Simple smoky udon noodles from the oven

Pasta ovendishes were always a favourite of mine before becoming macro…now I hardly have them because…well, because I don´t eat any more cream and cheese, quite essential ingredients for creamy pasta dishes! But there is a way…yup, tofu to the call…

First cook your noodles (any kind will do, I made udon, which are thick flat wheat noodles). Mix them with sauteed veggies of choice (I used onion, carrot, broccoli, parsley root and leek), sauteed on water with a teaspoon of tamari. For the sauce just blend a cube of smoked tofu with enough water and lemon juice to taste – smoked tofu has a distinct flavour of its own so I didn´t want to overpower it. It will come out a bit chunky, but it´s ok Mix through the noodles with veggies and bake in the oven on 200°C for 30 – 45 minutes until the top gets a nice crust. Serve with fresh salad – I had lettuce, rucola and red radishes with some salt and lemon juice. Good for balancing the baked yang food!

Steamed greens with tofu dressing

In the picture below you can see one of my lunches – pressure cooked rice and rye, long-baked onion, carrot and parsnip (sprayed with tamari and a tiny bit of oil, baked for about 45 minutes under tin foil, then 15 minutes uncovered), steamed greens (bok choy, curly cabbage, pointed cabbage, cauliflower leaves, kohlrabi slices, leaves and stems) and tofu dressing.

For the dressing I blanched roughly 50 g of firm tofu for a few minutes (to make it easier to digest and less weakening), placed into a blender with 1 tsp lemon juice, 1 tsp tahini, 1/2 tsp ume paste and 1/2 tsp white (shiro) miso, and blended until smooth adding liquid as needed.

Chestnut mochi kanten

Ok, three things to say up front: finding a name for this recipe was really tough, it could also be called chestnut-mochi-kuzu-agar agar dessert. But I spared you and chose a simplified version

Second, this dessert is ugly. It really is. It looks like wet grey concrete. Somehow chestnuts, at least the dried ones, don´t make for a pretty dessert. But who cares, right? It´s the taste that matters…

Third, this dessert is absolutely guilt-free. It´s even healthy! There is not a gram of added sweetener, no rice malt, maple syrup, fruit, nothing. Just chestnuts to make it sweet (which are really healthy for your blood sugar levels). This also means that this dessert is very mildly sweet. But for us who have sensitive taste budes and who are on a restricted diet with zero or very few desserts, this is still a blessing

Now back to business. You just need to soak (preferrably overnight) about half a cup of dried chestnuts (add water to make the cup full). The next day pour it all into a pressure cooker and add about 1/4 cup of sweet brown rice. Add a pinch of salt, water to cover, bring to pressure and cook on a low flame and on a flame tamer for about an hour. Transfer to blender (you should have enough liquid, but adjust as needed) and puree. Bring back to the pot, add 1 tsp of kuzu diluted in a tiny bit of cold water and 1 tsp of agar agar powder (if using flakes or bars, you need to follow package instructions for the amount used). Bring mixture to boil while stirring, let simmer gently for a few minutes and then serve warm or let cool down and solidify. The texture is amazing…….

Adzuki-corn soup

This is a slightly modified version of the kidney bean and corn soup which you can find in Wieke´s cookbook. I decided to use some leftover cooked adzuki beans and it turned out delicious! You can use fresh corn on the cob, but it´s not in season yet here, so I just used corn from a jar, which (together with using cooked beans) made this soup incredibly quick.

For one portion add about half a bowl of beans to one bowl of soup, mix in corn kernels (to your liking), chopped carrot, diced onion, some salt or shoyu (my beans already had some shoyu) and bring to a boil. Simmer until the veggies are soft, then add 1/2 tbsp white (shiro) miso diluted in a bit of warm water. Simmer for a few minutes more. Serve with garnish such as chopped parsley or spring onion.

Oil-free onion butter

I´ve been enviously watching my boyfriend making (already twice) a lovely onion butter, using recipes from Jessica Porter and Aveline Kushi, which both contain some amount of oil. Luckily, I found out that you don´t actually need any oil to make this yummy spread for your bread or rice cakes!! It´s soooo simple…it does take some time though so be sure you make the butter on a day when you are able to keep an eye on the stove for a couple of hours…

All you need to do is peel a couple of onions (I used nearly 4 larger onions, mostly red ones which are sweeter) and slice them thinly into half moons (you can still chop them up smaller, but I think it´s not important). Sautee them in a heavy stainless steel pot for a few minutes on a medium flame, on water covering them up until about one half of the layer. Add a generous pinch of salt, cover with a tight fitting lid, place pot on a flame tamer, lower the flame to the minimum and then just simmer….and simmer…and once in a while check they´re not burning (but avoid lifting the lid often or too much water will evaporate! the best is to have a glass lid). You can of course add water if needed but the onion comes out better if it´s as dry as possible – mine got all thick and gooey and caramel-y at the end I cooked mine for 4 hours, but 3 might do the trick…You can basically cook them really really long but it depends on your flame, flame tamer, water level, salt, onions etc. Anyway, you should end up with something fragrant and spreadable

Let cool and store in a glass jar in the fridge.

Black amaranth – for real ?!?

Imagine my surprise when I found these tiny shiny black seeds in the health shop in Zagreb - black amaranth! Try and google some information about this grain, you will probably not be successful… It´s apparently very rare. I like amaranth a lot and often cook it mixed into rice, so I thought this would be similar, just black. I decided not to mix it into rice this time to create a visual experience of contrasting black grain with colourful veggies. Well, the black amaranth was a disappointment…It tasted like poppy seeds, except I like poppy seeds better Actually, it tasted more like wet sand, more so than normal amaranth (which also has an odd texture, but eventually gets creamy). I cooked it for about half an hour, but it was still gritty. There were also quite many tiny stones which were not tooth-friendly… But you must admit it looks pretty, especially with the lightly sauteed veggies

We ended up mixing it into rice/barley which I accidentally cooked for the next day. The next morning we cooked it with the rice/barley into a porridge, but it didn´t get any softer

 

Some simple daily meals…

Honestly, most of my meals are not fancy. Most of them are not from cookbooks. Most of them are not beautiful enough to be photographed. Most of them are rather quick and simple and they get rotated regularly, because I am not a full-time blogger nor a full-time macro cook Usually it´s something like this…

Pressure cooked rice and hato mugi – green beans sauteed with white (shiro) miso diluted in water – carrot roots and tops sauteed on water with a splash of ume plum vinegar – arame cooked in water to cover + shoyu to taste and some raw spring onion mixed in at the end

Pressure cooked rice with rye – leftover cauliflower/millet mash (check my blog for the recipe) – cubes of smoked tofu baked in the oven – umepaste stew ( cover bottom of a heavy pot with a thin layer of ume paste, then continue with a layer of thin onion slices, thin cabbage slices, grated carrot, chopped kohlrabi, finely chopped dill and about two inches of water, simmer under a lid on low until tender, mix in the end ) – nori condiment made from shortly simmering torn up nori sheets, shoyu, mirin and lemon juice

Sweet millet cooked together with cubes of hokkaido pumpkin – fresh rucola – hiziki cooked with water to cover + shoyu to taste + sesame seeds + thinly sliced onion + presoaked dried lotus – nishime of daikon ( with thinly sliced kombu, sliced dried and presoaked shiitake, 1/2 tsp shiro miso diluted in water and 1/4 tsp of lemon zest)

Pressure cooked long-grain rice with hato mugi and lotus seeds – lettuce, red radish, radish sprouts and lightly steamed green cabbage – roasted hokkaido pumpkin and onion sprinkled with cinnamon – leftover hiziki dish (see above)