Fresh home-made food every day
Delicious for a rainy day like today, I made an apple and chai cake with big apple from Aomori I bought at the coop market. For the chai I made a mix of cinnamon powder, cardamom seeds and fresh gratted ginger. The rest is just flour, baking powder, brown sugar and a bit of vegetal oil. All stired well and baked 30min at 170deg. Served with chai tea for breakfast or tea.
Again mushrooms on the menu and sure more to come! I simply love them all! This time a big combo of shiitake, white shimeji, maitake, mushrooms, eringi slightly sautéed, then mix with tofu and eggs and set in a chesnut flour dough. Topped with a bit of grilled bacon if you like. A delicious tart with sweetness and crispiness of the chestnut dough that perfectly contrasts with the filling!
Perfectly sunny days, chilly wind in the morning and in the evening, warm temperature during the day, beautiful colors and beautiful light,
Yes! Autumn is here and it’s beautiful in Japan! Before the leaves turn red there is yet so much to enjoy! While Europe is turning gloomy, rainy and cold, Japan is bright, quiet and perfectly warm. Probably the best season to visit the country.
And with autumn coming fruits and veggies are slightly changing, fish too. Sanma, green yuzu, matsutake, lotus roots, sweet potato, kabocha, kaki… are now the most available seasonal ingredients and I love to cook them!
I love to prepare autumn veggies sautéed in a wok for lazy lunch or dinner. So simple, so colorful and so yummy. The one on the picture is just made out one sweet potato, one carrot, a quarter of kabocha, and a handful of shimeji, a bit of oil and salt. Served alone or to accompany something, all option are possible!
We are weeks before Christmas and this year again I plan to bake the traditional pompe à l’huile for everyone. So right now once in a while I bake one just to polish my recipe. And I think I got it right this time! The pompe à l’huile is a traditional Christmas dessert in Provence. It is often mistaken with Gibassier. Pretty much every family has a recipe or a preference. Pompe brioche, with orange, with neroli, with anise… In our family we like a thin rather dry one, with neroli and a bit of orange peels.
Since it is an olive oil base dough it is extremely easy to knead and with the neroli it smells extremely good. A real pleasure to prepare!
For a 30cm pompe à l’huile I used: 180g of flour (regular flour not the strong one), 6g of dry yeast, 3g of salt, 35g of brown caster sugar, 60g of water, 75g of olive oil, 1 table spoon of neroli, a few candied orange peels, or a zest of orange.
I mix all the ingredients and add the orange peels in the last few minutes of kneading. I knead until the dough is smooth and soft as usual. Then I wait for 2 to 4 hours depending on the room temperature before shaping it. I roll the dough in a circle, cut and if you want you can strech the dough so that the cuts open loose for 1 cm. Then wait for a few hours before baking at 180deg until it goldens. While still hot with a cooking brush apply a thin layer of olive oil.
No better excuse than a typhoon to induldge with a cup tea and a piece of cake. The other day I bought beautiful limes in Ohara, so I decided to use them and make a lime cake, then I found a little piece of ginger in the fridge and found that it’d be the perfect combination. Et voila! How the lime and ginger cake recipe was written and executed.
I mixed half flour and half corn starch, baking powder, brown caster sugar, a bit of oil, eggs, stired well. Added the zest of one large lime, and the juice too. Added the gratted ginger (a little piece is enough). Stirred well again. Greased a cake pan, put the dough in, baked in the oven at 150~180deg until golden. Ate with a nice cup of Earl Grey. And kept the rest for breakfast!!!
I like okara very much but we don’t eat some too often. For this recipeI wanted to prepare a 100% vegan meal and I come with the idea of a sort of galette. I mixed okara with finely cut tomatoes, fresh green beans slightly boiled, flax and sesame seeds, and salt. I shaped them in round and grilled them in the oven until the top it slightly roasted. I was very much pleased with the sweetness and juiciness of the tomato contrasting with the crunchy beans and flax seeds. It was hard to fell the sesame taste. I regretted not to have used tahine or suri-goma (crunched sesame seeds) for more flavor instead of just the seeds. But I’m fairly happy with this use of okara.
With autumn slowly making its way, and a typhoon winds rattling outside, mushrooms start to be a must of the season. Not that there are so many wild mushroom on the markets in Japan, but still autumn is for me a great season to enjoy mushrooms. After my 100% Japanese dish with mushrooms 2 weeks ago, now it’s a more international recipe, yet as simple. First replace the Japanese rice by quinoa. Second mix different types of mushrooms: shimeji, maitake and nameko, and instead of adding soy sauce just add salt once grilled.
With endless variations and always the best seasonnal veggies, a tart is always a perfect meal.
My veggie tart today contains the last green beans and the last broad beans of the season, a handful of edamame, one yellow sweet pepper and one tomato. I prepared the dough with a mix of buckwheat and spelt flour, and olive oil. Except the edamame that I boiled a few minutes, if not they are hard to peel, I just use raw ingredients. Simple and delicious.
The basil in the garden seems to enjoy very much the rainy weather and it’s growing gigantic, so I went to cut some and was thinking about preparing a simple dish of pasta with basil and tomato. But then it turned out in a new ravioli recipe!
I peeled a large tomato (you’ll actually need 2 or 3) and then cooked in a pan with a tiny bit of olive oil and some salt, until I obtained something close to condensed tomato. While the tomato was getting ready I prepared my usual dough recipe (100g of flour, 1 egg, a bit of salt and olive oil) and washed the basil and chopped it, and added it to the dough. This why I didn’t add water in the dough, the moist came mainly from the basil. I knead well and then pass it in my pasta machine untill it was thin enough (7 on my machine). I prepared two versions one with plain tomato for my husband, and one parmegiano-tomato for me. I have some delicious vintage parmegiano brough from Italy, so I gratted some and mixed it with the tomato sauce. On the dough I lined a little quantity of filling, then lay an other layer of dough. And then made the ravioli. I am not very well equipped for making beautiful ravioli, so mine are pretty irregular. I just finally boiled them in salted and oiled water and served them with a little of olive oil. Super delicious. I was really surprised by how much we can appreciate the taste of the three ingredients: basil, tomato, parmegiano in my ravioli, a perfect balance that is usually not so easy to obtain with just tomato-basil pasta.
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