Tag: local product

New green on the table: tatsoi

The family of edible greens I know is growing every week when we go to the farmers market. Somehow they always manage to have something that tickles me and I want to try. This week was all about tatsoi. Sorry for being such so badly cultivated when it comes to greens… I have so much to learn! So there was some tatsoi タアサイat the market and I could not resist it’s beautiful round shape, the greens of the leaves that ressemble spinach or rather chards, and a texture that is also close to bok choi.

I firt prepared one in a very simple manner: I washed it thoroughly to remove the sand and soil, and simply cook it at low it with a few drops of sesame oil. Added some sesame seeds to serve. That was awfully simple and perfect to enjoy the flavor and texture of this green new to us.

The second time I cook one, it was a tiny one, so rather than using oil, I just blanched it, and served it with natsumikan zest. This can work with orange, yuzu or lemon too. The zest and the tatsoi were working very very well!

I actually served it in a more complex plate as can be seen on the bottom picture, as a request of A. to accompany his bottle of Duhart-Milon 2011, with smoked duck, braised leek, sautéed shiitake and sautéed yakon. Oh! Do you know yakon??? I also recently discovered it… I’ll talk about it next time. In the meantime enjoy your greens, be adventurous with your local products, and have a good rest of the week!

Italy meets Japan again

Saturday I spent some time browsing cookbooks, looking at their beautiful pictures and slowly moving from the winter mood to the spring mood. I was focusing on two very different books: a Japanese macrobiotic cookbook from Brownsfield owner elder daughter Shinema Nakajima, and a Sicilian cookbook by bloggers Maria Teresa di Marco and Marie Cecile Ferre. The first one reminded me its been too long since we last ate brown rice, the second one made me crave for tomatoes, fresh anchovies, fennels and artichokes. But from the mix of both came this very simple recipe of a macrobiotic risotto made from Japanese brown rice and fresh local vegetables. Here is my recipe.

Italian x Japanese risotto (2servings)

– 70g of brown rice

– 3 shiitake

– a handful of fresh rucola

– 3-5 small tomatoes, ripe

– olive oil, salt and pepper

First of all cook the brown rice in the Japanese way. Use left over if you have some.

In a large pan heat some olive oil, wash and slice the shiitake and cook them at low heat in the oil. That will make the base of the risotto stock. Add the rice and stir well, add a 2tbs of water. Then wash and chop the rucola and the tomatoes, add and stir well. Cook for a few minutes while stirring. Add salt and pepper. I served it with daikon pickled with yuzu, that was perfect!!

Making miso again

The time of making miso has come again… and just like last year I went to our neighbors’s S. and W., and made miso with them.

Below⬇︎it’s me equipped for this task with my gears: in the orange furoshiki, a large container with a loose lid that has been sterilized, a bowl and a pestle. On the other hand, freshly cut sasa bamboo to avoid the miso to rot on the top. Leaves only will be used after being sterilized. I was actually really surprised how it worked well last year! Only parts that were not covered got a bit of mold, the rest was perfectly clean!

Now I am ready for a couple of hours In the warmth of the stove, chatting with S. and W., crushing boiled soya beans, mixing with koji and salt, making balls and crushing them in the container… but you know all that since I did it last year!

Now I am again waiting for 1year to try this new miso… but I also learned that 3years miso is very very delicious… can I wait 3years???

Koji
Miso in becoming, ready to wait one year or more under a large stone

Simple food: rice

Though when we were first traveling to Japan about 20 years ago, I would get tired of eating rice 3 times a day after one week, now I think I eat rice not enough and I am never tired of it, be it 3 times a day, every days!

It can be plain white rice with just a pickled plum, konbu, miso or salmon, or more elaborated recipes. Everything is good for me as soon as the rice is good. My favorite rice is Koshihikari, as I’ve earlier said, be it from Tsunan or Isumi. But one thing I love to do is to cook more rice than needed so that the next meal can be prepared rapidly using this extra rice. Because if plain boiled rice is amazingly delicious, sautéed rice is also amazing. I love it prepared with sesame oil, and many different seasonal vegetables, it is as versatile as risotto. This time I cooked it with shiitake, carrots and cabbage, and added some sesame seeds and a few lemon peels from the last lemon of these season. A perfectly light combination for both lunch or dinner where the sesame and the lemon are well balanced and the vegetables textures play with crisp and melt…

How do you like your rice???

