Tag: wild vegetables

Whaou!

Quite a week, and it’s only Thursday!!!  So let’s get back to when I left you last Saturday… Sunday evening we had 4 guests (mix of French and Japanese) for dinner at home in Tokyo so I cooked some of my half new recipes: creamy cauliflower soup with curried croutons (recipe below), pork cutlet with roasted roots: lotus, taro, sweet potatoes, turnips, deglazed in soya sauce, and for dessert hasaku with spices syrup (ginger, cinnamon and cardamom) served with sesame and kinako biscuits. A. picked many Japanese and French wines to accompany my food. Oh… and I also made some plain and olive fougasse, with the olives from the garden in Aix that my mother prepared! But that was Sunday and it seems ages already!!!

And then Monday it had snowed, quite a lot actually, so I came back home earlier than usual to avoid being stucked with train problems. And I was happy to work from home eating left over sesame-kinako cookies with a hot chaï late. And having nothing to prepare or so for dinner since I hade made too many roasted vegetables! I like to recycle leftovers and do new things with them. So I added fukinoto and topped with sprouts for a perfectly balanced dinner. It was a great flavor experience! Fukinoto bring so much!! They are also the taste of coming spring with plum blossoms! And then there was this workshop I co-organized at the French Embassy. Everything went great, I met amazing people, now I can think about what’s next (and there’s plenty) and go back to the work routine for a short while!!

How is your week doing? 

Cauliflower soup with curried croutons (6 servings as starter)

– 1 cauliflower

– 1 potato

– 150ml of cream

– 4 slices of bread (I used half rye bread I made) 

– 2tsp of curry

– oil for the frying the croutons

– salt, pepper  

In a large pan I boil the cauliflower washed and chopped and the potato, peeled and chopped too. When they are very soft I blend everything. Add water if it’s too thick. Then add the cream.

In a fry pan add oil and the curry, cut the bread in cubes and fry them while turning them regularly. When golden take them out and keep them on cooking paper. When serving heat the soup, add salt and pepper if you lile, serve and top with the croutons. I added a sprinkle of tumeric for adding a bit of color.

Double luck!

I was thinking that these days I don’t cook much and in particular I haven’t created new recipes as often as I usually do. Indeed, I am busy with work, handling a lot of things at the same time, and the beginning of the new term at the university, with new students in the lab, teaching and budgeting is always a period with a lot of pressure. On top of which, because more is better, I have taken the lead for an exhibition at the science museum of the university and the opening is in just one month, so there is a lot to do and prepare. Of course I have an amazing group, with great people that are always ready to challenge themselves. But in the end of the day I have little energy left to think about creating a new recipe, as I also concentrate on this recipe/cooking contest entry. So last night when I stepped in the kitchen at 21:00 past the first great news was a package from Poland from our friend who knows how much I love the Polish traditional potteries which I find suits very well Japanese food, and every once in a while sends us one. I now have a pretty collection!!!

Then I started to cook some vegetables sautéed for our dinner, and I was thinking that it was really not enough as a meal and A. would complain I don’t feed him enough!!! 😉 And just at this perfect moment (timing couldn’t be better), the doorbell rang and after a short time A. came back to the kitchen with a warm dish of bamboos shoot rice prepared by our neighbor who has been to the country to pick bamboo shoots. Isn’t that lovely! And here the perfect dinner was ready! Thanks a lot I. and Mrs W.!!!!!

My collection of Polish crafted potteries
My collection of Polish crafted potteries

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.

Bamboo shoot in kinome pesto

And here is the second recipe with bamboo shoots, the one that I really wanted to try. It is inspired from a dish we had at Daigo in February and since then I’ve been thinking/dreaming of it. It’s a very Japanese dish with taste of spring. It requires some fresh bamboo shoot boiled and cooled down, a table spoon of olive oil and 10 branches of kinome (the small leaves of the sansho tree, we have one in the garden so I just had to go and pick some!). I cut the bamboo shoot in dice, chopped the kinome leaves and add then to the bamboo, then add the oil and stir well. Ready to serve ready to eat.

Bamboo shoot rice- 竹の子ごはん

As I was telling you earlier, spring means a lot of fresh wild vegetables. After the fukinoto the bamboo shoot is probably the next to be found in Isumi area. In particular, the area close to Ohtaki is particularly great for delicious takenoko (bamboo shoot in Japanese). It’s also a great fun to go and pick them. This variety of bamboo shoot is the large one (8 to 15cm diameter), there exists a small one (1 to 3cm) that arrives later and that is even much more fun to pick.

Freshly cut bamboo shoot  
Freshly cut bamboo shoot  

Preparing fresh bamboo shoot is really easy, though a bit time consuming. First of all you need to peel the hard and hairy skin. It peels like a artichoke, so it’s really easy.

Peeled bamboo shoot  
Peeled bamboo shoot  

Then you need to boil it in something that would remove the bitterness of the wild shoot. In supermarket they often sells nuka (what is used for the pickles) and I was using that until I learn from an old lady at the local farmers cooperative that the first wash of rice was perfectly efficient. Since then I’ve usjng that, and believe me it’s much easier to clean than nuka. You need to boil for 30 to 60min, until soft (you can pick a toothpick easily in).  Once cold you can cut and then boil in dashi for 15min. I used katsuo dashi. You can eat now, or add to rice for a “takenoko gohan”. For this I start cooking the rice as usual, then at mid cookjng time I add the bamboo shoot sliced vertically and a little of soya sauce. Delicious to accompany red snapper or bonito.

Takenoko gohan
Takenoko gohan

Ideally you would serve takenokoto with leaves of “ki no me” the leaves of the mountain pepper tree (sansho), mine in the garden is not yet ready… 

Fukinoto – ふきのとう

Fukinoto growing in our garden
As a lot if places, Japan is full if wild plants that are edible. A lot of them come as a set called 山菜 (pronounce that sansai, literaly the “mountains vegetables”). It includes kogomi, tara no me, warabi and fukinoto. Most of them are great fun to pick, just like mushrooms. Depending on places they are more or less abundant and they grow at different times. For example fuki no to grow in January-February in Chiba prefecture, while in the Niigata mountains they are snow piercer and grow in May.
The first time we ate fukinoto, we actually went to pick them in Tsunan machi area with some friends connoisseurs. Later, I realize that we have some in the garden!! Fukinoto are delicious, with quite a strong taste easy to identify. They are better eaten while still at the bud stage (not as opened as the picture show them). They are often prepared in tempura (I skip this since I don’t deep fry at home), in a mixture with miso: fukinoto-miso which allows to preserve them longer, and in miso soup.
Today I tried the miso soup with tofu!

For that you need a good katsuo dashi, or konbu dashi for a vegan experience (I promise to prepare something about dashi soon), some miso (I prefer white or light colored miso for miso soup, which is also what is used for winter miso soup in cha-kaiseki), a piece of silky tofu, and some fresh fukinoto. Once you’ve prepared the dashi, mix in a spoon of miso per person. In the bowls put a few dices of tofu (after draining it), top with the finely chopped fukinoto (for a softer taste of fukinoto you can boil them once chopped in a net for 30s) and finally add the miso soup. Et voila!
Plain rice and fukinoto miso soup

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