Tag: vegan

Shojin cuisine inspiration

Since I got my Shojin cuisine book I only tried one recipe but many others are really simple and delicious. So I’ve decided to try (and slightly adapt) two other recipes. One is a classic, the otherone is rather new for me. But even the classic I gave it a little twist. I really love green beans salad, alone, with potatoes or with tomatoes. It’s a real simple dish perfect with thin little green beans or flat beans that my mother cooked very often in season. I used the recipe of miso green beans as a base and mixed it with my childhood memories. So I added small ripe tomatoes. So it’s just blanching the green beans, just a few minutes, they should remain vivid green and crisp, mixing with miso of you choice, adding the tomatoes in quarters (bottom left of the picture).

The second recipe is eggplant and edamame. The colors and mix of textures and tates really attracted me and I was very happy with the result. The recipe apparently used fava beans or broad beans but the season is over and the season for eamame just started so I replaced them. Also in the recipe the beans were sweetened with sugar, but I didn’t find it necesary, the edamame being already super sweet. So you need half little eggplant per person and a handfull of shelled edamame for two. Halve the eggplants, in a frypan greased with oil cook the eggplants, skin size first, the turn them. They must be soft but not overcooked. Keep to cool on kitchen paper skin up. Boil the edamame, when ready shell them and peel them. The thin skin over the beans must be removed for a smooth preparation, and is actually super easy to remove. Place the beans in a mortar and crush them but not too much. Cut the eggplnt in bites and top them with the edamame. 

Both recipes are perfect served at room temperature. 

25year old umeboshi

I must say that when our neighbor told me she would give me some 25year old umeboshi, like if it were a very special gift, I was a bit suspicious. Who keeps food for that long? I mean we can keep alcohol but pickles? Then I did my homework and found out that 100 year old umeboshi do exist and are still edible so what’s 25 years?! And then she bring me a little bag of the treasured plums. And finally we tried them. I wanted something really simple to try them to actually enjoy the taste so I simply prepared gomadofu (sesame flavored tofu), a red cabbage salad with jakko, and rice, plain white rice. I was worried they might salty, or sour but actually they weren’t. The flesh is rather dry compared to umeboshi of the year, but the taste was really amazing. Rather sweet with a strong plum taste, not sour at all. I guess they would be perfect for ochazuke when the plum flesh can get a little more moisture. But they were worth trying! And since she gave me quite many actually you’ll see umeboshi a little bit more in the future!

Pre-talk lunch

During the winter I didn’t give many talks and plenty of new results came in, so when I was invited two weeks ago to Kyushu Institute of Technology and today to Tokyo Institute of Technology to give talks I wanted to include plenty of our new material and shape new talks. When I work on these kind of things I really enjoy being home, I am much more productive, focused and I memorize my talk very easily. Unfortunately it is not always possible for me to squeeze in this time during week days, so I often work on my talks on weekends. Recently I am managing my time much better than I used to (may be it’s the low tide after the panic of business from last year) and I can prepare my talks more calmly and better. And this means having lunch at home which is also really nice. I can cook simple things that are just the perfect food before giving a talk: light and energetic. Today, I went for a simple arrangement of steamed zucchini and couscous with olive oil, salt, pepper and fresh mint from the terrace. Ready in 5min, but so delicious!

And a last one!

Yup! I’m done with this grant application and with many other things that were bothering me and keeping me too busy at work. So here is the last one-plate of this series, the last just before finishing the grant things. From tomorrow I will be back to some more elaborate cooking and trsting new products that I have on the shelf for a while but wasn’t decided to try yet. 

So on the plate today: raw radish and cucumber, bamboo shoots, fried tofu, rice with sesame and grilled carrots. 

And an other one

Indeed, I am still crazy busy at work with this grant application, but hopefully it should be all done today. In the meantime we still need to sustain ourselves and the Japanese one-plate is on the menu again with an unexpected variation. Indeed, I prepared the green beans with miso and the pickled onions, but we have some fresh simmered small bamboo shoot on the plate now, that I didn’t prepare! 

There exist two types of bamboo shoots, the big one I’ve been cooking quite often because you can find them everywhere and the small one that are more let’s say “wild” and that one needs to pick in the forest. Picking bamboo shoot is a real fun sport, basically it’s hiking and them crawling in bamboo groves. We’ve had the chance to go bamboo shoots picking with our friends from Tsunan once and it was really awesome. Like wild mushrooms picking it takes some time to figure what to pick and to know the good spots. Unfortunately in Isumi we don’t know yet these spots and people keep them secret, like everywhere!! But one of the guy we met on the tennis court came to bring us some small bamboo shoot simmered with sesame oil. There is something here quite unique with Japanese, is that they love to offer us food they make and local products. I think it goes together with this tradition of food souvenir etc… I need to do some research about that! 

