Tag: seasonal

Potato salad with Japanese flair

I often forget how much we love boiled potatoes. I always have the impression it takes longer to prepare than other ingredients and usually our carbs end up being either pasta, or rice, or a dough of any kind: a quiche, a pie, a stuffed bread etc… You can argue that making a quiche or stuff bread takes more time than boiling and peeling potatoes and you are absolutely right!!!!

So, once in a while I remember how much we love them and boil a few. And when the season of cucumber is at its peak I love to make potato salad.

One can think of so many variations of potato salad that two are never the same! Once thing that I really love is the mix boiled potatoes and hard boiled eggs, and since I had a lot of fresh green shiso leaves I decided to prepare a potato salad with Japanese flavors. It was simple and quick to prepare, nourishing and tasty. I highly recommend you try it!!!

Potato salad with Japanese flavors (2 servings as one plate dish)

  • 8 potatoes (ping pong ball size)
  • 1 Japanese cucumber
  • 2 eggs
  • 5 leaves of shiso
  • 1tsp of soya sauce
  • 2tbs of olive oil

Boil the potatoes, and the eggs. Once cool peel the potatoes and cut in two or four. Peel the eggs and chop them. Wash and slice thinly the cucumber. Wash and chisel the shiso leaves. In a bowl put everything, add the olive oil and the soya sauce. Stir well and enjoy!

Coral lentils spicy stew

I love lentils of all sorts, but when I see coral lentils on a shelf, I can’t help being attracted by their beautiful color. And every time I forget that the color will somehow fade away when cooked (contrarily to some fancy pictures you see on the internet… or they have a well kept secret…)

So I usually get excited starting cooking them and thinking about the beautifully colored dish… and 20 minutes later… damned! It’s yellowish brownish… Nonetheless the recipe I came with yesterday was really delicious, and worth remembering. So let me share it with you.

Coral lentils spicy stew (2 servings as whole meal)

  • 100g of coral lentils
  • 5 little potatoes
  • 1 onion
  • 1 eggplant
  • 1tsp of curry powder
  • 1tsp of turmeric
  • Ground black pepper
  • Salt

In a large pan put the lentils and cover generously with water. Cook at low heat for 15min or until the water is gone.

Peel the potatoes, cut them in 4. Cut the onion in bites, and the eggplant. Add to the lentils. Almost cover with water, add the spices, salt and pepper and cook at medium to low heat for 10min, or until the water is almost gone. Serve and enjoy!!

Summer…

Damn I love summer, the heat, the cicadas, the trips to the beach and all the summer foods!!!

Another year without travel has taken us to our usual refuge for the holidays, where we’ve been spending more and more time thanks to telework. Escaping for one full week Tokyo’s heat, the Olympics fuss, and the again increasing rate of contaminations is just perfect.

Holidays are usually spent between morning and afternoon surf sessions, playing tennis, when the weather allows, gardening (we’re expanding our garden so there is quite a bit of work to prepare the new plot soil, as we plan to use it as an orchard and kitchen garden partly), talking, reading and sleeping a lot, and cooking less than I always originally want…

I must say that the fresh fruits and vegetables are so delicious eaten just the way they are that it doesn’t invite to be creative!!! Simple melons, blueberries, blackberries, and now the nashi season has also started… though in the past I tried some nashi tart and baking them, I love them just the way they are… simply peeled and eaten just out of the fridge, that’s when their cold and sweetly perfumed juice is so refreshing! (Top picture)

Breakfasts = fresh fruits and sourdough breads

The one thing I steadily do is baking breads and tarts and quiches. Whole wheat, buckwheat, plain, seeds, focaccia, pizza… everything is good for my sourdough! And blueberries tart are also a favorite at home!

I’ve been also making quite a bit of skewers. Simple but easy to serve and grill in a pan… fish, chicken breast, pork filet… everything is good! My favorite is to roll the fish or the meat in green shiso leaves, that for sure feels like summer. Shiso everywhere! Topping a salad, in white rice…

For our new plot, I hope we could try to turn this desert land into a permaculture forest garden… my experience and skills in growing a kitchen garden are rather close to zero but I really would love to have one of these beautiful forest gardens that populate Instagram… one day maybe… but planning is fun anyway.

