While A. is on business trip while my days at work are super busy, I’m oscillating between experimenting new recipes and easy to prepare but very satisfying food such as cheesy toasts and ochazuke… In my experiments, the sweet potatoes gnocchi with a 100% sesame pairing was definitely a huge hit! It mixes perfectly a traditional Italian recipe with Japanese flavors. A must try if you love sweet potatoes and sesame. Bonus, it is one of the easiest recipe ever… and here it is!!!
Sweet potato gnocchi and sesame (two servings)
1 large sweet potato
Flour
1tbs of sesame seeds
1tbs os sesame oil
Salt and pepper
Steam the sweet potato. When tender let it cool down. Peel it and mash it. Add flour little by little to obtain an almost non sticky dough. Shape the gnocchi. In a pan boil 1-2L of water and poach the gnocchi. Drain and serve in plates, top with a bit of sesame oil and sesame seeds, add salt and pepper. Eat immediately.
There is no need to go far to discover new things and in particular when it comes to food, there is always something new and curious to discover at the farmers market. You just need to look around and you’ll surely find something you haven’t seen before. This time I found negibosu 葱坊主 leek’s flower buds. You can often spot the beautiful flowers in kitchen gardens in the spring, they are amazing ornaments. But I never guessed that would be edible, and that even you would be able to buy them in the bud version at the farmers market. But it is!
So here I am with my negibosu… I thoughts immediately that tempura would be an appropriate recipe. For some reasons, tempura always work well with any green, even with strong flavors: fukinoto is a good example. But what else… and would actually negibosu be strong in flavors? So I browsed a bit the net. Nothing came out neither in French nor in English but for the fully blossomed leek flowers. It was of no help, so I turned to Japanese and bingo! Negibosu have a significant number of entries in cookpad, more than half of them being…
Tempura of course… hum… not helping much either… digging a bit more I finally found the other classic Japanese recipe to accommodate greens: miso ae. Miso ae, in my opinion, works better with creamy miso, the one I have, that I make, is more granular and won’t work as good… one recipe in the end attracted my attention: a goma ae one. So I decided to go for this one, well, my way though. (and the tempura… just in case!!)
So here’s my recipe of goma ae. Suri goma すり胡麻 is ground sesame powder. It’s very easy to make from the sesame seeds, or to buy already powdered.
Making ground sesame: suri goma
Negibosu goma ae (2 servings)
A dozen of leek flower buds
1tbs of sesame seeds
1tbs of soya sauce
1tsp of brown sugar
Wash the negibosu, remove the hard part if any, and blanche for a few minutes. Drain and pat dry.
Blanching negibosu
Once cool enough, cut in tiny bite size.
In a mortar, crush the sesame seeds with a pillar to obtain a paste. Add the sugar and soya sauce and stir. Add to the negibosu, stir and that’s ready!! Yes, it’s that simple and you’ll see it’s delicious!!!! Enjoy!
While the summer plays hide and seek, the summer vegetables are still around and should be for a few more weeks.
The great star of the summer in my kitchen this year is eggplant 🍆. We always eat a lot of eggplants in the summer, but this year it looks really like we are eating even more. Last week recipe was a great example but there is much more to do. And today I share with you another Japanese eggplant recipe, vegan this time, as simple as the previous one but with a different set of flavors.
Sautéed eggplants Japanese style
2 Japanese eggplants
1 aburage pad (thin fried tofu sheets)
1 tsp of sesame seeds
1tsp of soya sauce
1tsp of cooking oil, I usually use olive oil no matter what but sunflower or rice oil are OK too
Wash the eggplants and dice them. In a pan set the cooking oil snd heat. When hot add the eggplant and cook at high heat while stirring often. Slice thinly the aburage. Add to the eggplants. Cook and stir until the eggplants are creamy. Add the sesame and soya sauce, stir and serve.
While the base is the same as the perfect eggplant recipe, the flavors are very different. I actually recommend to cook both and compare. It’s perfect to understand umami.