Fukinoto miso

I harvested a few fukinoto very early in January, but now is the pick season in Isumi. We have quite a lot growing in the garden, so I just have to walk around where the fuki grow and search under the fallen leaves for the little yellow-green buds. Can you spot them in the below picture???

I usually prepare them in miso soup, but this year There were really many so I decided to prepare some fukinoto miso, a way to keep them for a week or two. Fukinoto miso is delicious with plain Japanese rice, tofu or with grilled pork.

Here is my recipe.

Fukinoto miso (makes a small bin)

– 50-70g of fresh fukinoto

– 6tbs of miso

– 1tsp of sugar

– 1tbs of oil

Wash gently the fukinoto to remove earth and fallen leaves pieces. Chop them in 5-10mm pieces.

In a heated pan with the oil, add the fukinoto and stir gently at medium heat. When all are shiny in oil add the miso and the sugar. Cook at medium low heat for 5min while stirring. Put in a sterilized jar and close with the lid. Eat when cold. Keep refrigerated for 1-2weeks.

Crepes or cookies

I wanted to talk about one or the other in my post today but I decided to do otherwise because my cookies recipe is great but the baking time wasn’t good (I slightly over baked them) so it needs another trial before being shared. And crepes… well… it was Chandeleur on Saturday and I thought about making crepes, but I didn’t have buckwheat flour anymore to make savory crepes so I made a few sweet crepes for tea time, but that’s not something special as I probably make crepes once a month or more. So today I wanted to talk cheese and pizza! Indeed, after all the beautiful sunny days I found some tomatoes at the farmers market. I assume they grew in a green house heated by the winter sun only. They were a beautiful red full of ripeness. I couldn’t resist… after all the winter vegetables, that would be different! They also had a little of rucola too, so instantly the idea of eating an homemade pizza came to my mind. And for that I needed some nice cheese, so we drove up to Takahide farm to buy some mozzarella.

We stayed to see the cows and the heifers, and we came back not only with mozzarella but with a new version of one of my favorite cheese there, in an aged version… simply delicious!!

Oh! For the pizza dough I use always the same recipe as here. It always works perfectly.

Lentil curry

Well well well, it’s getting cold and gloomy today in Tokyo and rain and snow are on the forecast for tonight after weeks of dry and sunny weather… I guess that’s it… every year is basically the same… after the brilliant days of January cold, the gloomier days arrive, colder even… To warm the mind and the body, there is nothing nicer than a hot plate of slightly spicy curry with plenty of vegetables, and to make it a little fancier, replace the rice by lentils. So I made a big pot of it, and used the leftovers for another version with even more vegetables inside and a brighter note of anis seeds. Here are both recipes. Enjoy and keep warm!!!

Lentil curry (2 servings+leftovers for the next recipe )

– 150-200g of brown or green lentils

– 1/3 cabbage

– 2-3 carrots

– 1.5tsp of curry powder

– 3 pieces of thin aburage

Boil the lentils until just soft, but not too much. Drain them. Wash and chop the cabbage and the carrots. Chop the aburage. In a frypan greased slightly and heated start cooking the vegetables. Stir regularly. Add 2cup of water and cook at high heat. When half of the water has evaporated add the curry powder, stir well, and add the aburage. When the water is almost all gone add the lentils, a bit of salt and stir. Serve and eat immediately.

Spinach and potato curry (2 servings)

– leftovers of the above recipe

– 2 potatoes

– a small bundle of spinach

– 1tsp of curry powder

– 1tsp of anis seeds

– 2 pieces of fresh cod (optional)

Peel the potatoes and slice them. Wash and chop the spinach. Chop the cod in bite size and remove bones and skin if any.

In a grease wok or large pan star by cooking the potatoes. When they start to golden add the fish and the lentil curry leftovers. Stir well. Add 1/2 cup of water, the curry powder, the anis seeds, the spinach. Cook at medium to high heat until most of the water is gone. Serve and eat immediately.

A soup version is also possible by adding more water and stopping when the water level is just at the vegetables level.

