29.10.

 

On 29th October my boyfriend arrived from his vacation, so I wanted to surprise him with a bit of a more fancy meal. He loves miso soup, so I had to make that one – this time with fresh daikon, plenty of onion slices and with mugwort mochi (I think I mentioned already that mochi is a Japanese product made by pounding sweet brown rice into a firm sticky block, this one was flavoured with a herb called mugwort, it´s a dark green mochi!!).

The main course was pressure cooked brown rice with buckwheat (about 3:1 ratio), tempura of sweet potato and carrot slices (see previous post for the simplified recipe), sauteed cabbage, leek and fennel (without oil, just using a splash of mirin towards the end), a pressed salad from pointed cabbage

-thinly slice cabbage and place in a deep bowl, sprinkle about half a teaspoon of salt for two big handfuls of cabbage (it´s a bit hard to tell the exact amount of salt you need, but don´t use too little, you need the salt to start the fermentation), massage in for a minute or two using your hands, put a small plate on your salad in a way that it sits directly on the salad and put something heavy on the plate (you can of course use a salad press if you have one…I don´t). Let sit for at least half an hour, but preferrably for a couple of hours. The salad will release some water and it will be slightly fermented, just to break down the tough and hard to digest cellular structure, plus it gives the salad a pleasant fresh taste. You can rinse the cabbage in case you find it too salty.

and a kinpira…

-cut an equal amount of carrot and burdock root (can be found in some health shops, but it´s quite rare, you can also find them in nature) into quite thin matchsticks, quickly sautée on a high flame using a tiny bit of water, add sesame seeds if you like, put a lid on, change to very low flame, and slowly cook for 20-25 minutes. Be sure your kinpira doesn´t burn, but don´t lift the lid too often…at the end season with tamari.

For dessert I made a white rice pudding – I cooked a cup of white organic dessert rice (a sticky short-grained rice) with 4 cups of fruit juice (I used water mixed with fruit concentrate, in Holland called “diksap”), add chopped up dried fruit (I used a handful of organic dried apricots) and perhaps a squeeze of lemon (if you want to, you can also add lemon or orange peel, and vanilla essence or powder…). Bring to boil and cook under a lid for half an hour. Turn off heat and let sit for a few more minutes and better even longer so that the water soaks in a bit more. You can mix in a spoon or two of almond butter – I didn´t have any so I just sprinkled some roasted almond flour on top of my servings. If needed, add a natural sweetener, like maple syrup, or rice malt. Next time I have to be more careful with the liquid (I used too much) and maybe I will try and make this dessert in a pressure cooker for a more dense texture.

 

28.10.

 

For lunch I cooked millet with mung beans and green/grey hokkaido pumpkin chunks – all in my new lovely pressure cooker! So easy, just put it all in, add water (3 parts of water to one part of grain in this case), bring to pressure on high flame, then put on a lower flame (possibly together with using a flame deflector) and cook for half an hour, done! Just wait 5-10 minutes for the pressure to come down on its own. And you actually have grain, vegetable and bean 3 in 1! 😀

But anyway, I made some quick extra greens – shortly blanched kale and cabbage. You just bring a pot of water to boil (enough water to have the veggies covered later on) and when it starts boiling, transfer the vegetables inside and let them cook for just about a minute or two (they should get a deep green yet bright colour and become softer yet firm and crispy – a bit of a challenge, yes! 😀 trial and error!).

 

For dinner I had the leftover grain from lunch (with new and not burnt!! self-made gomasio) plus I made a quick miso soup with carrot and tofu cubes. In a wok I sauteed (with no oil) paksoi, carrot and leek, seasoned with tamari and mirin. And I had to try out my newly purchased tempura pan and made a glutenfree deep-fried tempura: sweet potato slices dipped in a batter of brown rice flour+kuzu starch+water (you have to experiment with the consistency, that´s the hard part!) and deep-fried until golden. It was a great success, I really liked it!

 

15.10.

 

On 15th October I started my level 1 Art of Life school at the Kushi Institute in Amsterdam. For lunch that day (my last homemade lunch, because at school we get fed 3 times a day) I made millet (with some of my, ummm, lightly burnt gomasio :-p) with a hiziki dish:

Soak hiziki sea vegetable in water for about half an hour to reconstitute it, then cook with a little bit of the soaking water and sliced onion for 30-60 minutes (the longer the better), towards the end add corn (I used corn from a can, because I didn´t have fresh…), roasted almonds (I roasted them shortly in the oven, just for about 10 minutes) and season with tamari.

I also cooked orange hokkaido pumpkin with a bit of salt and water until it became all soft and mushy and towards the end added some cubes of tofu to the dish.

Served with lightly pickled cucumber (just cut the cucumber into chunks, sprinkle generously with big grains of sea salt, let sit in a bowl or on a plate for 15-30 minutes, then WASH OFF the salt, ready!).

11.10.

