Fresh home-made food every day
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.
A pure bowl of yumminess! With quinoa simply boiled, baby leaf salad, diced avocado and dried salted konbu (shio konbu – 塩昆布), and the juice of a local lime for a late Friday evening dinner in the country. I love shio konbu, it accomodates very well with Japanese and non Japanese dishes. It tastes slightly like salted licorice, and I am still imagining ways to use it in my recipes.
In my quest of an ever changing breakfast menu, I decided to try to make soya flour thick pancakes. It is as simple as making soya flour pancakes but the fluffiness obtain with the thick layer of dough is really changing the whole experience. For this recipe I used a mix of white flour and soya flour (only soya flour makes a strange consistency), 2 eggs, 1 pack of baking powder, a bit of brown caster sugar and a bit of salt and water. After stirring well all the ingredients, in a greased heated pan I form the dough in metal circle and cooked at low heat until the top is almost not moist anymore, then fliffed the crumpets with the circles and cook a few minutes more. Delicious with any kind of topping!
Sometimes (often) I don’t have much time to prepare dinner so I really like to prepare sautéed fresh seasonal vegetables (carrot, lotus root, potato, okra), and this time I accompanied them with a fluffy tofu omelet. Yes fluffy again, after yesterday’s pancakes recipe!
In a bater I mixed 3 eggs and a block of silky tofu roughly drained, and beat well. I cooked it in a frypan under cover at medium heat both sides until golden.
A new variation of a classic bread: buckwheat and plain flour bread. It is really simple it consists in replacing half of the flour by buckwheat flour and add a little more yeast. It has a subtle taste perfect for breakfast.
An other of my simple vegan dinner, this time 100% Japanese. With a konbu dashi miso soup with tofu and myoga and a bowl of rice topped with sauteed veggies: shishito, carrots, burdock and potato. No seasonning, just the pure delicious taste of each ingredient.
The other day we went to Aoyama to pick up our new car and we stopped for lunch on our way in a little passage in Aoyama dori with food trucks and cafe barracks celebrating the chia seed week. Don’t ask me what it is, I didn’t really get the point, none of of the food served was using chia, probably some promotional event…
Still, they serve some decent vegan food and serve some drink, this is where we tried the apple-ginger cider. It was made out of French sparkling apple juice and ginger syrup, and quite good, though a little too sweet, so I decided to try making some today and invented my own recipe.
I had some fresh ginger root, so I made a syrup out of it by cutting into small bits one large root. I boiled it into 1/3L of water where I added some block sugar, once the syrup was ready I just let it cool down. For the apple juice, I don’t have a juicer, so I couldn’t make my own apple juice, so I bought some natural basic apple juice. And same for the sparkling water, just soda water. I mixed then in the following proportions: 1/4L of ginger syrup where I left the cubes of gingers for a better taste, but you can filter; 1/3L of apple juice and 1/3L of soda water. If you like you can serve with ice cube, I like it at room temperature.
Back to our routine, lot of work and week end in the country. Saturday morning tennis and one-bowl lunch.
Today the market was really good, edamame, green beans, lots of fruits… So the lunch bowl was really simple: chick peas, edamame, green beans, cucumber, sesame seeds, with lemon juice and olive oil; and for the proteines chicken and black pepper balls. Simple, delicious.
After being away from home for more than 10 days I’m really happy to be back to my kitchen. After eating out a lot (even though recently it’s been easier to find simple food in restaurants in France) I really need to get back to my basic diet. As soon as we were done with unpacking, I went down for grocery shopping, grabbed some fresh Japanese mushrooms: shimeji and maitake (kind of oyster mushroom), and some sprouts. I cooked some plain rice, grilled the mushroom in a pan with a bit of butter, add just before serving some sesame seeds and a drop of soya sauce, and served the whole as a vegan donburi.
In the following weeks you’ll see that while in France I packed a few ingredients I love and still can’t find easily in Tokyo, some herbs from my parents’ garden in Aix, some flour for baking bread, tones of quinoa… and I’m really looking forward to using them!
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.
