Back to the future

So it turned out that I had to take a rest.

Just wanted to say I am back again with a picture of my overgrown shiso and the last mizuna plant:

 

Why didn't I harvest the shiso? Because it turned out that shiso is indeed the one Japanese ingredient that I don't like (as I thought I had already noticed in Japan, but looking back at the time I bought the seeds, I hadn't been sure anymore). To me, it tastes like bitter almonds, a quality I don't like so much in an herb. My Japanese friend said that the red shiso is different from the green one, but I didn't notice a huge difference.

The picture is about two weeks old, and now all of a sudden the temperature outside is winter-like. Up to now, I had kept the plants for their decorative value, but they are starting to suffer under the cold.

There should be a series of photos of Ben and me making vegan nama fu on the camera's SD card. If I recall the essential details, I will post about that when I can spare the time.

Premonitions of Bento Mania...

Highschool has started for Esther yesterday.

And the first thing she said when she returned home yesterday was: "They don't have any Coca-Cola at the canteen. They have Dr Pepper and various energy drinks, but no plain Coke."

Hmmm. Dr Pepper is British. Most people I know say that it tastes similar to Cherry Coke. I used to like it a lot. I think that it tastes faintly of violets.

I would never have guessed that it was popular enough around here to be featured by a school canteen ;)

Esther also said that the air in the canteen was hot and stifling, and that there are about 2000 students at the school, but the canteen holds only about 60 people.

So yesterday and today she was lucky enough to be able to eat at the canteen. But I secretly asked myself if I'd turn into one of those crazy mums that get up at 4 in the morning to prepare fabulous bentos for their kids.

I tried looking at various bento blogs with her. But she lost interest rather quickly.

These are the things she said she would like in her bento so far: Strawberries, cherries, edamame and rice.

Not quite a sufficient variety to create more than one bento out of that.

To be continued.

Prawns and a fountain

We came back from a vacation in Sri Lanka a few days ago.

Food was mostly buffet style, and as I've said before, I'm not very fond of posting pictures of food which I have got myself from a buffet.

And if the food wasn't buffet style, it didn't look so spectacular.

I have one photo of a dish Esther ordered on the way to Sri Lanka at Dubai Airport, though, which I found rather impressive, even if the prawns are not straight ;)
 

 Hmmm. It looked more impressive in reality ;)

For a certain reason I would like to post photos of one fountain in Zurich-Oerlikon as well.

 

The two figures (a man and a woman) are each holding a fish between their legs, the water spouting from the mouths of the fish.

 

Making iced tea

Today, it was rather warm outside. I decided to have another go at making iced tea.

Decades ago, I had got a leaflet from a tea shop in Germany (of which I was a regular customer) explaining how to best make iced tea.

1. Fill several long-drink glasses up to two-thirds with ice cubes.
2. Brew the tea. Use double the amount of tea leaves as you normally would for a given amount of water, but let infuse for only half of the time. (Add sugar to taste.)
3. Pour the hot tea on the ice cubes. The tea will be "flash-frozen" instantly, while part of the ice cubes dissolve.

I tried to make a larger amount at once. A while ago, I had bought this "refrigerator pitcher".

 

I filled it with a lot of ice cubes. The pitcher holds 2 liters, and I filled it approximately to the 1.5-liter mark. Then I brewed the tea. I filled a paper tea filter with 8 teaspoons of green tea.

 

This is sencha with extra flavor added. I used earl grey flavor (a small rest) and blood orange flavor.

After I had added water of 80 degrees Celsius, it looked like this:

I let it infuse for one and a half minutes, then poured it on the ice cubes.

Hm. Again, I was not so happy with the color. I tried it. I wasn't that happy with the taste, either.

Possible ways to improve it:

1. Less ice cubes.

2. Distribute the tea leaves evenly among two tea filters, so they have more room to expand in the hot water.

3. Use fresher tea. (The blood-orange flavored sencha was more than a year old, I think.)

To be continued.

 

 

Another attempt at the perfect curry nabe

Yesterday, Ben pinged me on chat while he was at work asking what I had planned for dinner.