Yesterday night I remembered to soak my grain, as it induces a germination process, and the result is even more nutrients in your grain! Plus reduced cooking time, yay! So I soaked a mix of the dutch brown “zilvervliesrijst” with red thai cargo rice, beautiful colours when you put those together…

We had the grain with a smoked mackerel with a black pepper coating (courtesy of the Albert Heijn supermarket! :-D), it was quite tasty and MSC quality (sustainable fishery), but next time I´d prefer non-smoked fish, I like the fresh version of fish better…

I also made nishime from daikon, carrot and onion (see one of my previous posts for how to make nishime), seasoned with tamari. I quickly blanched the rapini and mizuna – so far the best way how to prepare them, better than steaming or eating them raw as I did before. You just bring a little pot of water with a grain of salt (or two, or three…)to boil, place the greens inside, turn off immediately, let sit for a minute and take the greens out, simple! And I made a few chunks of lightly fermented cucumber – just sprinkle some salt over the chunks, let sit for a while and then rinse the salt off. It does wonders to the taste of the cucumber and it makes it more digestable! Overall, a great dish today, I think.

My typical breakfast

Since starting my MB studies, I transformed my breakfast meal from a sweet porridge with a looot of nuts and seeds (I used to sweeten it with stevia or raisins or rice malt, and always used rice milk as well…) to a much healthier savoury version.

I always start my day with miso soup – honestly this has been the best step for me as of lately!! Such a great food to get you started. I make it less salty in the morning (just using half a teaspoon of miso per bowl). I try to use some form of daikon to induce discharge (either dried daikon or fresh, as in today´s soup), I always add wakame as is traditional in miso soups (I add a poststamp of it just a minute before turning the soup on low to simmer, that´s when you add the diluted miso). I often add carrot or onion, but not today – instead I finely chopped some ginger to give me extra warmth on this cold day. I add a garnish of chopped leek greens, or spring onion (as you can see in the pic).

Then I make a savoury porridge from leftover grain (today it was leftover quinoa/buckwheat mix), sprinkled with roasted seeds, with some pickle (sauerkraut and pickled gherkin are nice in the morning, they give extra live enzymes). Plus today I added a spoon of the arame dish from yesterday.

I don´t even miss my sweet breakfasts!!

10.10.

Yesterday I was cooking a whole lot – I gotta practice now that I´m doing the macro school!!

For lunch I had cooked sweet millet (more sticky and creamy than regular millet), with steamed veggies (red cabbage, onion, daikon, carrot, cauliflower, rapini/mizuna), and dry-roasted tempeh with sauce made of tamari, mirin (sweet rice wine) and lemon juice (add after the tempeh is roasted and let evaporate). I burnt my tempeh a little bit, so no picture! 😀

For my dinner I cooked a mix of buckwheat and quinoa (which is truly awesome, the light texture of the quinoa makes the heavy hearty buckwheat less heavy and hearty :-D). I also cooked adzuki beans with kombu (helps soften the beans) and some time before the end added a few chunks of hokkaido pumpkin, mmmmmmm…..

I also had a sidedish of arame (which I presoaked for a bit and used the soaking water) cooked with sliced onion, roasted sesame seeds and corn kernels, and seasoned with tamari. I cooked it long enough to make the water soak in or evaporate. Arame is my favourite seaweed, with a very gentle pleasant taste – good for seaweed beginners!

9.10.

For dinner after coming from the Art of Cooking workshop I made myself some pretty cleansing, discharging dishes, to further continue what I started at the workshop 🙂

I now eat miso soup twice a day – this time it was with dried daikon (for deep discharge of old accumulation), carrot, wakame and chopped leek as a garnish on top.

I cooked brown calasparra rice together with sweet brown rice and some hato mugi. Calasparra is a wonderful rice coming from Spain. Sweet brown rice is a protein rich strengthening variety of rice of the sticky sort. Hato mugi, also called “pearl barley” or “Job´s tears” is a cleansing grain and I must say I fell in love with it, very nice mixed in with your rice!!

With the grains I made a nishime of daikon, carrot and kombu, seasoned with tamari. A nishime is a very nourishing sweet dish. You prepare it by placing a poststamp of dried kombu on the bottom of the pot (preferrably a thick-bottom pot with a heavy lid), then you place big wedges of daikon and carrot (or other hard vegetables), add only about half a cm of water, cover with a lid, bring to boil, and cook on low flame for about 20 minutes (more or less – depending on how quickly your veggies get soft). I love how it brings out the sweetness in the veggies! At the end I added a splash of tamari, but you can also just use a bit of salt.

I also had sauerkraut for a pickle and some raw rapini and mizuna that Nardo got at the organic market – rapini (or broccoli rabe, turnip tops etc.) and mizuna (Japanese mustard, Japanese greens etc.) are both relatives of the turnip, and they remind me a little bit of rucola.

My new baby!!

Yesterday, after my Art of Cooking workshop, I purchased a lovely Japanese knife made by Seki Ryu. It´s called “Santoku” – an all purpose knife which you can use for both veggies and meat, and I guess just about everything. I got it in my favourite “Dun Yong” toko shop in Chinatown, for an affordable price 😀 I reeeeally like the shiny blade with the Japanese print hihi!

4.10.

Yesterday I finally cooked up the Spanish calasparra rice I purchased in our macrobiotic shop – truly delicious!! Doesn´t even need any gomasio…

Together with it I fried a few slices of tempeh – using only a bit of mirin instead of oil (as I am now supposed to go oil-free to cure my longstanding food allergies). The sweet mirin (which is a sort of Japanese rice wine) gives the tempeh a very sweet flavour, a bit odd, but not unpleasant 😀

As for vegetables, I sautéed (on water) sliced fennel(yum!!), leek, finely sliced fresh ginger and paksoi, with a sprinkle of tamari.