  • Surfin’
  • New plot

Enjoy your summer!!

Summer

The end of the rainy season coincides with the beginning of the true summer days. The cicadas start singing full blast, the dusks and the dawns vibrate with the beautiful and typical sounds of the かなかな蟬kanakanamushi (Tanna Japonensis), probably above all my favorite animal sound… the humidity goes slightly away and the heat climbs up to another level… it’s a short time of the year that lasts just a very few weeks, before the typhoons arrive. The heat brings some kind of slowness to our home, and some restlessness because all I think about is going swimming. But there is much to do too.

What do you think is the very first thing I do when the rainy season ends in Japan?

Well… it’s easy, it’s drying my umeboshi. Gently taking them out of the brine on a nice morning one by one and lining them in the sun. Turning them and doing it another day. I must say that I am getting better at picking plums and the worries of the first attempt are now all gone and I am more confident. This year for the first time I also added red shiso to some and I am quite please with the result.

So if you had pickled plums this year, it’s gonna be about time to dry them and enjoy them. Keep the brine for the summer energy drink. Add a bit to a large glass of water to pack on salt and minerals.

Amaranth leaves – ヒユ菜

Every time I think I have seen all the possible greens they grow in Isumi, every time I happily discover a new one. I am most attracted by greens and naturally when I see a new leaf on a shelf I can’t help buying it.

This time our local farmers market surprised me with hiyuna – ヒユ菜 apparently amaranth leaves. A nice green leaf, very tender and mild in taste. It is so mild in taste that I found it fits perfectly western cuisine, despite its Chinese origins! While most recipes I found were stir fry pr soup, I used the nice green leaves for omelette or pasta sauces. A bit like spinach. No wonder why one of their name is Chinese spinach!! And a rapid look at its nutritional value showed that this little leaf is packed with iron, potassium and several vitamins, another good reason to enjoy it.

I also found it was easy to prepare, and it goes very well with eggplants as in the picture below. And with tomatoes as in the other picture below. Enjoy if you find some!!!

Japanese simplicity

Who said that cooking Japanese cuisine was complex???

I have the simplest and most delicious recipe of miso soup for you today and an ultra easy ochazuke recipe. Of course both require basic Japanese ingredients: dashi, and miso for the first one, and Japanese rice, dashi and umeboshi for the second one. Indeed now is the time rice harvesting in Isumi is just finished new rice of this year harvest is now available. Delicious brown rice, slowly cooked to be just perfectly soft goes perfectly well in ochazuke recipes I find, almost better than plain white rice.

For the dashi of both recipes you can choose from katsuobushi, ichiban dashi, konbu dashi or shiitake dashi. Personally I love ichiban dashi. Ichiban dashi 一番だし is a basic in Japanese cuisine and particularly in cha-kaiseki 茶懐石, so I mostly make ichiban dashi, so let’s start with its recipe.

Ichiban dashi – 一番だし

  • 1L of water
  • 15g of katsuobushi blakes (not too thin)
  • 15g of konbu

In a pan set 1cm of water, add the konbu and bring to a boil at low heat for 10min. Add the bonito and the rest of the water. Keep boiling at low heat for 5 minutes. Let rest and filter. Your ichiban dashi is ready, you can use it as a base for soup, cooking vegetables, fish, tofu, rice etc…

With the dashi made, we can then move to the other recipes. First the eggplant miso soup. Then below the ochazuke.

Eggplant miso soup (for two servings)

  • 2 little Japanese eggplants
  • 1 tbs of miso
  • 600ml of dashi
  • a bit of neutral frying oil

Wash and cut the eggplants (see top picture fir cut). In a frypan greased with the frying oil, cook the eggplants until just golden and soft, serve then evenly in two large miso soup bowls.

Heat your dashi if it was prepared ahead, or use the one you just prepared. Top the eggplants with the dashi. Set half a tbs of miso in each and stir gently. That’s it!!!

Simple ochazuke (2 servings)

  • 1 cup of Japanese brown rice or white rice cooked
  • 400ml of dashi
  • 2 pickled plums
  • 1 bundle of komatsuna or other green (water spinach, spinach…)

Serve the rice in a large bowl. Heat the dashi. In the meantime wash the green vegetable, cut in 5cm long and blanche. Drain well.

