Tag: local product

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.

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!

I knew it…

Well… while this week has been crazy busy with work, I also was very excited with my sourdough experiment… and things turned out almost as I expected they would… with utter fun when Lois grew and foamed and in utter disappointment when it stopped, finishing in a nauseous mess that stunk like I couldn’t imagine it would. Sourdough is not for me, I knew it…

Lois on the 2nd day, gently bubbling

I read books, blogs, websites about sourdough before starting (it took me 5 years to get ready for the commitment!!!!) and while I was observing it growing. I wanted to do right, not to waste precious time and resources. Then I was almost desperate when it started to stink, read even more about all the possible tricks, tested them all: sugar, malt, fridge, not fridge, more food, more mixing, rest, splitting it and starting afresh… nothing seemed to have worked truly. Almost 1kg of mixture went down the drain in a terrible smell. The rest is sitting in the kitchen in a desperate hope I can still save it. The smell is gone but no foaming and bubbling as I thought it would… part of the passive mixture was used for pancakes this morning…

But before things went south I had on the third day just enough to make a tiny bread to test it when it was still good! And damned! Even if I rushed it a bit ( temperature went down with the rain so the rising was too slow for the impatient me!) the crust was perfectly crusty, the crumbs were moist and soft, and the taste of whole wheat and sourdough was amazing. Enough to keep me trying to save what is left of Lois… so now I am in this terrible situation where I want to stop hoping I can grew a stable relationship with my sourdough, but I can’t take the final decision to trash it all, as the taste of sourdough bread was so perfect…

Lois

It’s been more than 5 years that I bake weekly or more and since the beginning I was tempted by preparing my own sourdough starter, but the traveling back and forth between Tokyo and Isumi and our almost monthly business trips abroad stopped me from doing it… yet I never fully abandoned the idea, and recently I got a bit disappointed with dry yeast. Even using respectus panis proportions, I felt I couldn’t control the yeast. One day it bubbles in 30min like crazy, the next, even after 2h I barely see a difference… Then, I had long discussions with my best friend M. about sourdough and bread making, saw how sourdough breads look much nicer, with darker crust and soft and moist crumble on IG, and to finish convincing me I should try, I read Robin Sloane’s Sordough and not that the novel convinced me to have my own sourdough, rather it made me more intrigued with this strange life-of-its-own thing. Since we probably won’t be traveling at all this year, and we have 4 days in Isumi, so I just decided it was time to try.

So here is Lois, my sourdough starter in the making… just freshly mixed: 50g of whole wheat flour and 50g of water… well… now, see you in 3 days hopefully with some bubbling…

An old recipe

Making a quiche requires quite many ingredients. First flour and butter for the dough, then eggs and milk or cream fir the egg base and finally something to put in: vegetables, bacon, fish, cheese… then it takes 30-40min to bake it to perfection. It’s not something you prepare and serve 20min after you’ve started cooking.

But one day, when I was rather young and staying at my best friend’s house, her mother made a quiche, or rather what in French we call a savory tart with minimum ingredients and cooking time: the mustard tart. Back in France many people buy ready-to-use rolled pie crust so this makes it even simpler, but here what is stunning is the baking time. Because there is no egg base, it is really short.

Unfortunately the original recipe is all about cheese, and this doesn’t work for A. so I barely cook mustard tarts, until the other day when I decided to replace his share of cheese by thinly sliced local sausages. He had his meat, I had my cheese and everyone was happy to have lunch ready in no time!!!

So if you want to try, here is the original recipe and my recipe:

Mustard tart (classic)

  • flour, butter, water for one pie crust
  • 2 large and ripe tomatoes
  • 2tbs of mustard
  • 1-2 handful of grated emmental or gruyere cheese

Prepare the dough and roll for a 30cm low pie dish. Spread the mustard. Wash and thinly slice the tomatoes, sprinkle the cheese. Bake at 200deg until the cheese os melted and slightly golden. That’s it!!!

Mustard tart (meaty version half/half)

  • flour, butter, water for one pie crust
  • 2 large and ripe tomatoes
  • 2tbs of whole grain mustard (makes the whole milder)
  • 1 handful of grated emmental or gruyere cheese
  • 2-4 little sausages

Proceed exactly as above but just slice the sausages, sprinkle them on one half, and the cheese on the other. It is really that simple!!!

Edamame and eggplant

Whether on weekdays, when we have little time to have lunch or on the weekends when we are busy with surfing/bodyboarding, playing tennis or gardening, having a good lunch easily ready is important. Moreover, if that can be prepared in advance it is even better! Fresh pasta have been quite a good candidate as they can be accommodated easily, be eaten warm or cold… and since it it is the end of the summer we want to continue enjoying the summer vegetables a little longer, in particular, enjoy the last edamame of the season. I know that we will have eggplants and tomatoes for quite a few weeks or even months but they add a real summer touch to a dish. So I came up with a recipe of edamame pasta with eggplant that is all creamy and divine and I couldn’t wait sharing that recipe with you, as if you want to try you’ll have to hurry!

Edamame, fava beans, and similar are a good match with eggplants and are traditionally used together in Japanese cuisine. I revisited this classic combination in a more western style.

Edamame and eggplant creamy pasta (2 servings)

  • a handful of edamame
  • 2 eggplants
  • fresh pasta
  • olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • grated Parmigiano (optional)

Boil the edamame, grill the eggplants to be able to peel them. Once the edamame have cooled down peel them completely and in a mortar puree them. Add a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Peel the eggplant and add to the mix and pure roughly. Boil the fresh pasta, once drained add the mix, stir well ad serve. Add grated Parmigiano if you like.

Yes! that’s it! Isn’t that simple? And you’ll see it is truly delicious!

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