As yesterday was another rainy and rather cold day, I had planned to make a nabe using stuff that we still had in stock. I asked Ben if he would prefer tomato nabe or curry nabe, and he chose curry.

Overview of the ingredients:

 

Ben had pinged me around 6, and he was due home around 9. So I had enough time to soak some dried mushrooms. The bowl in the center contains about 20 g of dried cloud ear mushrooms, soaked in lukewarm water and cut into bite-size pieces. The bowl on the bottom right contains 4 dried shiitake, also reconstituted in the same water and cut into slivers.

I also decided to use the leftover konnyaku (in the bowl at the back). I wasn't quite sure if its fishy taste was compatible with curry, but then I thought: "The Thai make excellent fish curries. Why not give it a try?"

I had strained the liquid from soaking the mushrooms through a paper coffee filter into this measuring cup.

 

(Sorry for the blurry photo.) It had a really strong mushroom smell :) As you can see, it is almost three quarters of one liter. For use as stock for the curry nabe, I filled it up to one liter and added about half a tube of this instant kombu dashi:

 

To be honest, I am not so happy with this brand of kombu dashi. When I dissolve it in (usually boiling) water, it first turns into myriads of little gelatinous, light green squares. I have to stir really hard until they disappear. I'm also not quite so happy with its taste. But it is good enough for many purposes. 

I added two curry roux blocks to that and two tablespoons of this soy sauce:

 

(I have mentioned "light-colored soy sauce" a few times in this blog and translated that to "usukuchi shoyu". The stuff in the picture above was what I had used. I guess it's not really fair. This soy sauce is light-colored, yes, but it also doesn't taste very intense. Several cookbook authors tell me that real usukuchi shoyu tends to taste more salty than regular soy sauce, due to differences in the fermentation process. Yumi Hana carries real usukuchi shoyu. As soon as this bottle is finished, I want to try it.)

 

After I had taken this photo, I decided that the bag of Yude Udon would still fit in.

My first bowl:

 

On the whole, I was quite happy with this curry nabe. But I guess I don't want to use dried mushrooms every time. I also should have put in the shiitake right from the start, with the carrots, the cabbage cores and the konnyaku. They were still a bit tough when we had them.

So there is still space for improvement :)

 

 

 

A post-mortem on yesterday's oden

The weather report for this weekend spoke of rain and low temperatures. So I had decided to make oden for dinner on Saturday.

Unfortunately, yesterday I was in a bad mood for food-unrelated reasons. So contrary to what I had planned, I did not take photos of making the oden. While having dinner, though, my mood cleared up and I regretted not having taken photos. So today, I decided to write quite a lengthy post-mortem of yesterday's oden.

Yesterday's oden contained:

Carrot chunks
Daikon half-moons
Potatoes
Konnyaku
Store-bought ganmodoki (I had finally found them frozen at Nishi's Japan Shop)
Fuku-bukuro (filled pouches of abura age, tied shut with kampyou ribbons)

Funnily enough, I had met my Japanese teacher at Nishi's when I had bought the ganmodoki. When I told her that I had to make the oden without fish products because my husband is a vegetarian, she wondered: "Oden without fish? Is that even possible?" ;)

But now a word about the fuku-bukuro. We blanched four abura age sheets, patted them dry, cut them in half and pried them open. The filling was:

2 dried shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, rehydrated and cut into thin slivers
100 g enoki, trimmed and cut into 2.5 cm lengths
half a cup (125 ml) of shirataki noodles, blanched and cut into 2.5 cm lengths

I still have the other half of the pack of shirataki noodles left. This time, I used this kind:

This is a product from Thailand. What I like about these shirataki noodles is that they come gathered in bundles which are tied with a knot. This makes it easy to lay them out lengthwise for cutting after having blanched them. I simply had to untie the knot.

And this time, we didn't try to make decorative konnyaku braids, but we simply cut the loaf in half horizontally, made shallow cuts diagonally on back and front, and then cut the slab into smaller rectangles. I liked the result much better than the braids - the last time we made braids, they were much too thick. This time, the konnyaku was less chewy and had acquired more flavor from the simmering liquid.

