Onion-bread soup

What a simple way to improve your “usual” onion soup – add a piece of sourdough bread to thicken it! 😀

For onion soup I sautee at least two medium or large onions (I prefer red onions – they are sweeter) on a bit of water with a pinch of salt, the longer the better, they should be really soft. Then I add two bowls of hot water (or as much as needed) and bring to boil and then simmer, 5-10 more minutes.  This time I added also cubes cut up from half a slice of our homemade bread. Let them (almost) dissolve, stirring at times. Towards the end add about a teaspoon of ginger juice and diluted brown miso to taste.

Complete meal idea

I just thought that this looks really pretty and that it´s quite a nice balanced macro meal, so here you are 😀

Grain: rice+25% sweet rice, with gomasio

Vegetable dish 1: kinpira made from dried/soaked burdock, carrot, a splash of tamari and ginger juice and finely cut carrot tops

Vegetable dish 2: chopped red cabbage sauteed under a lid with a bit of water and a tablespoon of ume vinegar and a bit of dried thyme

Protein: chickpeas with chunks of hokkaido pumpkin and some salt to taste (not in picture)

Greens: raw rucola and corn-salad lettuce

Pickle: sliced takuan (daikon pickled in rice bran)

Glazed yuba again – this time with soba noodles

I already posted a recipe for glazed yuba on this blog, you can find it here. This time I made this one just for my boyfriend (except that I used half white flour and half whole-wheat flour for tempura batter, as he is not sensitive to gluten). For myself I made an oil-free and less-yin version 😀 I just soaked the yuba strips overnight, making sure they are fully covered by water, cut them up into bite-size pieces and then I cooked them in 1 tbsp of shoyu, 1 tbsp of mirin, 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice, 1/2 tbsp of rice malt (instead of maple syrup) and a bit of water, so the yuba was almost submerged. I first cooked the yuba for a while with a lid on and then let the liquid slowly evaporate with a lid off. It was almost as tasty as my boyfriend´s deep-fried version!

I served the yuba on soba noodles, with water-sauteed veggies (onion, leek, broccoli, carrot and cabbage).

Exploring asparagus plus some more vegetable dishes

Here in Slovenia it´s most definitely asparagus season – on the farmer´s market almost every stand has these beautiful bundles of tall green asparagus stalks, they are apparently very popular. Now I had asparagus only a few times in my life, as in the Czech Republic it´s not a vegetable people would normally use. You can sometimes find it hidden in a soup, and it´s easier to find in a posh restaurant. But here it´s a food of “normal people” 😀 I found out asparagus is not your typical “macrobiotic vegetable” (it seems that it´s a tad too yin), but I wanted to give it a try anyway, so I purchased a small bundle and tried steaming it, baking it under a tin foil with some water, roasting it dry in the oven and woking it with other veggies 🙂 Here are two of these creations.

The first one is asparagus simply steamed with a sprinkle of salt. Served with millet-cauliflower mash (see my recipes for this one – basically it´s just millet and cauliflower cooked together and then well mashed), into which I added a teaspoon of shiro miso for more flavour. I also made a “roots and tops” vegetable dish – one big spring carrot sliced into thin diagonals, simmered one minute with water to cover, then I added its fiber-rich cut up tops and simmered under a lid for a couple minutes more, towards the end adding just half a teaspoon of shoyu.

The other meal is asparagus baked in the oven on 200°C for about 15 minutes, with a sprinkle of salt. For my boyfriend I added also a coating of oil and some extra cracked black pepper. Served with rice/amaranth mixture and the Purple passion stew from Jessica Porter´s book. It´s basically a nishime – a piece of kombu on the bottom of a heavy pot, then rounds of daikon, half of a small red cabbage cut into small chunks, and just about an inch of water. I simmered the veggies for half an hour, covered with a lid. It turns the daikon deep purple, how cool!!

Simple rice-chestnut-apple pudding

This is a very simple, quick dessert which has no sweetener except for fruit, there´s not even a touch of rice syrup or maple syrup or such. Therefore it´s VERY mildly sweet, but good if you´re in the need of watching your dessert intake and still longing for something a bit sweeter than sweet vegetables 😀

I had some leftover shortgrain brown rice which I pressure cooked for 45 minutes with dried chestnuts (in a roughly 1:1 ratio, because it was a small amount only). It´s good to soak the chestnuts overnight before you cook them. The next day I blended this leftover rice/chestnut mix in a blender with a bit of water (just enough to make the blender work) and half of a bigger unpeeled apple cut into chunks. Then I transferred the puree into a pot, added a pinch of salt and simmered for maybe ten minutes. Towards the end I added a teaspoon of kuzu diluted in a little bit of cold water and brought to boil. You must make sure your kuzu went through boil. You can enjoy your dessert warm or let it cool and set a bit (it will resemble pudding more when the kuzu is allowed to cool). You can sprinkle the top with some cinnamon.

