.
As for the new things… we discovered Nakago – 中子 a small village by a lake with a few sakura tree. The place is on a plateau where they do a lot of farming. The beautifully opened view and the quietness were totally exquisite.
The other place we went was on the way to Akiyamago, a small village with a suspended bridge on top of the Nakatsu river, the Mikura bridge – 見倉橋. It was a beautiful walk down the river, and you can go up the other side of the bridge to the Mikura village. But we didn’t, so next time we’ll visit K. we know were we could go!!!
Oh my god! In 4 days my lab at the university is moving and things have gotten a little bit out of control. I’m very lucky to have a great crowd of researchers and students to help prepare this big change. But the moving is just one thing among many many others that I have to handle. There are so many things going on at the same time and days are so short… that these past few days cooking has unfortunately not been a priority. Hopefully the weekend gives a better chance to cook some more elaborated food… just a bit more. So this week has been all about rice/pasta/gnocchi with sautéed vegetables, in particular snap peas, lotus roots, fava beans and green peas. I also bought a few things that I haven’t bought in a long long time, in particular kamaboko. Kamaboko is a kind of fish paste made with white fish, egg and steamed on a wooden plate. It ressembles in some sense to surimi (I’m not talking about the horrible thing you can buy in supermarkets, right! But of homemade surimi (recipe to come any time soon!)). It is very convenient to use kamaboko in rapid recipes and it adds a bit of protein and a nice texture with crunchy spring greens.
So last night I simply cooked some rice, and in a pan greased with a bit of vegetal oil I simply sliced a pice of kamaboko and added plenty of snap peas. And dinner was ready!!!
And as I said this week was really all about simple food, so here are a few other plates with snap peas that I cooked for dinner recently. This spring is all about snap peas!!! What about yours?
With a sister who has let me down without a word after 3 years of Tokyo Paris sisters, I have decided to come back to my very first website and to continue to share my culinary experiences with those interested in Japanese-French-Italian cooking, and in fresh, local and seasonal food. So basically nothing has changed but the name and address.
I didn’t have much time to vamp the website yet and work on the data but I will. I plan to try to have something simple, accessible and comprehensible. I realized that the glossary from TPS was not enough and I have new ideas to present the specific ingredients so that everyone can easily replace them with what is available locally or know which ingredients comes when. Indeed, why would you desperately search for a very specific ingredient from far far away when there are so many others ingredients available that were grown locally and totally make the trick? For example it is very simple to replace gobo (Japanese burdock) by tragopogon, and vice versa, same family different branches. The taste is of course a little different but it works very well and anyway, I’ve never seen tragopogon in Japan! It’s the same with citrus fruits. There is almost to none oranges grown in Japan that reach Tokyo, they all come from very far away countries. But instead there are decopon, hassaku, natsumikan and so many others that work as well. And in many cases they have traveled just 100km to reach Tokyo!
Let’s get started! And I will share my adventure of last weekend about miso making very very soon!!
When we moved to Tokyo in 2004, during the first few months every evening on my way back home I was taking one of the small residential street around Tokyo university, and every evening from one of the house in that street a delicious smell was tempting me, a smell that was the promise of a delicious Japanese dinner. It could be the smell of dashi, the smell of soya sauce, the smell of tempura, or the smell of sesame oil. At that time it was a smell that I really envied because we were unable to cook it at home, even just to find the ingredients was hard, cooking them was just impossible, and because we had no money to afford wasting food by trying silly recipes (an habit that I have kept actually, I only try recipes that I know will work for me). I called this street the “rue du supplice” because I always took it when I was very hungry and when I knew dinner would be some somen with ketchup and fried or scrambled eggs (what we lived on for a few months before being adventurous with the Japanese cook book!). It was a real ordeal and a real pleasure to take that street, the fantastic smell… only later once home emphasized the monotony of our dinner.
Last night, I had this very same feeling again passing one of the house nearby the university when I smelled the sesame oil… it made me craving for some real Japanese food. But since we have some guests I cooked some traditional summer recipes from Provence: oven grilled summer veggies, soupe au pistou, fougasse etc… so this all Japanese food craving is still waiting… soon probably..,
The quick trip to France followed by a weekend in Ohara to recover from the jetlag, enjoy the fresher air in the country, see friends and celebrate Sea day with a swim in a warm and beautiful ocean, it’s time to go to the lab again, stay seated 12h in front of my computer and regret there is no outdoor pool nearby (why on earth would they shutdown the beautiful pool we had on campus just when I arrived????)… Hopefully there are the colorful one-plate full of Japanese tastes with fresh shiso, soya sauce, rice, grilled tuns and raw summer veggies! While everyone here and there will go on holiday, we will keep working and moving: next biz trip already planned and departure in 10 days!
