Loquat – 枇杷

Among the many trees in our garden we have in the very back of it a loquat tree. Loquats-枇杷-biwa are quite common in Japan and have been there around for long enough such that a music instrument bears the same name but writes differently 琵琶.

The location of the tree in our garden was very unfortunate, it is near where we have a space designed to burn garden green trash, and it was in the shadows of the edge trees of our neighbors. While we have stopped burning garden trash and now compost them or dispose them, our neighbors also cut the edge trees last year, and our garden is now benefiting for a lot more sun light than it used to. This two factors combined, our loquat tree has produced numerous large sweet fruits this year, which compared from the tiny sour fruits it used to produce was a big surprise. I used to give the fruits to birds, now I decided to harvest quite a few.

Loquat are good eaten raw in fruit salad, with yogurt or fromage blanc. They are just a bit tedious to prepare. The peal comes of easily, so do the seeds, but there is this harder part between the flesh and the seeds that I don’t like and prefer to remove. So when it comes to preparing loquats, I like to prepare several at the same time. Having my hands all covered in juice… unfortunately they oxyde very quickly so you can’t prepare them to long ahead before eating. Not that it alters the taste, but the bright orange color turns quickly in a brownish, not very appealing.

My all time favorite for eating biwa is definitely in a tart. Like you would do for apricots, with a sable pie crust and an almond powder and egg base. Not too sweet, as the fruit is very mild in taste, you don’t want to overwhelm it with sweetness. I used also no sugar in the pie crust. Just butter and flour, and a bit of water.

And since I had a few cherries left from the clafoutis I made, I added a few. Very good balance in flavor, juiciness, sweetness and sourness. After baking until golden, eat rapidly as the loquat oxydation continues even cooked…

Now is the season of loquat in most north hemisphere countries, so enjoy them as you can and have a good week!

June 14, 2020

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!

June 10, 2020

Pastizzi tal pizzeli

It is really interesting how much Maltese food has left a strong impression on me. I’ve already shared some of my favorite recipes from Malta, but one is still missing: that of pastizzi tal pizzeli, one of the three types of pastizzi, that with spicy peas. Why did it take me so long? Because I was waiting for the season of green peas to make them with fresh green peas. And now the season has come and I have gotten plenty of green peas so I tried making pastizzi. But for the genuine recipe you’ll have to wait longer, my attempt, though delicious, is a disgrace to the true Maltese pastizzi such that in the picture below.

If you look on the internet you’ll find several different recipes for pastizzi, one of the main difference is those that use spilt peas, and those that use green peas, but they all have in common that they are prepared with puff pastry and the inly spice they use is curry, hence they are often called curried peas pastries, but in my memory the taste was more complex than that, or the Maltese curry is different than that we have here… hum… anyway, the challenge was to start with the puff pastry, not something I am confortable making (I need a serious training for that!), in particular when I remembered how thin and delicious it was in Malta, almost like filo (something I should also try to make!), so I decided to go with a rough puff to save some time, and spare me the disappointment of a poorly done puff pastry. As for the filling, I used half of a new onion, two handfuls of green peas, curry, a bit of clove (after all this is the Maltese spice by excellence), salt and pepper. I boiled the peas, I chopped the onion thinly and cook it in a pan with olive oil at low heat until just golden and soft. In a mortar I puréed the peas, add the spices and the onion. Stir well. Then roll and cut the dough in 8 squares of 12cm and filled them. I used an egg batter and baked at 200deg until golden. Well that was it. It was tasty, delicious but it was not a pastizzi!!!

