Tag: vegetables

Autumn warmth and color

As the summer fades away, autumn days are slowly settling in. Autumn in Japan does not mean yet fallen leaves, cold mornings etc… we’ll have to wait at least another month for that! October is usually a fair month with warm days and just chilly enough evening and mornings to enjoy a walk or a bicycle ride. The food stalls start changing in colors and products too. The new rice harvested in August, the pumpkins and kabocha, the lotus roots… of course some of the summer food will still be around for a while: the super ripe tomatoes, the last crunchy cucumbers…

Combined together late summer and early fool ingredients are perfect such as in this pasta recipe below: tomatoes, butternut, lotus root… simple but delicious.

With the more chilly evenings, it is nice to curl under a little blanket and eat a warming dish, warming by its color and flavors. So I prepared a slightly spicy soup with fresh vegetables and chicken meat-balls, in a bouillon of spices and fresh lemongrass. Here is my recipe, it’s super simple!! Hope you’ll like it!

Spicy soup (2 servings)

  • 1 carrot
  • 1 2cm slice of butternut squash
  • A handful of green beans
  • 100-150g of chicken breast grounded
  • 1 tsp of potato starch
  • 1 pinch of turmeric
  • 1 pinch of chilly pepper
  • 1 pinch of coriander
  • 1 pinch of salt and pepper
  • 1 leave of fresh lemongrass
  • 100g of vermicelli or thin noodles (optional)

Actually you can adjust the vegetables to what you have around… I sliced the carrot with the peeler to obtain very thin slices, but you can also do a julienne or small stick… it’s up to you…

So in in a large pan I heat 1L if water, add the vegetables and the spices. Then in a bowl I mix the meat and the starch. Make small balls (1.5-2cm diameter) and toss them in the boiling bouillon. After 10min all is ready. 5min before eating I add the noodles. They cook very quickly and you don’t want them to become thick and too soft. Serve immediately. Yes… that’s it!!!

Have a good day!

Edamame and eggplant

Whether on weekdays, when we have little time to have lunch or on the weekends when we are busy with surfing/bodyboarding, playing tennis or gardening, having a good lunch easily ready is important. Moreover, if that can be prepared in advance it is even better! Fresh pasta have been quite a good candidate as they can be accommodated easily, be eaten warm or cold… and since it it is the end of the summer we want to continue enjoying the summer vegetables a little longer, in particular, enjoy the last edamame of the season. I know that we will have eggplants and tomatoes for quite a few weeks or even months but they add a real summer touch to a dish. So I came up with a recipe of edamame pasta with eggplant that is all creamy and divine and I couldn’t wait sharing that recipe with you, as if you want to try you’ll have to hurry!

Edamame, fava beans, and similar are a good match with eggplants and are traditionally used together in Japanese cuisine. I revisited this classic combination in a more western style.

Edamame and eggplant creamy pasta (2 servings)

  • a handful of edamame
  • 2 eggplants
  • fresh pasta
  • olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • grated Parmigiano (optional)

Boil the edamame, grill the eggplants to be able to peel them. Once the edamame have cooled down peel them completely and in a mortar puree them. Add a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Peel the eggplant and add to the mix and pure roughly. Boil the fresh pasta, once drained add the mix, stir well ad serve. Add grated Parmigiano if you like.

Yes! that’s it! Isn’t that simple? And you’ll see it is truly delicious!

Super easy pickles

In the summer it is nice to enjoy refreshing pickled vegetables. After many attempts of different methods to make pickles there are a few that I find particularly not adapted to our life style, and some others that require too much equipment. But there are two that I really like and that are very simple, can be done everywhere, require little ingredients or equipment and work in a few hours. Today I want to introduce the simplest and most efficient way, that works with many of the green summer vegetables such as cucumber, uri, or togan, but also with radishes and daikon. It is called shiozuke 塩漬け in Japanese, and as the name suggested it is a method of pickling vegetables in salt. As a matter of fact it is the same method as making umeboshi or pickled Chinese cabbage… expect that with summer vegetables it takes only a few hours instead of several days or weeks! Today I present the recipe with uri 瓜 a kind of melon/cucumber that is very popular in summer in Japan and that just made its entry in the glossary.

Shiozuke summer vegetables

  • 1/2 uri or 1 Japanese cucumber
  • 1/2 tsp of salt
  • a little piece of konbu (optional)

Wash and cut the vegetable. It is not really necessary to peel them. Slice them thinly. Cut the konbu in thin pieces. in a bowl large enough, add the sliced uri, the konbu, sprinkle the salt on top. Use a piece of wrap to top and set a weight the size of the inside of the bowl (I used a honey pot filled with water) on top to press the mix. Wait for a few hours before enjoying, and keep in the fridge in the liquid for a few days.

