Tag: pickles

Pickled cabbage

This week, our nice little grandma neighbor gave us some salt pickled chinese cabbage. She has offered to teach me how to make it if we like it. Of course we liked it! So next weekend I’m looking forward to learn how to make it. In particular because I like Chinese cabbage but they are too big, and if I buy one we have to eat some for 3 consecutive days of more and I get tired of it. So pickling a part of it seems a very good option to keep it a little longer. And I find actually quite easy to use when pickled, even more than raw. 

Last night I used it in an improved recipe where I found it brings the perfect salty-crunchy taste and texture to a very simple saffron pasta soup. I used 1 cup of small soup pasta, 1 dose of saffron, a little piece of butternut squash peeled, a puece of pickled cabbage thinly cut, a piece of flounder, optional, black pepper.

In a pan I boil 0.75l of water, add the saffron and the butternut squash cut in small cubes, the pasta. Separately I grill the flounder in a fry pan. A minute before the pasta are ready I add the cabbage. Stir well. Serve the pasta/veggies then the fish, add black pepper. That’s it! 

Pickled myoga

Recently I’m experimenting a few new recipes or a few new combinations. Since it’s the season of fresh myoga and we love pickled myoga, I decided to try to make some and found a very simple recipe. This recipe is probably impossible to prepare if you don’t live in Japan or if you don’t have access to some very basic yet not common products, since usually they are homemade. First of all you need 3 or 4 fresh myoga, then you need what I call red “umeboshi juice” but which is in fact called umezu 梅酢 and which is the juice obtained during the making of umeboshi, and the red one is when using red perilla (shiso) to flavor and color the plums. It’s a very pink sour and salty liquid with a delicate plum flavor.Once you’ve got this, then you can prepare pickled myoga. Slice thinly the myoga, put in a jar, add 3 large spoon of umezu. Close the lid, shake well and let sleep for at least 12h. You can keep it for about 4 weeks in the fridge, so you can make much more than just 3 or 4 myoga at a time! Serve as a condiment or a snack.

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.

Autumn meal

I love when I get back to work a bit late (which is to be honest pretty much every day) to open my veggie drawer in the fridge and to find a whole set of fresh things just waiting to be prepared. What and how just naturally flow from my mind and in less than 15min the dinner is almost ready or at least all decided!

This time my fridge had a wide choice of autumn veggies, no surprise there. And I prepared a little mix to accommodate a simple bowl of rice and some pickles. So I just just a red onion, a piece of lotus root, a carrot, a piece of kabocha, some shimeji and a few green pepper. I cooked them in a bit of oil at high heat for a few minutes then under cover at low heat for an other few minutes, finally add a little of soya sauce and serve.

More deal!!!

Remember, last week our little old neighbor gave us some of her special ginger and goya preparation. 

Since I harvested to many persimmons (and there are still plenty to come) and I don’t know what to do with all these, I gave her a few and then she came back with more of her special pickles and preparations. So this week I managed to deal with her to teach me how to prepare the goya and the ginger, so hopefully I’ll share with you that very soon. She also gave us umeboshi and pickled myoga. Super delicious with plain rice! And plum jam. I’m looking forward to June, the harvest season for plums! This time I want to try to make umeboshi too!!!

Thanks a lot Obasan!!!

By the way, if you live in Tokyo and want persimmons, let me know before the birds have them all!!

Sour myoga and shiso pickled plum
Sour myoga and shiso pickled plum

Week end lunch

Funny because I don’t often cook soba on week days, but on week end I realized we eat some quite often!  I love to cook them in a simple manner, neither in soup nor cold with tsuyu, but rather just boiled with a few drops of soya sauce, accompanied with some vegetables and often meat balls. This time it’s simply Japanese pickles (carrot, cucumbee, turnip), and the meat balls are just pork with garden parsley, salt and pepper.

Local products from Tsunan

So, as I was mentioning before, I packed a lot of local products from Niigata prefecture and more particularly from Tsunan machi. The area is famous for its rice, a little of buckwheat and since they grow a lot of vegetables there is also delicious pickles, and to make them the 2-5-8, a preparation much easier to use then nuka, and that gives delicious salty pickles. I’ll tell you more about soon.

Rice flour, buckwheat flour and 2-5-8
Rice flour, buckwheat flour and 2-5-8

I also like very much the pollen and chestnut tree honey made in Akiyamago by a local producer. And while visiting some artwork we found some nice “sarunashi” (berry kiwi), a sort of wild tiny kiwi, with a taste close to rhubarb, homemade jam. 

Pollen, honey and berry kiwi jam
Pollen, honey and berry kiwi jam

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