This is the konnyaku we used (the remaining half of the loaf):

 I thought I should have hard-boiled some eggs as well, but Ben remarked that it was way too much stuff to put into the donabe already.

My cookbook had said to tender-prep the potatoes before peeling them and putting them in, but as they were going to simmer for quite a while, we peeled them beforehand and cut them in half. While we were having them, Ben asked if the Japanese cuisine really makes use of potatoes. I told him: "Yes, of course, but as far as I know, Japanese potatoes contain less starch than European ones and thus are eaten not so much as a stomach filler (like rice or noodles), like we do in Europe, but rather as a vegetable."

But the stars of yesterday's oden were these (at least in my view):

 

This time, I had not made mugi miso dengaku sauce. I had my oden with the Korean mustard I have mentioned in an older post, and the yuzu kosho and the kanzuri in the picture above.

My Japanese friend had brought those from Japan for me :) She had never heard of kanzuri, though, before I asked her if she could get that for me. I told her that it was a specialty of Niigata, and she said that her brother lives in Niigata. Possibly she got it on paying a visit to her brother.

I was surprised how mild the kanzuri was. Yet I found it very tasty :)

And the yuzu kosho is really hot and I liked the citrusy taste of it :)

Yum - I like oden :)

My current gardening projects

This is an old wooden cart. I had Ben and Esther sand it and paint it white. Then I asked Esther to sow some seeds in it. This is how it looks about three weeks later:

 

At the back is komatsuna, and mitsuba in front.

The same cart a few days later:

 

We will have to eat the komatsuna soon. Some plants have started to flower, and there seem to be caterpillars of some kind that have gnawed on a few leaves.

Furthermore, I had two mini greenhouses of this kind:

 There is shiso (aka jiso and ao jiso) in this one. But it's not coming on so well.

 

I suspect the climate in this greenhouse was just too humid, because many of the seeds became covered with mold after the first night.

  But some started to germinate anyway. I'll give them a bit more time while giving them water only sparingly.

Unfortunately, the cat kicked over the other mini greenhouse. There was green mizuna and purple mizuna in it. I could save only a few seedlings, which Esther and I transferred to a balcony box.

 When I look at them now (the picture is from Thursday), I believe they are doing quite well in that box.

It always helps when I don't have to do it alone and Ben or Esther (or both) are there to help (or do the work without me).
I have no green thumb at all - I'm no good when it comes to living plants :(

Yay! Store-bought onigiri!

Yesterday, we had kiriboshi daikon and hijiki no nimono. As always, about a coffee mug full of both was left. So today, I was planning to throw that into okonomiyaki dough.

A few minutes after the local supermarkets had closed, I thought: "Hmmm. Maybe mushrooms to put on top of the okonomiyaki in the pan would be good." So I pinged Ben, who was on his way home, and asked him if he could pop into a certain Coop supermarket close to his office before he got on the bus home. He did and got eryngii :)

He also got an appetizer for me :)

 

Onigiri filled with spinach and shiitake (on the left) and with teriyaki salmon (on the right).

(Never mind the cans of Beck's Beer. I just used them to lean the onigiri against them.)

Both were very good. But the left one didn't taste much of shiitake. It was flavored with wasabi. I was surprised to find that wasabi goes well with spinach :)

I have to apologize that I haven't been posting here as often as I should. There sure would have been enough to post about. I promise to do a post about my gardening projects soon.

O-miyage from Japan

I haven't posted anything for quite a while now. So today, I'll post about a cool gift we got from my Japanese friend and her husband.

They had been in Japan over Easter. We had been to Heidelberg, Germany. My friend's husband and my husband happen to work at the same company, and today they exchanged o-miyage.

This is what we got:

 

Tokyo Banana :)

This is how they look like on the inside:

 

Sponge cake filled with banana cream. Delicious!

 

 

Sake! (part 4)

So we had guests on Sunday. It was really a nice evening, even if I spent almost the whole day cooking :) And I was so busy that I didn't really have time to take pictures for posting about the food.

They brought a bottle of sake. This:

I liked it :)

I had also bought sake for that occasion. As there was no opportunity to visit the specialty shops, I went to our local Coop supermarket and bought this:

 

 There is next to no Japanese on the bottle. I wonder if that means that it is produced for export purposes only.

