Mushrooms

With autumn slowly making its way, and a typhoon winds rattling outside, mushrooms start to be a must of the season. Not that there are so many wild mushroom on the markets in Japan, but still autumn is for me a great season to enjoy mushrooms. After my 100% Japanese dish with mushrooms 2 weeks ago, now it’s a more international recipe, yet as simple. First replace the Japanese rice by quinoa. Second mix different types of mushrooms: shimeji, maitake and nameko, and instead of adding soy sauce just add salt once grilled. 

Another veggie tart!

With endless variations and always the best seasonnal veggies, a tart is always a perfect meal.  

My veggie tart today contains the last green beans and the last broad beans of the season, a handful of edamame, one yellow sweet pepper and one tomato. I prepared the dough with a mix of buckwheat and spelt flour, and olive oil. Except the edamame that I boiled a few minutes, if not they are hard to peel, I just use raw ingredients. Simple and delicious.

Vegetarian late dinner

Sometimes (often) I don’t have much time to prepare dinner so I really like to prepare sautéed fresh seasonal vegetables (carrot, lotus root, potato, okra), and this time I accompanied them with a fluffy tofu omelet. Yes fluffy again, after yesterday’s pancakes recipe!

In a bater I mixed 3 eggs and a block of silky tofu roughly drained, and beat well. I cooked it in a frypan under cover at medium heat both sides until golden.

Japanese vegan dinner

An other of my simple vegan dinner, this time 100% Japanese. With a konbu dashi miso soup with tofu and myoga and a bowl of rice topped with sauteed veggies: shishito, carrots, burdock and potato. No seasonning, just the pure delicious taste of each ingredient.

Back to my kitchen!!!

After being away from home for more than 10 days I’m really happy to be back to my kitchen. After eating out a lot (even though recently it’s been easier to find simple food in restaurants in France) I really need to get back to my basic diet. As soon as we were done with unpacking, I went down for grocery shopping, grabbed some fresh Japanese mushrooms: shimeji and maitake (kind of oyster mushroom), and some sprouts. I cooked some plain rice, grilled the mushroom in a pan with a bit of butter, add just before serving some sesame seeds and a drop of soya sauce, and served the whole as a vegan donburi.

 Mushrooms and sprouts donburi
Mushrooms and sprouts donburi

In the following weeks you’ll see that while in France I packed a few ingredients I love and still can’t find easily in Tokyo, some herbs from my parents’ garden in Aix, some flour for baking bread, tones of quinoa… and  I’m really looking forward to using them!

Simply veggies

I’m still a bit suffering from jetlag, and I wake up early, but in France it’s all dark until 7:00am, so there’s not much to do. So let me introduce an other recipe of delicious veggies, like I already miss them!

Grilled veggies are the best! Potato, sweet potato, kabocha and broccoli. I just added a few pieces of prosciutto.  An other pre-travel meal perfect to empty the fridge and to sustain my hunger for veggies.

Broccoli and mashed potatoes

Before and after traveling I feel like needing more than ever fresh fruits and veggies and super simple recipes. So let me share with you a new idea I add. I wanted to eat mashed potatoes, I love them! But I don’t make some too often. So for this recipe I prepared simple mash potatoes with only a bit of butter, then I added some little chunks of broccoli, and finished with an egg, and lot of pepper. Simply delicious!

The end of summer

After days of rain and gloomy weather and some chilly days I am slowly accepting that summer is over. It is also noticeable at our local farmers market: new rice is there and with it sweet potatoes and kabocha little pumpkin) are now taking over. Tomatoes are more rare, nashi tend to be more ripe… 

So there is no choice than to move forward and start cooking with new seasonal ingredients. For this dish of grilled tuna I prepared a summer/autumn mix of veggies: tomato and okra for the summer, sweet potatoe, carrot and leek for the autumn. Simply grilled in a greased pan.

Japanese cucumber with miso

Japanese cucumber are really tiny compared to the huge one in Europe or America. Their diameter is usually between 1 and 2 centimeters and they are 12 to 20 centimeters long. There are few seeds and the the skin is not too thick so you just need to wash the and can eat them.

In summer we eat cucumbers every day and I realized I should have started a cucumber week! I buy them either in Koganei or in Isumi at the local farmers, and this week I have a load of cucumbers from K. And S. From Tsunan. 

I love cucumbers in cold soup and salad, I also love them as pickles. I will soon present you my delicious pickles made in the 2-5-8 but so far I’ve been too busy with work to prepare any. 

But my favorite way to eat them is as a snack while dinner gets ready because it takes 3s to be ready: wash, dry in a cloth and cut in 4 sticks and cut the sticks in 4. And when I have an extra 2min I prepare a dip of miso paste. I use fresh organic mild miso but it works with red miso too, to which I add a little of vegetal oil and stir until creamy.

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