When I fail… 🚮

Once in a while I make a cooking failure… recently it hasn’t happened much because I master better my kitchen and the products I cook, and I have gained in skills a lot. But when it happens it is always very sad… and last night was one of this saddening moment when you have to face that what you have made with patience and love should end in the trash and nowhere else…

As often of Sunday evening I wanted to bake a quiche. Something I master but it was without counting on one ingredient… I had spinach and kabocha and wanted to use both. I thought that with this cold outside, a warming chestnut flour pie crust would be perfect. So I reached for the bin in the fridge in which I store chestnut flour. I keep most of my flours in the fridge and more particularly this fragile flour that is sensitive to pest infestation and that I cannot find easily in Japan. I usually get my chestnut flour from my parents when they travel to Corsica, or to the country house in the Cevennes.

I was a bit startled by the smell when I opened the bin, but I was just thinking it’s been a while I haven’t smelled chestnut flour and it smells strong… while preparing the dough with olive oil and love things were doing good, the dough was smooth and easy to roll, perfect! I prepared the vegetables and put everything in the oven… and then only I really understood what I feared… the flour was rancid… I didn’t know it could happen but there was no doubt and a quick check on the internet confirmed my diagnosis. I waited until the whole quiche was baked to taste the pie crust. No doubt. The rancid flavor stay in the mouth long, almost disgusting. A. was also trying and same conclusion. Now what… would we die eating rancid baked chestnut flour? Probably not… would we get sick? Maybe… for sure taste wise it was bad. I first decided to save the vegetables and remove the pie crust but the task was tedious, and the result not conclusive. So I had to take this horrible decision to trash the whole thing. I was sad after. All these nice products, the effort to prepare it, and the expected pleasure of eating it once back to Tokyo… and instead we had a very quickly fixed dinner made of whole-wheat spaghetti with grilled swordfish and lemon zest and olive oil dressing. Hopefully there are still a few lemons in the garden and I harvested some before going and I had bought some nice local swordfish Saturday…

I simply grilled the fish in a frypan without any fat, then added the zest of 1/2 lemon topped with olive oil. Boiled the whole wheat spaghetti and served the whole together.

Eating local when expatriated

This question has been in my mind for a very long time anytime I use #localfood or #eatlocal: What does it mean to eat local when you are expatriated and you travel once or more a year to your home country? Does 100% of the ingredients have to be local? If not how much could be alien? To what extent? Behind that there is a question of identity and a question of personal choices.

Traveling home means coming back with a suitcase full of the great local products, right? But these products are not local in the country I live in… they are barely sold here and when a surrogate is, it is usually a poorer quality version… what could beat mum’s olives or fresh ricotta salada from Sicily???…

After a long time carrying pretty much everything, in particular organic whatever… To be honest, I use to bring a real lot of food related things a few years ago. In particular when I started to bake breads and I wanted organic flours, and couldn’t find anything I liked in Japan because I was new to the area and didn’t know where to look at (I also think that baking has become trendy and it is easier now to find the basic products). Now I know that I can find good flours of different types of wheat in Japan, produced locally and organic and that is a great relief not to carry 10-20kg of flour in my suitcases anymore.

I have now switched to bringing back only a few things and in smaller amounts. Mainly products that my mum is making, for example: olive oil with the olives from the garden, bins of black olives in herbs saumure, dry herbs from the garden: thyme, verbena, laurel, juniper… homemade jam with fruits that do not exist in Japan… and a few very local staples bought around to store in the pantry: sea salt from Camargue, chickpea flour, green lentils, dry fruits and when in Italy riso for risotto, farro, polenta, dried porcini, finally there’s always a bit of space for a few fresh products: local cheeses for me and cured meat for A..

So what does it mean “eating local” in this international context???

I realize that as much as I cook Japanese food, I am also attached to my food roots, food from the south of France, food from Italy (I feel Italian food as a part of my roots somehow…) and I was discussing earlier in that post, the cooking that ressemble me best is “half”. So for all the fresh products I use the local circuit, for everything that as a good substitute I use the local products: Japanese flours are great! Mozzarella from Hokkaido is really nice… but Parmigiano sucks when it’s not from Italy!!!

However I try to avoid buying imported products, but rather only use what I can carry with me or sometimes receive as presents… that has been made easier with the fact that it’s been more than 5 years I stopped buying processed, canned or frozen food, and even more (thanks 3/11) that I carefully check the labels to check where products come from. It’s a systematic habit and it doesn’t take more time as labeling in Japan is quite simple and easy to identify and it feels so much better choosing consciously what I eat.

What can be better after a long day at work and a chilly evening than a dish of roasted vegetables from Isumi, with olive oil from my hometown and thyme from my parents garden?

n.b.: I still haven’t shifted for chocolate and black tea…

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