This sake also has a rather intense taste.

"Wasabi" Pickled Carrots

We are expecting guests on Sunday, and I decided to make pickled carrots in advance, using this recipe as a rough guideline.

I had 500 g of multicolored carrots:

I peeled and trimmed them.

 On the right in the photo above, you can see my favorite vegetable peeler. You might guess from its shape that it is intended for peeling asparagus. I like it because it is sharp and because it peels rather thickly.

So I used it to peel the carrots into strips.

Meanwhile, Ben had peeled the ginger and chopped it with the draw-knife.

This resulted in a lot more than one and a half teaspoons of finely chopped ginger. More like one and a half tablespoons. But when I used the amount stated in the recipe, the carrots didn't taste of ginger at all.

I added that to the carrots and this much chili flakes:

The container on the left is in fact a mill, to grind the flakes more finely.

I also added a scant tablespoon of regular household salt (not kosher salt). I used plain salt, not the salt with iodine and fluorides added. On top of that came four generous teaspoons of sugar and four scant teaspoons of this prepared horseradish:

I really wonder if the author of the original recipe was thinking of something like this when she advertised "prepared horseradish". She speaks of a "bottle" of the stuff - the concoction from Bavaria in the picture above is much too thick to put it into a bottle. It also contains sulfates, and I don't think that makes it better than the "wasabi" preparations readily available in Swiss supermarkets. One day, I think I'll use "the green gunk in the tube" and see what happens.

I used a pair of salad servers to work the seasonings into the carrots.

Then I stuffed everything into my pickle press.

While I was typing this report, it has sat in the fridge for - well, maybe a bit more than half an hour. I just took it out and transferred the carrots to a different container, setting some aside to try them.

They turned out really well!

Vegetable lasagna with shiitake

Yesterday, Ben and I made vegetable lasagna with shiitake for dinner. Last year in Austria, I had bought "Das kleine Pilzkochbuch" ("The little mushroom cookbook"), where the recipe is originally from.

First, Ben cut 500 g of fresh shiitake into quarters or sixths, depending on the size.

 As you can see, the fresh shiitake mushrooms available here are really large (and rather spongy).

500 g really is a mountain of shiitake!

 Ben also first trimmed and quartered one fennel bulb of 300 g, then cut the quarters into thin slices.

He peeled roughly 200 g carrots and sliced them thinly (1 mm) using a mandoline slicer.

And he diced two onions.

 I heated up a generous tablespoon of clarified butter...

...and sautéed the vegetables for about 5 minutes in that.

I removed them from the heat, dusted them with two and a half tablespoons of white flour and let them cool for a few minutes.

Then I added 400 ml cream, stirred to combine and simmered over low heat until the mixture had thickened a bit.

 

 I added black pepper and herb salt. I use this sort:

 Because there is so much cream in the mixture, I have to add quite a lot of that salt to create a savory taste.

Frying the shiitake briefly (for about 3 or 4 minutes) was the next step. Again, I used about a tablespoon of clarified butter.

 "Help, our frying pan is too small for all those mushrooms!" Luckily, Ben came to help me. He is more skilled at stirring the contents of overflowing pots and pans than me ;) But after the shiitake had shrunk a bit, I was able to continue. I seasoned them with herb salt and black pepper as well.

Meanwhile, Ben got out the lasagna form. I asked him to use clarified butter to grease it, but he said: "Mmmm... can't I use something else?" I answered: "Of course you can, use margarine if you like." He went on: "Have I never told you that I don't care much for the taste of clarified butter?" - He hadn't. But now I know ;)

So after he had greased the form, Ben laid out the bottom of it with 4 dry lasagna sheets (the "no pre-cooking" kind), spread half of the vegetables and cream on that, added half of the mushrooms and then another layer of lasagna sheets.

On top of that came another layer of veggies and cream, another layer of shiitake - and then Ben sliced two balls of mozzarella cheese (300 g in total)...

...and spread them on top of the lasagna.

 After about 30 minutes in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius, it looked like this:

 And this was my first portion:

 (I can tell you that it tasted much, much better than it looks in this photo!)