Tag: one-plate

Continuing with Japanese one-plates

For weekend lunches I love to prepare one-plate or one-bowl lunches. They are simple to prepare, well balanced and fun to eat. Since we spend most of our weekend outdoors they are a perfect break. I usually use Japanese rice as the starting point and decline with two or free more items. For this plate I prepared rice served with umeboshi, a tomato-avocado-sesame salad, and kabocha croquettes. I served it with grilled sausages for A. who likes meat. 

Kabocha and wheat bran croquettes: 

– 1/3 of kabocha, steamed

– 3tbs of wheat bran

– 3tbs of vegetal oil for cooking  

Once the kabocha is steamed, mash it  to a thick purée. Split the quantity in four and make balls or oblong shapes. Roll them in the wheat bran. Heat the oil in a fry pan and cook the croquettes at high heat, turn them regularly until golden everywhere. Have a beautiful Sunday!

Dinner one-plate

Some brown rice left over? The perfect base for a one-plate dinner. I oven grilled some white eggplants marinated in a bit of olive oil and added plenty of fresh coriander; grilled some horse mackerel pieces and added some fried beet on top of the rice. A bit of kosher salt and here is a perfect dinner after a long day at work. Quick, simple, colorful and tasty! What else? 

Simple Japanese one-plate

Well, Japanese is may be a little to much but at least it’s Japanese taste and local products! I don’t like fatty meat but I must say that pork belly is always perfect to flavor simple vegetables. It’s very easy to find thin slices of pork belly in Japan, they ressemble a lot bacon slices. They are perfect for cocotte cooking for the bottom layer. Once they are cooked and the fat has melted it is a perfect base for cooking vegetables. It goves an incredible taste. Most of the time I use it mainly as flavoring and don’t eat the meat myself (A. does) but when the fat has completely disappeared and the meat gets crunchy then I don’t mind eating it! I actually find it quite good!!! It’s nice also because it’s perfect any time with seasonal vegetables. This time I cooked capsicums and in the end of the cooking added green beans cut in 3cm bites and finally deglazed in soya sauce. Delicious with plain white rice!

And a last one!

Yup! I’m done with this grant application and with many other things that were bothering me and keeping me too busy at work. So here is the last one-plate of this series, the last just before finishing the grant things. From tomorrow I will be back to some more elaborate cooking and trsting new products that I have on the shelf for a while but wasn’t decided to try yet. 

So on the plate today: raw radish and cucumber, bamboo shoots, fried tofu, rice with sesame and grilled carrots. 

And an other one

Indeed, I am still crazy busy at work with this grant application, but hopefully it should be all done today. In the meantime we still need to sustain ourselves and the Japanese one-plate is on the menu again with an unexpected variation. Indeed, I prepared the green beans with miso and the pickled onions, but we have some fresh simmered small bamboo shoot on the plate now, that I didn’t prepare! 

There exist two types of bamboo shoots, the big one I’ve been cooking quite often because you can find them everywhere and the small one that are more let’s say “wild” and that one needs to pick in the forest. Picking bamboo shoot is a real fun sport, basically it’s hiking and them crawling in bamboo groves. We’ve had the chance to go bamboo shoots picking with our friends from Tsunan once and it was really awesome. Like wild mushrooms picking it takes some time to figure what to pick and to know the good spots. Unfortunately in Isumi we don’t know yet these spots and people keep them secret, like everywhere!! But one of the guy we met on the tennis court came to bring us some small bamboo shoot simmered with sesame oil. There is something here quite unique with Japanese, is that they love to offer us food they make and local products. I think it goes together with this tradition of food souvenir etc… I need to do some research about that! 

Anyway that’s how we ended with a perfect Japanese one-plate, with only fresh and delicious local products.

Japanese one plate

It looks
a lot like a French dish or an anywhere dish: seasonal vegetables slightly
sautéed and oven grilled cod. But I gave it a Japanese twist by glazing the
vegetables in soya sauce, a bit of sugar and mirin, and by covering the fresh
cod with a thin layer of red miso. It doesn’t take more time to prepare and it
definitely change from the olive oil sautéed. In particular the taste of red
miso is perfect with all the vegetables. How to cook Japanese without cooking
Japanese!!!

New plates and colorful one-plate

You may have noticed that new plates have suddenly appeared since Saturday. Watching to many beautiful plates on IG I thought it was high time to renew our plates, to offer different plating options. After looking for quite some time and not being able to find exactly what I wanted I finally opted for simple Arita yaki (Japanese ceramics) with a white smooth inner side and a rough black outter side, not as refuned and beautiful as the one I was having in mind, yet simple and so far very easy to use. The right portion size too if you don’t use a ton of salad!!! So to inaugurate them I prepared one of my favorite dish: seasonal veggies sautéed and creamy scrambled eggs. The veggies are new potatoes from our neighbours garden, little carrots, green beans, and jumbo radished. Simple as usual but really delicious. And I find the new plates really easy to use and not bad for plating, knowing that my own ability is quite limited!!

Improvised dinner for friends

Our friends visiting from Germany spent the weekend with us in Tokyo with daytime busy visiting the city, museums, flea markets, and kabuki, trying some nice cafes too, and evening at home, I’ve cooked for them Japanese as much as possible but not only, in particular for an improvised late dinner at home after a long day out and a fridge almost empty. So I opted for a potatoes and baby spinach salad with tofu and poached egg and topped with sunflower seds and flax seeds. Simple, ready in 10min and delicious!!

One plate lunch

Despite being officially spring, this weekend has been rather cloudy and chilly so I wanted to prepare a warm dish for lunch,  I first boiled some green lentils, added with a few coral lentils too hoping the color will sustain, but it vanished in the green (learn your lesson, better boil them separately). Then I prepared some ashitaba (angelica) rolls with pork meat. I find that ashitaba goes very well with potatoes and pork, and also eggs (see my post on ashitaba here).
It’s very simple, you need some fresh ashitaba, thin slices of pork cutlet, one egg battered, bread crumbs. Roll a little bundle of ashitaba into a slice of pork, then pass it into the egg and finish with the bread crumbs. I fixed with a little toothpick and then cook them in a fry-pan with a bit of oil until golden.
For the vegetarian version (the one on the top of the plate in the picture), cut the the ashitaba roughly, mix with the egg and the bread crumbs and make some patties that you cook in the fry-pan too. I served it with the warm lentils and a few tomatoes. Bon appetite!

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

Up ↑

Verified by MonsterInsights