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!)

Could it be that you are reading my blog?

Today, when I went shopping at Migros, I noticed an Asian-looking man waiting in line at the fish counter. When I passed by, he followed me with his eyes, beaming at me all smiles.

Could it be that he had been reading my blog and recognized me by my footwear? ;)