I’ll try again! 😉

May 18, 2020

Inspiration from the kitchen garden

The fancy of a beautiful kitchen garden, abundant in vegetables, berries, herbs and flowers that I’ve always had, may be because both my grand fathers had beautiful ones… may have been just a dream. The kitchen garden we created last year and that gave some beautiful potatoes, peas and peanuts last summer, didn’t deliver up to my expectations. While I was very excited about the harvest, most of the plants didn’t produce anything, didn’t grow or just died… instead of being a place like the rest of the garden, of surprises and enjoyment, it’s been a place of great frustration. In most of the places in our garden, things and edibles grow almost unattended: plums, citrus fruits, spring wild vegetables, shiitake.., but in the kitchen garden, regardless of my constant efforts, things are not working as they ought… I know I am totally inexperienced and I am learning, but I found my efforts completely vain. My onions that I shall harvest now are too small, the celeriac that was supposed to grow this winter is only starting now to finally grow, even my seedlings don’t really go well. The soil should be good and I make a lot of efforts… but I am slow at learning and not so many chances once I missed a season.

Luckily the winter was rather warm and none of the herbs froze, so I still have abundant parsley, fennel tops, and celery branch, mint and rosemary, sansho too. So while it is frustrating not to harvest properly what I had planted, at least these ones surviving for more than a year now are a great source of inspiration in their scarcity. While being simple, they add a great flavor to simple ingredients, more particularly on Friday evening when we arrive, that the fridge is close to being empty and we are starving. They help me twist a simple recipe into something new, great, fresh and green.

My last idea was an olive oil sautéed new potatoes pot to which I added celery and parsley freshly cut in the garden. That was divine.

To boost cooking time I cut the potatoes thinly, and cook them in a bit of olive oil. Then add the celery washed and chopped, stir. Finally toss in the chopped parsley. Salt and pepper and all set for dinner. So no mater how irritating or saddening it is to work in my kitchen garden, I will continue learning and trying, because even for a few parsley leaves or a handful of peanuts… it is worth the effort, as the pleasure of going down there and thinking of the next recipe counter balances everything else.

May be one day, in a far future, I’ll finally manage to obtain one of these beautifully curated kitchen garden where colorful flowers and perfectly grown vegetables are lined and create an amazement of the eyes and the promise of a generous and rustic taste.

May 3, 2020

Croissants!!!

I use to hunt down the best croissants in Tokyo, I found some, but best shops making the best croissants change over time… Recently we went nearby our place at the factory, and they have probably close to the best pain au chocolat but definitely not the best croissants… and a space that maybe perfect for a gloomy morning but not for a bright sunny day, I preferred the park nearby.

Knowing that finding delicious croissants in Tokyo, you can imagine that in Isumi it is a bit of challenge. Grain makes delicious croissants and pains au chocolat but they open too late to have freshly baked croissants in the morning. The only option was that I tried making some again. Indeed after three or four miserable attempts in the past years, I decided that an ugly weekend would be the perfect timing for another attempt. And that’s just what we got: pouring rain for almost 2 days and strong winds, notwithstanding a drop in temperature back to a modest 5.

Instead of testing again a recipe I had in my books and didn’t work for me, I chose to go online and pick a video tutorial. After watching a few I picked the video by Domi patiss, because it was neither too short, nor too long, because her croissants look really fluffy and delicious, and she had a few hints that made sense to me. I followed her recipe almost to the letter except for quantities and I must say that for the first time I managed to make croissants that both have the taste and appearance of croissants from a boulanger… They were delicious!!!

So here is what I did… there is a lot of waiting/resting time, so it took 24h to make the croissants, but the actual “action” time is always very short. The video by Domi patiss is in French but quite visual to understand the folding and rolling tips she gives.

Croissants (make 6-8 pieces)

– 250g of flour

– 70g of water

– 60g of milk

– 6g of fresh yeast

– 7g of salt

– 20g of brown sugar

– 10g + 110g of butter

In a large bowl I mix the flour, the sugar, the salt, add the water, the milk, the yeast and 10g of butter. I knead until smooth, roll into a 25 by 15cm rectangle, wrap not too tight and set in the fridge for 12h at least. The dough should raise during that time.

http://gentianeetantoine.com/igk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/video-1.mov

Then I roll it onto a rectangle of about 25cm by 50cm. Cut the 110g of butter (cold) in thin slices and cover half of the dough. Flip the other half on top and roll again to obtain the same size again. Fold in four, wrap and refrigerate for 1h.