Top the rice with the vegetables, then serve the dashi, add the pickled plum. That’s it!

Have a good day!!!

Purple potatoes soup

Continuing the week with a recipe that this time uses only purple ratte potatoes, that is simple, delicious and beautiful: a cold creamy soup.

All you need is a few purple potatoes, some fresh cream or milk, salt and pepper. Yes! That’s the only ingredients in my recipe.

Cold potatoes soup

– 3 purple ratte potatoes (vitellote)

– 150ml of cream or cream

– salt and pepper

Wash the potatoes and boil them until very soft (actually if you do it a couple of hours before it is even better as the potatoes will cool down naturally and you won’t have to cool them under excessive water or in the fridge!).

Blend the potatoes with 300ml the cooking water, or just water, add the cream or milk, blend again. If too thick add a bit of water and blend again. Repeat until it has a creamy texture. Serve, top with salt and pepper.

That’s it!!

Fava beans gyoza

I could have started a “fava beans week” and write everyday a new recipe using them, whether Japanese, Italian or French… but I was alone these days, A. traveling again for work, and my work is kind of busy… a lot of things have suddenly started to move forward since February, after months if not years waiting for that… yet everything decided to move at the same time so my hands are more than full… but I cannot complain too much, can I? So the fave beans week ended up being nothing… sorry for that, but you can check my past recipes here and here.

But while work keeps me busy, it doesn’t prevent for my mind to wander and invent new recipes. And this recipe is something that I have thought about for quite a bit now. I first thought about ravioli, but guessed it would be too common, and reminding myself (1) how much we love gyoza; (2) how delicious the butternut gyoza I made were; (3) how easy it is to make, I could only try.

Let me share with you this delicious recipe!

Fava beans gyoza (makes about 16 pieces)

For the gyoza dough:

– 50g of bread flour

– 50g of pastry flour

– a pinch of salt

– 50cl of tepid water

For the filling:

– 20 pods of large fava beans

– salt and pepper

For the dressing:

– 20 sansho leaves (kinome) or a small piece of fresh ginger

– 2tsp of soya sauce

– 3tsp of olive oil

Prepare the dough by mixing the ingredients. Make a ball and leave to rest for 30min.

In the meantime boil the fava beans and peel them. Crush them and add salt and pepper.

Chop finely the kinome leaves (or the ginger if you use ginger). In a small bowl mix with the soya sauce and the olive oil.

Now 30min should have passed. Make a stick with the dough and cut in 16 equal parts. Make 16 small balls, and roll them in a 1mm thick round of dough.

I each round set a tsp of the crushed fava beans and close the gyoza with a bit of water on each side of the dough.

In a large greased frypan, add about 5mm of water and cook at high heat the gyoza. When the water is gone reduce a bit the heat and then flip the gyoza.

Serve with the dressing in a side bowl to dip them in. Enjoy!!

Lemon cake

For my birthday for the past 6 or 7 years, when possible, A. bakes me a birthday cake of my choice. The season is such that it involves often lemon or apple. This year the tradition went on and he prepared on my request a lemon cake. With the lemon just harvested in the garden. These lemons I have seen slowly growing and are totally free of pesticides, wax and other things that make you think twice before using the zest. The cake he made was super delicious, on of the best I have had! I wonder why he doesn’t bake more often!! And because he used the recipe he found online and didn’t want to halve the quantities, we obtained 2 cakes of perfect size for tea and breakfast for two. I slightly ask him to modify the recipe to be less buttery, so here is the actual recipe he used:

Lemon cake

– 200g of flour

– 120g of brown sugar

– 80g of butter

– 4eggs

– 1tbs of baking powder

– 1 lemon (free of chemical)

Melt the butter. Wash the lemon and extract both the zests and the juice.

In a bowl, mix the flour, the baking powder, the sugar, add the eggs, the butter and end with the lemon juice and the zest. Pour in a cake dish (one 30cm or two 20 or less).

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180deg for 35min to 45min

When ready eat right away or once is has cooled down.

Have a beautiful end of 2018!!

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