Fresh home-made food every day
Et voila! Busy weeks, long working hours, the one-plate dinner is back!!!
Quinoa and bulgur for the energy, salad for the green, cherry tomatoes for the red, momendofu (hard tofu) for the white and a little shiso omelet fr the taste. Seasonned with just olive oil and we’re set.
Remember to always drain your tofu, and cook the omelet under cover at slow eat to avoid the flipping task!
After a whole week in the US, I was cruelly missing Japanese rice and Japanese food. So I fixed this little dinner with rice, green peas and green shiso and shoyu-grilled Tachiuo fish (beltfish). Simple and perfect!
The rice is just steamed, in the last few minutes I add the fresh green peas, and just before serving I add chopped green shiso leaves. The fish is grilled in the oven with a bit of soya sauce and served immediately.
After a whole week in Seattle, it’s good to be back home. Though the city has numerous farmers markets, with very attractive food, the hotel life allows only for limited purchases and preparation. There are also a lot of food trucks but honestly the idea of having lunch standing or seated like punks in the street is not very attractive, though the food looks good. As for restaurants, food was ok, fresh but I didn’t find anything outstanding. The best we had was surely grilled salmon or grilled halibut with asparagus. There might be some nice places serving local food (not limited to seafood, which is not what I like best) but we couldn’t find them… It’s really a pity because driving around Seattle one can find again tones of organic farms selling their products, fruits, veggies, delicious yogurts…
So being back home it is time to go back to the kitchen and improvise some summer recipes with fresh food and light enough to beat the jetlag and the heat. So we’re back to the basics: quinoa and bulgur as a base, baby leaf salad, cherry tomatoes and cucumber, yellow zucchini, ocra, and to finish pumpkin seeds, flax seeds and white chia seeds. Back on the tracks!!
When summer starts I love a good piece of bread with fresh vegetables and why not a barbecue. My favorite bread for that time is focaccia, and even better rosemary focaccia. It’s so easy to make and with a delicious olive oil it’s just too good!!!
To make a focaccia you just need fresh rosemary roughly cut, a fruity olive oil, flour, yeast, water and salt just like for gbe fougasse. But the preparation of the bread when shaping it is slightly different (just as on the picture). And the final touch is to fill the finger holes with olive oil before baking for 20 minutes.
While in Capetown last year, thanks to our hosts at the Manolo we managed to have a table at the very demanded Test Kitchen. One of Capetown best restaurants, and sometimes ranked in the top 10 xorld’s best restaurants. The experience was great abd what I apprfciated a lot is their flexibility to propose vegetarian full course and vegan full course menus that have nothing less than the regular full course menu. I picked the vegetarian one and was delighted, in particular there was some mini fried tofu balls presented as tofu fallafels. With a crispy deep fried outter shell and a melty inside. Since then I’ve been thinking about it and finally I’ve finally come up with my own idea of a soya fallafel. What I like in the fallafel is the mixture of texture with roughly cut peas and the pureed ones. So my recipe is really simple: I used dry soya beans (daizu-大豆) that I rehydrated and boiled, then roughly blended them and add some firm tofu, stirred well and then made balls and fried in a pan (probably deep frying is ideal).
Though different than the fallafel from the Test kitchen in Capetown it was really delicious!
In Japan, fish is really delicious and it is not so difficult to find fresh wild fishes from safe places. Spending time in Chiba’s prefecture Sotobo we have access to really amazing products, when the weather allows it. Recently flounder has been really abundant. And with my parents visiting us I must prepare a lot more non vegetarian food than usual. So I prepared this flounder just grilled, with fava, beans and snap peas for lunch on the wok with olive oil. Very simple, fresh and seasonal, all I love!
Of all meals breakfast is my favorite and I like all of its variations. I also like that my breakfast changes everyday, even if there are some common ingredients. Bread or similar and fresh fruits in salad, smoothy, or just plain are on the menu everyday.
I baked this wholewheat soft bread that accomodates perfectly with jam, honey, butter or cheese. It’s very similar to wholewheat pain de mie but because my covered pie dish was too big the bread occupied only half of it and the result was really delicious with a thin crispy layer covering the soft and tender center.
For the bread it’s really simple. I used 250g of T150 flour, 180g of water, 13g of sordough, 1g of yeast, 5g of salt.
As spring fades away and summer approaches (and with it the rainy season) I’ve started to prepare a lot more dishes that look like ratatouille or at least that use the vegetables of the ratatouille.
I prepared a sauted dish in olive oil of new onion, paprika, zucchini and tomatoes, added some dices tofu and topped it with some fresh cresson and a mix of linen, poppy, sesame seeds. Very fresh, the vegetables don’t need to be cooked long, so this can be ready in no time.
Super busy with work, finishing late every day and trying to still watch one movie every night, the one-plate dinner is really handy. I am also finishing the last spring vegetables as we’re moving towards summer, so I had a few new carrots and new onions to use. I like to prepare carrots with cumin and find it suits also very well chick peas. I was about to add some chick peas to the carrots and onions that I cooked rapidly in olive oil and finished them in their own steam, to prepare some kind of raggu when I remember having a pack of vegan fallafel mix waiting on the shelf for months. Yes, I sometime buy vegan burger mix and vegan fallafel mix but if I don’t use them right away, I usually forget them prefering fresh food or making my own mix. So I decided to use that poor mix, but instead of making real fallafel I used the mix to make some kind of grilled chick pea croquettes to serve with the vegetables. Nothing too fancy but delicious!
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