Roll again to the same size or larger and fold in three this time. Refrigerate for another hour.

Finally roll again to the same size. Cut the edges to make apparent the feuilletage. Cut 6-8 triangles, roll them into croissant, set for another hour to rest at room temperature.

Apply an egg batter on the croissants and bake at 210deg for 15min or until perfectly golden. Enjoy!!!

March 29, 2020

Eclairs & choux

Why while the recipe is always a lot simpler than I remember, I prepare eclair only once every 2 or 3 years???… These and millefeuilles are probably my favorite French traditional patisseries, with strawberry tart. (I don’t count simple fruit tarts, cobblers, and crumbles… they do not really count!!! 😉 What the three have in common is a delicious custard, and I love custard… with vanilla, cocoa, macha…

While my puff pastry is never really good, I have never been presumptuous enough to make an attempt at baking millefeuilles, but eclairs, choux are perfectly at the level of my abilities. And each time I am decided to make some, each time I prepare myself for a tedious task, and each time I am surprised by how quick and easy it was!!! And wonder why really I don’t make some more often!!!

I always use the same recipe that I wrote sometime ago here, beware that the custard ingredients quantities fill about 2/3 of the choux, so if you want to fill all of them, you need to multiply by 1.3 the custard quantities or use 2/3 of the pate a choux ingredients. I use these quantities because sometime a choux doesn’t bake with the perfect shape, and because A. and I like to test the choux out of the oven! And I realized it is always almost at the same time of year I make it and only when we have friends visiting!!! The recipe makes quite a lot of them actually so that may explain the second point… as it is better not to keep them more than 24h!!! They are so much better fresh!

Have a good day!

March 26, 2020

Magic ingredients

While many places in the world now have braced for the virus impact, life in Japan has been pretty good and simple for what concerns me. I can totally live without attraction parks, without stadiums, and for a certain extent without concert halls, jazz bars etc… I barely go shopping as well… So, so far, except for a few days a week of remote work for A. things haven’t changed much for me. Of course, there has been a lot of fuss with foreign students supposed to come to the lab and local students to go abroad, but once I realized the situation was way to dynamic to make plans I just decided to take it easy and try to minimize the impact to the student and our activities, and because this is the spring break I have no teaching for the moment and fewer students in the lab. We’ll see how things turn out in April with the new term… Well, in the meantime many friends in many countries are now fully locked down, and that’s for them that I am making this post today. Among all products they could have at home or needed to pack I recommend flour. I bake a lot so I almost always have 5kg of flour at least at home if not 20 (I buy it on internet in 5kg bags). Flour and water are two ingredients that can make magic when you’re in short supply of everything else and work even better if you have a bit of time!

With these two sole ingredients you can make a dough for vegan pasta, dumpling skin, ravioli skin, biscuits, flat breads, batter for tempura, you can even make sourdough… once you have sourdough you can make bread… If you have a bit of baking powder, add it to water and flour and make pancakes… If it’s olive oil you can make a dough for a quiche or simple crackers… if it’s butter how about baking sablés and cookies… if you have both sourdough and olive oil a focaccia or a fougasse. With an egg even better pasta! Oh! If you have milk with the egg, crepes, add a bit of sugar and you have a clafoutis or a far… and I am sure I am missing quite a lot of things we can do with these simple ingredients… such as boiling potatoes and making gnocchi!

So wear your nicest apron and rush to the kitchen!!! I must admit that I’m a bit envious of those locked down now, as for us life is just business as usual… if I were stuck at home for a few days I would so much enjoy myself with all the things I don’t have time for!!!