I have a principle that I apply for pretty much anything and even more when I cook or think about cooking, it’s to be always flexible and opened to opportunities, or see change in plans as one. Nothing is definite. A recipe evolves and comes to life as ingredients are mixed together, taking the mood and the time into consideration… This is exactly how this wafu pasta recipe was created. It all started with a bicycle ride to go diy shopping. On the way back, if we take this road, I like to stop at the little stall that sells local fresh vegetables grown right on the spot. Sometimes the shelves are empty, and sometimes they have little treasures. They just had many little treasures this day. In particular a big bundle of tiny sweet leeks appealed me. I just picked it, slid a 100yen coin in the box and off we went.
But what to do with them… I had no plan… until a few days later when time for dinner came and it was decided we would eat pasta. Tagliatelle. A bit of sesame oil was remaining in the pan from some little rice crackers I made, so I decided to use it. Chopped the little sweet leeks, coated them in sesame oil, added a very ripe large tomato (that can easily be replaced by a good tomato sauce or preserved tomatoes), and cooked at low heat until I obtained a creamy tomato sauce with the delicious flavor of the fragrant sesame oil, slightly confit. Added the boiled pasta, stirred well and added a bit of sesame seeds before serving. A new version of the wafu pasta…
How do eat your pasta Japanese-style? Have you ever tried???
The very special blend of spices, citrus fruits zest and sesame seeds of Maltese Qagħaq tal-Ħmira is still floating around me and inspires me a lot, but it’s not always that I can wait for my sourdough Lois to work slowly a dough which in this still cold season can be 12 to 24 hours… sometimes we need something to eat, QUICK!!!! So I came up with a scone version of Qagħaq tal-Ħmira… it may be a blasphemy to the true Maltese tradition, so I apologize for this rather crude recipe. But to my defense, this scone recipe brings in all the flavors of Qagħaq tal-Ħmira in only 25min: 10min of kneading & shaping and 15min of baking. The softness of the famous slightly brioché bread is replaced by a more crumbly dry scone one. Add jam, honey or butter to it, or it alone in bite version… it is truly nice! Really!!! Try it and tell me what you think!
Scones Qagħaq tal-Ħmira way
150g of flour
50g of butter
30g of sugar
1tsp of baking powder
1 pinch of salt
1tsp of ground cloves
1tsp of anis seeds
1/4 of orange zest
sesame seeds for the topping
a bit of water or milk
Pre-heat your oven at 180deg.
In a bowl mix all the ingredients except for the last two: sesame seeds and water/milk. Start kneading. Add a bit of water/milk while kneading until you obtain a homogeneous dough. Roll to 3cm thick and top with sesame seeds. Roll a little bit thinner and be sure the sesame seeds are well incrusted. Cut to the shape and size you want, and put on a sheet of cooking paper. Bake 15min, and enjoy as soon as you like.
With the fall, burdock 牛蒡 gobou is back in season. This long root that looks like a salsifis but is firm and ressembles in texture artichokes, and a bit in taste too… is a classic flavor in Japanese cuisine. Probably because of a rather country style strong flavor and its fibrous texture, it often appears in simple recipes with other strongly flavored ingredients: chilly pepper in kinpira for example, or in very small quantities. Given that a burdock root is quite big, and one can keep for rather long, it is a very handy vegetable!!!
I love to cook it in different preparations. Creamy soup is one of my favorite but it takes quite some time and requires a blender. Last night I came up with a simple recipe that mixes daigaku imo recipe inspiration with gobou in a light version. I’ll talk about daigaku imo later… The recipe with burdock is really simple and super tasty. It is perfect with a bowl of rice or whatever you like.
Burdock & sweet potato (2 servings)
1/2 burdock
1 sweet potato not too big (fits in the palm)
2tbs of sesame seeds
1tbs of sesame oil
2tbs of soya sauce
1tsp of sugar
Wash and peel the burdock. With a peeler make kind of gobou flakes. Boil in water until it softens. About 15min probably. Drain. Wash the sweet potato and cut in sticks not too big.
In a pan greased with the sesame oil, start cooking the sweet potato. Add the burdock drained. Stir well. When the sweet potato changes to darker yellow or golden, add the sugar the soya sauce, and the sesame seeds, stir well again. Cook another 2 minutes while stirring. And serve. Eat warm or chilled.
