Fresh home-made food every day
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.
This all week has been pretty crazy. I knew I would be very busy at work and that I’ll have to go early to the lab too, but what I didn’t expect is that the train to commute would let me down so many times. Usually trains are super reliable in Japan, but once in a while there are incidents, and usually they happen all at the same moment. Spending more time to commute then usual I didn’t have so much time left to spend in my kitchen and still needed to indulged with some simple food to keep : rice with sesame seeds, and greens with soya sauce, and since I knew that wouldn’t be enough for my husband, I stopped by Saboten and added some pork filet katsu to the menu.
I’m in a constant quest for new food combinations and freshness, while at the same time I keep things simple and try again and again. That’s what I love about cooking: nothing exactly the same but yet not completly different. Always delicious because I cook what we love. And so many chances to try since we need to eat a little every day, right?
After loving my bulgur donburi, I decided to try a Japanese rice one-plate. I love the combination of the crispy chirimen and the creamy avocado, so I used that base, added some sesame seeds for the taste. Since rice is drier than bulgur and I don’t like to use any dressing with it (it makes it slippery abd impossible to eat with chopsticks) I just added some juicy tomatoes and fresh cucumber. An other delicious and refreshing combination!
When the temperature exceeds 30deg day and night I only can eat very simple food. Japanese rice is really delicious when it’s hot, and it suits very well simple preparations, without any fat nor dressing. Donburi is always a good and simple way to prepare a rice based perfect meal. This time you can’t imagine something simpler: plain white Japanese rice, fresh cucumber, grilled chicken breast chopped, and a lot of shiso leaves finelly cut, a few sesame seeds for perfection. Served with a glass of cold green tea. How do you cook when it’s hot?
My husband and I usually play tennis together every Saturday morning for aboug 2h, and sometimes the stakes are really high: we play for the color of our new car, its model, the options, and sometimes even what we’ll have for lunch. That’s how my husband win his piece of meat ;). After our game we usually head to the beach for a refreshing swim, so once we’re back home we’re literally starving so I need to fix something quick and nourishing. Japanese rice is always a good option because it can be cooked unsupervised and gives me enough time to drop by the shower! Cucumbers, tomatoes and all other vegetables that can be eaten raw, Japanese pickles, scrambled eggs… are also very handy. Finally, leftover and tofu make our lunch look like something awesome.
This time it’s a mixture of all that. Plain white rice topped with some sesame seeds, sesame-tofu from Mount Koya, miso green beans, and raw cucumber.
This quite simple Japanese recipe is really delicious and I like it very much now, but for sometimes I hated it because the first time I tried to prepare it, it was a terrible failure. The first and only time I prepared something to eat that ended up in the trash because it was not edible. I surely made a mess of this delicious recipe! Probably a problem with the mastering of Japanese ingredients at the timeand the proportions! Indeed when we arrived in Japan, cooking was a quite interesting task and grocery shopping an even more startling! Almost every evening we would go to our local supermarket and starre at what at that time we found strange mushrooms, awkward fruits and unknown fishes. So after a few weeks I decided to buy a beginners Japanese cooking book and to try most of the recipes to get familiar with techniques and basic products. The book I picked was in English of course and was clearly written for foreigners, so it was really helpful! However most of the recipes in this book make use of mirin (together with sugar), a Japanese cooking ingredient that I find unify the taste and is not very interesting (a bit like glutamate in Chinese cuisine). So I will give you my version of miso eggplant, the one that is just perfect and doesn’t use mirin.
For two as a side dish I use 1 or 2 Japanese eggplants (they are quite small); a spoon of miso; a tea spoon of grounded sesame or “surigoma”; a little of vegetal oil. After removing the stems and cutting in halves the eggplants, fry them in a very very thin layer of oil. In the mean time, mix the miso the sesame and a very little of oil if necessary to obtain a paste. Once the eggplants are cooked, set them on a serving plate and delicately spread the paste to obtain a thin layer. Decorate with a little of sesame. You can also set the eggplants on a cooking shit, spread the miso, and grill them 3 min in the oven to obtain a roasted miso thin crust.
With all the new vegetables and the sunny days I’m preparing more and more cold salads this year. This one is really taking advantage of spring green peas, little radish, lettuce, cucumber, tofu and spelt, all with a little of olive oil, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Fresh, colorful, tasty, perfect!
A donburi in Japan is basically a rice bowl topped with something, anything. I really like the concept and you’ve seen a few of my original recipes yet. With each time changing in what I top it with depending on the market and time available.
This time it’s a 100% green topping with avocado, cucumber, cresson and lettuce. A bit of sesame oil and sesame seeds and lunch is ready in just the time to cook the rice!
A rapid lunch of fresh vegetables, grilled bonito from Katsuura in sesame, and rice!!
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