Beware that the liquid when pressing may overflow the bowl, so set the bowl in in a tray or the sink, or use a rather large bowl compared to the amount of vegetable that can receive all the liquid. Another option is to make them in a sealed plastic bag (ziploc…), but I don’t use such plastic bags…

 

Another new friend: Water spinach 空芯菜

I am amazed by my lack of culture when it comes to greens… every month or so I am discovering something new… something I can’t remember having seen before or tried before… This time it is water spinach or 空芯菜 kushinsai. Actually I even grow some in my garden that I received as a sprout from a friend, devotedly planted but as I didn’t know what it was I just let it grow quietly when the other day, at the farmers market I found them on the shelf… Well… I just got some and tested them… The leaves resemble a lot that of Japanese spinach, smaller and thinner, and the stem is wider and hollow. When cooked it indeed resembles spinach in texture and flavour, without the tartness that spinaches often have, bonus, it grows in the summer, making it a good new summer friend to add to the collection with moroheya and tsurumurasaki.
I first cooked it in a Japanese version to top rice. Simply blanched and then deglazed in soya sauce. It is always a good way to test a new local green. Most Japanese people will tell you they eat them like this, so I don’t bother asking anymore!!!!

Kushinsai, tomatoes, pork filet in soya sauce topping plain rice

Once this test passed, I use the vegetable in more European ways, with pasta and olive oil, that is the second test. And the vegetable is adopted in my list of easy-daily vegetable. If it doesn’t pass both test it stays in the list of once in a while vegetable, that requires special treatment or attention, like uri (you’ll see it soon), togan, takenoko…

Water spinach passed both tests easily is now adopted in my everyday routine. Good with bacon, good with pork filet, good with pasta, turmeric and parmigiano… basically as you would used spinach… next test probably will be the quiche, but I already know it will pass easily that one too!

Bacon, egg, kushinsai on spaghetti

I could also try some more south Asian recipes, but I barely cook Chinese and Taiwanese… if you have good recipes to use my new friend in cooking let me know and I’ll be happy to test them!

Turmeric, kushinsai, tagliatelle… top with parmigiano for the perfect finish

A new veggie

There’s always something new to discover or to learn… that is true in any discipline, but even more in cooking!!! The quantity of potential ingredients is really enormous, and the variety depends so much on customs and climate that I am far from having explored a hundredth of what exists. Even in after 16 years in Japan, there are still some surprises. Products that are not necessarily Japanese but made their way a few decades or century ago. That’s the case of the yard-long bean or in Japanese jūrokusasage 十六ササゲ. Something I had never seen before, that attracted me at the farmers market, and so I tried it and it made its entry in the glossary. I really like how farmers manage to grow locally so many different vegetables in such a beautiful way! I wish I could one day…

As the name promised, it’s a double long long green bean like vegetable, but the flavor is more subtle and more grassy. As I wasn’t sure how to prepare it first, I decided to blanched them and serve with soya sauce, grilled thick fried tofu atsusge 厚揚げ and that was perfect and top with katsuobushi.

What is the last new vegetable that you tried?

Japanese flavors meet mum’s classic recipe

In the late spring and early summer, back then when we lived in France, my mother would often cook a potatoes salad with green beans or broad beans and new onion. Or she would prepare broad beans with tomatoes. Broad beans, or Morocco ingen モロッコインゲン, are very easy to find in Japan. In Isumi they seems to be growing quite easily, it’s on the farmers market stall from early June. (Oh! By the way, it seems that the name “ingen” comes from the name of a monk that imported green beans to Japan a few centuries ago!!)

Like my mother, I like to prepare broad beans, and a potato salad is always handy because it can be prepared ahead of time and doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Perfect lunch for a busy day. Though I live the dressing my mother prepare for this salad – her classic recipe is here – I wanted to test the new katsuo flakes from Katsuura I bought recently and I am also trying to finish the last umeboshi from last uear to make space for the new ones that will be arriving in a few weeks. The dressing for my potatoes and broad beans salad was all set. The mixture of flavors, familiar yet newly combined made this recipe really super easy and delicious. So here it is.

Japanese flavors potatoes and broad beans salad (serves 2)

  • 150g of new potatoes
  • 200g of broad beans
  • 1 large umeboshi
  • A handful of katsuo flakes
  • 1tbs of soya sauce
  • 1tbs of olive oil

Boil the potatoes and broad beans. Do not over cook the broad beans. Drain. In a bowl add the vegetables, extract the flesh of the plum, scatter it on the vegetables. Add the olive oil, the soya sauce, top with the katsuobushi. Serve at room temperature or cold.

Inspiration from mom’s recipe

I call my parents at total random times, depending on my schedule, but because of the time difference it often falls before their lunch time/our dinner time. Often it is when I am on the move. Walking between appointments, walking back home. But it also happen when I’m in the kitchen kneading bread or washing vegetables to prepare dinner… the latter often drives the conversation towards food. We share our new favorite recipes, what is in season here and there (more than often the same things except for those that are specific to each country…)

Last Sunday was mother day in France so I happened to call when I was thinking of preparing dinner, and my mother told me about her new favorite pasta recipe. Something very Sicilian to me, and with all ingredients I had in the fridge or in the garden… well all but the one that was key to her, which for me was optional: the sardines!!! I don’t mind skipping the proteins if the rest of the recipe seems worth. And it was… so here is my recipe largely inspired by the conversation with my mother. I didn’t know how it is called so I called it:

Pasta mom’s way

  • 100g of flour
  • 1 egg (for the pasta)
  • water (for the pasta)
  • 1 fennel fresh
  • 4 little red onions as those on the picture above, can be one large…
  • 1 handful of pine nuts
  • 1 handful of raisins
  • olive oil
  • 2 branches of parsley

Prepare the dough for the pasta by mixing the ingredients. Leave to rest for the time to prepare the sauce.