Anyway that’s how we ended with a perfect Japanese one-plate, with only fresh and delicious local products.

Sansho and konbu Shojin style

Sansho, or Japanese pepper  
Sansho, or Japanese pepper  

Here we are with the first recipe I tried in my Shojin cuisine cookbook. Because we had plenty of sansho in the garden I decided to try this super simple recipe, that was perfect to eat with plain white rice and some raw vegetables and miso.  Usually I use the leaves of sansho or kinome a lot but so far I never used the fruits. I buy them. But we had many fruits and I thought it was really time for me to use them since that was the all point of having a sansho shrub in our garden. And this recipe literally took 5 min to prepare and 15min to cook, which makes it perfect for a busy day at work.
All you need is dry konbu that you cut in little squares, fresh sansho (the seeds not the leaves) if possible but canned or packed one can do, soya sauce and sake. In a pan you put the konbu and sansho, add 1 tbs of sake and one of soya sauce, and one of water if you have fresh sansho (to remove the bitterness it’s better), then simmer under cover at low heat until most of the liquid has disappeared. It’s ready! You can serve hot or cold, perfect with rice or as a snack with a drink.. The taste is quite strong so it’s not a main dish, right!?

Baking bread!

Breakfast table
Breakfast table

I didn’t really bake for a few weeks and I really missed it. Kneading is a such a relaxing and nice moment that is like a ritual. The promise of delicious breakfast on top of that. I didn’t bake but I had a chance to get some nice wheat bran and oat bran so I was really looking forward trying them, in particular the wheat bran. I decided to make a whole wheat flour base to which I added the bran, and that worked perfectly well. I like the texture the bran brings to the bread and for breakfast it is perfect. Together with the passion fruit jam we found at the farmers market, I could eat breakfast 3 times a day!!!!

And now it’s time to back to work, have a good week! 

Back to normal… Socca lunch

Hectic weeks, busy week ends, when we arrived in Ohara last night it felt like we haven’t come for months. Everything in the garden has grown tremendously high and green, no cat was waiting for us… Of course H. came today but we are more a food supply than anything else so far… There is such work to do in the garden that we started early this morning and work until lunch, without even going to shop for frrsh veggies. So when lunch time came and we needed energy before our afternoon tennis game I had to fix something with what I had in stock: sokka and a few vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers and avocado. Sokka is a traditional dish from Nice in the south of France. It is extremely simple to make!

Socca (chick pea flour galette) 

– 100g of chickpeas flour,

– a cup of water,

– a bit of olive oil,

– salt and pepper.

Mix all the ingredients. Preheat and grease with a bit of olive oil a frying pan. Pour some dough in the pan to obtain a 3-5mm thick layer. Cook, flip, cook again, serve immediately. It is also possible to do it in the oven but the pan is much more convenient for me.

Shojin cuisine and cooking class

Sanko-in in Koganei
Sanko-in in Koganei

There aren’t too many places were you can eat vegan food in Tokyo, but recently the number of vegan cafe and vegan restaurants has dramatically increased and we’ve been trying quite a few. Yet to enjoy Shojin cuisine, there are still very few places. There is the most famous Daigo we went to last February, that provides the highest end of kaiseki shojin cuisine with a real unique experience. Then Itosho. Both being on the Michelin with respectively two and one star. Then there are a few temples providing a simpler experience, more rustic, but also interesting. Lucky enough there is one of these temples close to where I work: the Sanko-in and when I have visitors I like to take them there for lunch, for them to experience something different. At the Sanko-in you can eat some vegan buddhist cuisine in a budhist temple. Entering the temple and walking to the back building where the dining room is, is already setting the tone: quiet, simple and peaceful. The dining room is very simple, a little kitsch, but the chef and her assistant are really nice and welcoming (it’s run by two ladies). The cuisine uses seasonal ingredients of course and their famous matured tofu in miso, something close enough to a creamy cheese. The chef also prepares tea to accompany the lunch and it is a rare chance to enjoy macha and susuricha for my foreign visitors. A place I recommend if you don’t have the chance to go to Koya-san, or if you want to learn Shojin cuisine. I will enroll soon to her cooking class!

Pictures courtesy of Sanko-in website
Pictures courtesy of Sanko-in website

Ah! She also recommended me a book on Shojin cuisine that Soei Yoneda, the previous chef-abbess from the temple wrote. It is unfortunately not edited anymore but thanks to amazon I got my hands on one and should receive it soon!!!! Can’t wait!!! 

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑

Verified by MonsterInsights