March 18, 2020

Miso, again…

Making miso every winter is now a tradition. Our friend S. prepares everything for the event and we gather together for a couple of hours to chitchat and squeeze soya beans. Well, for non Japanese people or not used to Japanese cuisine, miso may be a rather intriguing ingredient and not so easy to use except in the traditional miso soup, and even then, using fresh miso in a soup may be a bit challenging when not used to. But the truth is that miso is quite versatile. We easily eat 2or 3kg of miso every year at home! You can see my past posts about miso here, but let me summarize some of the things you can do with miso again.

Miso can be used in soup, dips, to pickle vegetables and flowers, in marinade for fish, a spread on rice balls, to replace butter in pie crust, to replace cream in quiche flan, just to give a creamy texture to a sauce, and in many other places I am forgetting!

Today two super simple recipes with miso: in pie crust and in spread. Both are very straightforward. Let’s start with spread, a classic in Japanese cuisine: yakionigiri. You need just some plain white Japanese rice and a two tea spoon of miso per serving of rice. Cook the rice to obtain a sticky japanese classic rice. Prepare a sheet of cooking paper. Wash your hand under cold water and don’t dry them. Take half a serving of rice in your hand and form a ball (if your sensitive to heat let it cool down before doing that, you may burn your palms). Put the ball on the cooking paper. Gently flatten it by pressing with your palm. Spread one tea spoon of miso on top. Put under the grill until the miso starts darkening. Eat right away.

The second recipe is just to replace butter in a pie crust by miso. This changes of course the pie crust consistency to a more crispy on the edges and chewy on the bottom, with the characteristic flavor of miso. You can make quiche with it (vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, canola… are perfect), or tiny sesame crackers.., or be creative and use it for a chocolate tart!!!

Miso pie crust for a broccoli and spinach quiche

February 21, 2020

Cheese, cheese, cheese…

In these kind of gloomy days of grey skies and new Corona virus outbreak, even very recently with the pick of new cases in Japan that starts to impede our work activities: events I was invited to got canceled, events I have been working hard to organize are going to be canceled as well… a bit of slowness, time shared with the loved one and delicious cheese was more than welcome.

Saturday morning, after a few days separated for work, it was high time for having breakfast together again for real. So we headed to cafe No. 4 in Yonbancho for breakfast. Indeed after trying croissant at Factory the other day, and finding way too salty, we tried the avocado toasts from No. 4 and they were really delicious! The kale and fresh fruits salad that accompanied them was also great! A very good place to start the day and honestly there are not so many in Tokyo that open early enough.

But that that’s not the point of today’s post to review early breakfast spots in Tokyo, though I should make one, one day…

The point is this little gem we found on our way to the countryside later that morning. A few kilometers before arriving home A. wanted a coffee. So we stopped at the one opened on the way: Haru. A small place I knew was making galettes and crepes, but, I don’t go out to eat crepes and galettes, that’s what I cook when we’re in a rush and starving!!! That’s why we’ve never been before… what I didn’t know is that they are also making cheese!!! What a surprise! Indeed, the owner used to work at Takahide farm, a place I really love, and he had spin of, but still uses the milk from Takahide farm. He learned one year in Auvergne, France. He makes a few different types of cheeses, different from Takahide, great! A good reason to shop at both. I bought the “souple” cheese which is a semi-hard cheese that has a very soft taste. Loved it, with some freshly baked bread, or just like this… I didn’t try the blue cheese but knowing that he studied in Auvergne I am guessing it should be nice for blue cheese lovers (which is not really my case).

But the best of the best was their fromage blanc. They sell it in 350g pack which is a great size for making several servings, it reminded that in France we buy fromage blanc by 1kg!!! Haru fromage blanc is light and creamy, very mild in taste and melty in the mouth… scrumptious. And with the strawberry season starting in Chiba it’s the promise of many delicious breakfasts and desserts! And many visits at Haru! And when there you can try the Houji cha latte… really good too!!!

So you can bookmark the address as I did! I am sure there a few more remarkable cheese makers in the region, just need to find them… and by chance is surely the best!

Top picture of the cheese is from Haru website.

February 17, 2020