Peel the onion and wash the fennel. Chop the size you like. Toss in a pan grease with olive oil and cook at low heat until soft.

Crush roughly the pine nuts. Add to the pan. Add the raisin. Cook at low heat and stir sometimes. Chop the parsley, and add. In the meantime roll your pasta. I made tagliatelle but you can make what you like. Boil them. Drain and add to the sauce stir and add salt pepper and a bit more olive oil. Stir and serve to eat right away!

That’s it! Thanks mom for the tip!

Fava beans

Now is the season and it’s always a feast for me!!! Well… it wasn’t always like that, it took me time to enjoy fava beans but now I love them and I was thinking of doing a fava beans week like I did in the past for many of my favorite ingredients: 5-7 days, 5-7 recipes, but by the time I got to actually seat and write a post I realize I published so many pictures of recipes with fava beans on IG that in the end it wasn’t making sense anymore. So once again the fava bean week has been postponed… I decided to go with a summary of my favorite recipes, may in one or two posts.

One thing that took me some time to understand was how delicious fava beans or sora-mame in Japanese そら豆 are when simply blanched and pealed. I use to eat them whole (don’t get me wrong not whole whole right! Just the beans inside the pod!!!)… but after preparing some Shojin cuisine recipes some years ago, I understood the difference between pealed and not pealed fava beans, and I would never not peal anymore.

One of my favorite fava beans combination is with tomatoes. For some reason Isumi produces beautiful and delicious tomatoes. Very large and ripe ones, I love to cook them slowly with olive oil and reduced into a thick tomato sauce. They are sweet and tasty. Add a new onion to the preparation, soften by the long and slow cooking at low heat, and this is perfection!! If you have made tomato sauce last summer, my preparation is probably close to that, even thicker, so if you still cannot find proper tomatoes just use tomato sauce. I just then add blanched and pealed fava beans and use it for accommodating Japanese rice white and brown, or pasta, long and short or just a slice of made bread.

Tomato and fava beans topping brown rice

One other recipe is to use the fava beans as a base for pasta sauce. Instead of just blanching the fava beans I cook them a little longer so that they become creamy when pealed. Then mash them with olive oil, salt and pepper and add to pasta. Here I added a bit of smoked snapper.

Fava beans pasta sauce with smoked snapper

Finally, one of my favorite way of eating quinoa is to start as a soup, but let the liquid evaporate almost entirely and add plenty of vegetables from the start. I usually do this recipe in winter but spring is also good with all the spring vegetables, here a large tomato for the sweetness, a new carrot, and pealed fava beans and green peas. That’s it!

Have a good day!!!

Yama udo

One of the wild spring green I like to cook is udo or rather yama udo ヤマウドウ. It is a kind of long stick that likes to grow on steep road sides and is very easy to prepare, with a distinctive taste but not strong such that of fukinoto. One preparation that is really easy is with miso in miso ae. Usually I would blanched it to soften it a bit and remove its bitterness or tartness, but I realized while doing a bit of reading, that vinegar water would work as well, which for the lemon-miso ae I wanted to make was more than perfect. Indeed, while I am waiting for my lemon tree to bear fruits (I lost all last year in early strong winds and heavy rains), I found some delicious lemons at the local market. Hence, recently there has been a lot of lemon in my recipe, the lemon cake, lemon pancakes, lemon pasta… The vinegar miso ae is taken to a new level of rich flavors with the addition of the lemon. It works the same way as yuzu miso. That said my recipe today is really super simple, and if you can’t go to pick yama udo yourself or find some, you can try with regular udo. Its taste is much milder but that works very nicely too. And if there is no udo where you live, try with wild asparagus or green asparagus, that will work fine as well.

Yama udo with lemon miso ae (2 servings as side)

  • 1 udo
  • 2tsp of miso (I used my homemade miso)
  • 3tsp of vinegar (I used rice vinegar)
  • 1tsp of sugar
  • a little bit of lemon zest
  • a little of lemon juice (about 1tsp)

Peel the udo and cut in 3cm long pieces. Then slice vertically with about 2-3mm thick, then make sticks. Set in a bowl with water and 2tbs of vinegar for 15min.

In the meantime, in a bowl, mix the miso, 1tbs of vinegar and the rest of the ingredients. Stir well.

Drain well the udo and add to the miso mix. Stir well and serve. That’s it, really simple isn’t it?

I served it with grilled sawara (Japanese Spanish mackerel) and plain white rice.

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