Boiled salad with pumpkinseed dressing

This time I tried a recipe out of my most favourite macro book – Jessica Porter´s Hip Chick´s Guide to Macrobiotics. This boiled salad uses a slightly different method than the other boiled salad I posted about – you don´t really blanche the veggies, you just dip them into boiling water and immediately turn off the gas, leaving them in the water until they get a bit more bright, about one or two minutes. They stay very crunchy and taste almost like raw (well, except for the leafy greens perhaps, which get wilted very fast). This is a positive feature of this salad, and at the same time it can be a disadvantage if you have more troubled digestion, as I do – I think I prefer a “real” boiled salad, where the veggies actually boil for a couple of minutes. But I´m sure this will be great once the weather is hot and once my digestion improves so that I can process more raw food 😀

I “boiled” red radishes, curly cabbage, pointed cabbage, spring onion, parsnips, parsley root, green and yellow kohlrabi, green beans, and also (very briefly) some rucola, dandelion greens and corn salad greens. I topped the salad with a dressing coming from the same book. It doesn´t look too pretty, but it tastes very nice! Just roast half a cup of pumpkin seeds (which you washed and drained beforehand) until they start popping and turning more brown, then either process them in a blender, or (as I did) grind them in a suribachi until they are mostly crushed (depends what consistency you are aiming for). Then add half a tablespoon of umepaste and a bit of water, to your liking, mine came out quite chunky.

Carrot butter

This recipe comes from Kristina Turner´s “The self-healing cookbook”, which contains quite many awesome recipes, unfortunately not so many oil-free ones for my current diet 😀 This one has a bit of tahini, so it´s not completely oil-free, but it´s just one spoon 😉 And you can also definitely pass on the tahini!

My boyfriend recently succeeded in his sourdough project and created a wonderful homemade sourdough bread which was calling for some sort of spread. The carrot butter is very easy to make and more sweet than savoury.

Steam 3 or 4 cups of carrots cut into thick rounds of smaller chunks, for about 20-30 minutes until very tender. Then blend in a blender with about half a cup of water (I used water from the steaming, which had a bit of a carrot aroma) and a pinch of salt. Transfer to a pot, heat up, add 1 tablespoon of kuzu (diluted in two tablespoons of cold water), whisk vigorously to avoid lumps, and bring to boil. Simmer for a few minutes while stirring. For a more creamy consistency add one (or two) tablespoons of tahini. Store in a jar in the fridge.

Ume-cha-zuke

This recipe is slightly adapted from Wieke´s cookbook, and it is supposed to be a breakfast meal, but I can easily imagine it eating it for lunch or dinner, with a side of veggies. Ume-cha-zuke is basically a brown rice porridge cooked with tea and flavoured with umeboshi. Sounds odd, but it´s really great and refreshing! You can use a green tea or a roasted twig tea (which has much less caffeine) such as kukicha, which is the one I used.

Bring to boil 2 small bowls of rice (I had a long grain rice/wild rice mixture leftover) with 3 bowls of fresh made tea (1 used a tablespoon of the twigs for this amount). Mix in about a teaspoon of umepaste diluted in a bit of tea. Let simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Most likely you will still have quite some liquid left – I took off the lid, brought the porridge to a higher temperature and let some of the liquid evaporate until I got a desired consistency. It should not be creamy, but also not very watery. Ume-cha-zuke is best served with chopped spring onion garnish and thin strips of nori seaweed (easiest is to cut up the strips with scissors). I also mixed in a 1/4 tsp of wasabi paste, yum!

I liked combining it with a small serving of snow nabe, made simply by simmering a few tablespoons of grated daikon with a pinch of salt, a sprinkle of lemon juice and small cubes of tofu (about one slice for two people is enough). And of course miso soup, as every morning 😀

Lemon scented wok veggies

As you all know, I use my cast iron wok pretty damn often because it´s quick, easy and satisfying. Plus I really like the intense labour of constant fast stirring with two large wooden spoons, in an enormous frying pan over a high fire, there´s something very primitive about it – like being in touch with the essence of cooking on fire 😀

This time I wokked: wild chicory leaves, chinese cabbage, onion, carrot, daikon, red radish, broccoli, fennel, zucchini, champignons and yellow kohlrabi – starting with the onion and mushrooms, then the tougher veggies and at the end the soft and leafy ones. What makes it special? My lemony sauce – a tablespoon of shoyu, a tablespoon of mirin, half a tablespoon of lemon juice, half a teaspoon of powdered ginger, one teaspoon of rice malt and one teaspoon of grated lemon peel 😀 I also mixed in small tempeh cubes (first marinated in shoyu/lemon/mirin and then baked until crispy in the oven).

We ate the meal with a long grain rice/wild rice mixture with gomasio.

Fish miso soup with sauteed greens

On Saturday we go to the local fish market in the centre and buy ourselves a fresh fish fillet for dinner – can´t get much more fresh than that, unless you live just at the seaside and not in the mainland as we do. We are sampling different kinds of fish, sometimes freshwater, sometimes sea fish. This time we went for Croatian seabass. It was pleasant, though a tad too oily for my current strict regimen 😀

I decided this time to turn the fish into a soup! First I steamed the fish very shortly, just so that I could take off the skin and bones, and set it aside. I brought water to a boil and added chopped parsley root, leek, daikon and sweet potato, all in small pieces. Towards the end I mixed in diluted shiro miso (you don´t want to use a strong yang miso with the fish, but be aware that shiro miso is very mild, so you might need more of it) and the pieces of fish and let simmer for a while, and then garnished the soup with chopped chives.

On a pan I sauteed wild chicory leaves, broccoli, kohlrabi, zucchini rounds and shredded pointed cabbage, just with water, mirin and ginger juice. We also had some raw spring greens – rucola, kohlrabi and corn salad (a type of lettuce). Served with long grain rice/wild rice mixture.