Savoury glutenfree veggie pancakes

These came as an immediate creation of my fantasy when I needed a QUICK lunch! 😀 They were a success, mmmm!!

In a bowl you combine diced onion with finely cut cabbage, grated carrot and grated pumpkin (I used hokkaido, as almost always), but actually you can come up with endless vegetable possibilities. As a flour I used a mix of brown rice flour and buckwheat flour, roughly 50:50, plus enough water to make a sticky wet mixture together with the veggies – you really don´t need any egg in your pancakes! Just try to make the consistency as similar to a normal pancake consistency as possible, but there´s no rule here – you gotta experiment and see what you like… I seasoned the mixture with salt and an italian herb mix ( I assume basil and oregano and maybe thyme…?).  Then all you do is fry this cross between patties and pancakes on some oil (I use rice bran oil) until golden. You can see that mine fell apart because they were a bit too big and the batter was maybe too liquid, but it´s actually fine, unless you go for the looks 😀

I served them with a salad of quick sauteed pointed cabbage and leek and raw rucola (rocket).

17.11. Kale-adzuki bean miso soup

As a grain I pressure cooked short grain brown rice with hato mugi, On top I sprinkled some dried bonito (fish) flakes which I purchased in chinatown. I heard you can use them as a sprinkle this way, but I´m not a fan – the bonito flakes have a reeeally strong fishy smell, which would not be bad in a bouillon (another way how to use these flakes), but as a sprinkle it was a bit too much 😀

My soup was made by boiling water with cooked hokkaido adzuki beans (the variety that comes from the vulcanic soils of the Hokkaido island in Japan), kale, turnip and finely cut ginger, with diluted rice miso added at the end. It was really yummy, but next time I´ll stick to ginger juice – I just don´t like biting into pieces of ginger, no matter how finely cut they are! 😀

 

 

3.11. Experimenting with hiziki and yuba

On November 3rd I went really wild with my lunch, just listen!

I pressure cooked short grain brown rice with amaranth. Ok, not special. And lesson learnt – amaranth needs really a lot of water, even in the pressure cooker! It was a bit too dry and undercooked thanks to that…

I sauteed (without oil) chopped fennel, leek, green beans and pointed cabbage, and seasoned with dried coriander. Ok, also, not so special, I should have added more water while sautéing, since I didn´t use any oil…

But then it starts getting interesting – it was the first time I used yuba, which is dried soya bean curd (the top layer of soymilk when you make tofu, something like a thick tofu cream layer…dried into yellow sticks, or sheets). First you have to reconstitute it for about half an hour, by soaking in water. Then you can do lots of things with it, similar as with tofu or tempeh…I just fried it on some oil and seasoned with tamari. But boy, does that yuba need a lot of soaking time! Next time more time needed…

The best part of the lunch (the only TRULY successful part) was the seaweed. I soaked hiziki (again, needs soaking to reconstitute, but perhaps 10-15 minutes are enough), then cooked it with a part of its soaking water, together with diced onion and diced butternut squash, for about half an hour or even a bit longer. At the end I sprinkled in some toasted pumpkin seeds and mixed in a sauce of diluted shiro miso (young miso) and rice malt, mmmmm!! Sounds pretty freaky I know, but actually this combination was really good, slightly sweet but complimenting the hiziki more than I would expect…

November 1st: A meal of fish and Chestnut-amasake dessert

On November 1st I made a meal of Pacific cod, short grain brown rice pressure cooked with hato mugi (aka pearl barley aka Job´s tears), kinpira, and blanched veggies. The cod was steamed in a steamer basket, after being coated with salt and black pepper, olive oil, dried basil and rosemary, and at the end I squeezed some lemon juice on top (I always add lemon juice to fish – it helps balance the strong yang quality of fish meat). The blanched vegetables that day were kale, paksoi and green beans. The kinpira was traditional: “shards”of carrot and burdock root, cooked with a tiny amount of water, first on high flame for a few minutes, then under a lid on low flame for around half an hour, seasoned at the end with tamari.

As a dessert I served chestnut – amasake cream. I might have not been the first one who came up with this, nevertheless I regard it as my own recipe, because I didn´t look it up anywhere 😀  I roasted a couple of chestnuts in the oven (15 minutes should be enough, I can´t tell the temperature, because our “micro-oven” doesn´t have any temperature settings…), then I blended them in a blender with a bit of water (just to make the blender able to function…) and a generous amount of brown rice amasake (which is fermented brown rice, using a “koji” culture, it is used as a sweetener, a healthy one indeed!), then I transferred the purée to a pot. I added a bit more water and a pinch of salt, cooked the mixture for a while,  then mixed in diluted kuzu starch, brought to boil while stirring continuously and cooked for 1-2 additional minutes. Super easy! And soooo yummy – it actually reminded me of ice cream thanks to its rich creamy texture…

 

 

31.10.

The nice yellow soup in the picture is pumpkin soup – cooked up hokkaido pumpkin, blended in a blender with added shiro miso (white, shortly fermented miso) and some ginger juice to taste – I personally think pumpkin soup just needs ginger in it! 😀

For grain I had brown calasparra rice mixed with red thai cargo rice and quinoa – all pressure cooked togethe for 45 minutes, served with a sprinkle of gomasio. I got a bit addicted to mixing different grains together, makes cooking much more interesting. But I must admit that I am not so fond of pressure cooking the quinoa with the rest – normally I cook quinoa without pressure for just about 15 minutes, a longer cooking time makes it too slimy and tasteless 😦

I sauteed pointed cabbage with green beans together with some mirin and ume plum vinegar – pointed cabbage rules!! So tender, compared to round cabbage.

And the beans are black hokkaido beans – first rubbed in a wet kitchen towel (instead of washing, so that their skin doesn´t “fly off” during roasting), then dry roasted for a few minutes until their skin cracks and becomes a bit golden, then pressure cooked with a double amount of water, for 45 minutes. When they´re done I added some kuzu to their leftover cooking water to make a sort of thick sauce (and a nice glaze on the beans), tamari (instead of salt) and rice malt – lovely combination!