This week was just like another, but it felt looooong and painful, busy with work (I’ve started a new online robotics course that keeps me busy, among the many other things I work on)… It was also our first week of telework for the both of us together in our new apartment with schedules not necessarily matching very well to have lunch together or go for a walk together. And the first week of really warm weather, summer warm, and of air conditioning. I always have a hard time adjusting to it and I felt little appetite for a few days, rare enough, and even more rare no appetite at all for chocolate. Instead I craved simple food and simple ingredients and in these situations rice, more particularly ochazuke, has been one of my best answer. Since ochazuke with vegetables is seasonal, ochazuke in May is different than ochazuke in December and the recipes I have posted so far, even if the base dashi could be similar. For a spring ochazuke I used a plain dashi of katsuobushi, but ichiban dashi would work as well, and if your vegan or vegetarian you can opt for konbu dashi only or shiitake dashi, in which I cooked some green peas (there will be more green peas recipe coming soon!!!) and some snap peas. I added after serving a bit of sesame seeds.
This dish is perfect eaten not too warm, it provides energy while having greens and liquid with strictly no fat. And it is tasty without being overwhelming.
And in a flash the week was almost over, passing with me not sharing any new recipe as I have cooked a little less or rather very simple food… I promise to do better next week!!
I love breads of all kinds and I’m always happy to try local breads when traveling. In Malta I didn’t expect I would fell so much in love with one of their bread: Qagħaq tal-Ħmira, sesame, anis, spices rings. We had one the very first morning when we were at the Birkirkara market, and after that I wanted to have some always, but there not that easy to find actually. Pastizzi were good but these little Qagħaq tal-Ħmira were just perfect. It has a perfect balance between sweetness and not, between richness and not, between spiciness and not. The balance of clove, anis seeds, citrus zest and sesame is perfect and that was the most difficult to recreate actually. But after 3 attempts I think I’ve nailed it and can share my recipe now. We love them so much and just to be sure I tested a fourth time, they were perfect, so there will many many more times!!!
Qagħaq tal-Ħmira
– 200g of flour
– 25g of butter
– 25g of sugar
– 3g of dry yeast
– a pinch of salt
– 1 cup more or less of tepid milk
– 1/2 tsp of clove powder
– 1 tsp of anis seeds
– 2 tsp of citrus zest (official recipe says lemon and orange, I used what I had: yuzu, natsumikan…)
– sesame seeds for the toping
In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, salt, yeast, butter, add the milk slightly warmed little by little while kneading. Stop adding milk and kneading when the dough is smooth. Add the clove powder, the anis seeds, the zest of citrus. Knead just to mix well. Leave for an hour or two in a warm places. When the dough has grow a bit and is warm and fluffy, cut in 4 pieces. Make a ball of each piece and shape like a bagel: squeeze the center of the ball with your thumb and make a hole, roll around your fingers to make the hole bigger about 4-5cm wide. Roll the top in sesame. Leave to prove for 1 to 2hours.
Bake at 180deg for 15 to 20min depending on your oven. Must be slightly golden but still soft.
Enjoy warm or cold, with jam, butter, cheese… or nothing…
When the season for persimmons comes it means that autumn is clearly here and with shorter days, the chilly evenings will be coming soon. And here they are. Not cold enough to tuen the heater on yet, but it’s coming.
While we are not big fans of raw persimmons, like pretty much everyone in Chiba Sotoboso, we have persimmon trees in our garden, two that give sweet persimmons and one that gives bitter ones. Persimmons are like plums in June, impossible to give away!!! Most people don’t even harvest them and their leave-less branches are decorated with beautiful orange fruits. I our gardens the fruits don’t last long as birds happily eat them and that is great. Still I always harvest a few fruits for us as there is one recipe that is my total preferred way of eating persimmons: tofu ae with cucumber.
So here it is:
Persimmon, cucumber and tofu ae:
– 1 persimmon not too soft
– 1 Japanese cucumber
– 1 small block of drained tofu
– 2tbs of sesame seeds
– a bit of salt
Peel and dice the persimmon, slice the cucumber. Grind the sesame seeds, drain very well the tofu* and mix with the salt. Add the persimmon and the cucumber. Stir well and it is ready to serve.
Oh! By the way, I’m testing new mini videos to explain the recipe… checkout below and on IG!!!
* draining tofu is crucial to obtain the perfect creamy consistency. To drain tofu (hard or soft) first press it gently between two boards with a weight on top. Gravity will make it work perfectly for you after 1h. Then in a clean cloth with thin weaving press the tofu to remove the water has shown in the third video below.
