Off to the summer conference!

Macromagician will not be online until around August 11th, because tomorrow I am leaving for the 13th European Macrobiotic Summer Conference held near Den Bosch in The Netherlands – link here. Hopefully I will bring home some great new ideas and inspiration for future blogposts! 😀

Can´t wait to taste all the wonderful food, by the way. Not that I don´t enjoy my own cooking, but it´s great to sometimes have a break from it all and just be pampered and well-fed by one of the finest macro cooks, don´t you think 😉

Roasted cauliflower with thyme and garlic

Roasted cauliflower is something very simple which you absolutely don´t expect to come out so divine! It sounds really…boring. But trust me and give it a try, it´s not as plain as it sounds. Especially if you do what I did and toss the cauliflower florets with some olive oil to coat,  salt, 1 or 2 finely minced garlic cloves and a generous sprinkle of dried thyme, oregano and basil, and let it sit in a bowl in the fridge overnight (or 24 hours, like in my case… :-D). The smell is quite overpowering, but worth the final effect. Roast the cauliflower on a baking tray lined with baking paper (or a silicone mat), for about half an hour on 180°C, turning the florets mid-way.

Served with quinoa mixed with chopped fresh parsley leaves and gomasio, and a salad of shredded leaf lettuce, iceberg lettuce and diced carrot, with a simple dressing of olive oil and ume plum vinegar.

Pumpkinseed pesto: great both on fish and pasta

The recipe for this pesto comes from my favourite cookbook by Susan Marque, focused on clearing candida from the body.

The good thing about pesto is that you can make it in just a few minutes – if you have a blender. And since I am a lucky owner….

I just blended 1 cup of pumpkin seeds (first dry roasted on a pan until they pop), blended them on pulse mode with about 1/4 cup olive oil, a big clove of garlic, 1 tsp ume vinegar, 2 tsp shiro (white) miso and a cup (or more) of fresh basil leaves, adding water as needed.  The blender requires quite some water to function…If you like smoother pesto (like the one I made), you can also blend on higher speed towards the end of blending.

just blended pesto

I used the pesto in two meals – over corn pasta with blanched carrot, green beans and broccoli (no picture, sorry!) and as a topping of baked fish which I baked in a heat-resistant glass baking pan covered with tin foil, for about half an hour. The fish was served with a rice/sweet rice mixture and a layered stew: onion rings on the bottom, then curly cabbage, white cabbage, dill and lettuce, flavoured with ume plum vinegar and cooked for some 20 minutes on a low flame under a lid, with just about 2 cm of water in the pot.

pesto covered baked fish

Corn chowder

 

This is a slightly adapted recipe from Jessica Porter´s Hip Chick´s Guide to Macrobiotics (see “Corn Chowdah”). I also made the soup for myself only so I cut down the amounts. It was surprisingly tasty!

Into one pot I placed 2 soup bowls of water together with a post-stamp sized piece of kombu, brought it to boil and simmered for 15 minutes. In another pot I sauteed a small onion and a piece of leek on some olive oil, with a pinch of salt. When the onion became translucent I added a piece of chopped up carrot and sauteed for 3 minutes, after which I added a couple of spoons of corn kernels from a jar and sauteed just one minute more.  You may want to add more salt in the process. Then comes the main step: I sprinkled the veggies with 2 tbsp of cornmeal (I actually used polenta which is basically the same) and stirred for a while until the veggies got evenly coated and the cornmeal turned more golden. Then I carefully poured in the kombu stock (you can discard the kombu or cut it up finely and add it to the soup), stirring to prevent lumps. I gently simmered the soup for 30 minutes on a low flame and on a flame deflector. It sounds long, but the longer you cook it, the more creamy it becomes, so it´s worth it! At the end I added a teaspoon of diluted shiro (white) miso, simmered for a few minutes and then served the soup with a garnish of red basil.

Baked teff dumplings with horseradish kinpira and sauteed greens

 

Long description but simple meal!

All I did was that I cooked up a batch of brown teff (the world´s smallest grain originating in Ethiopia), in a 1:3 grain to water ratio, with a pinch of salt. Then I mixed enough rice flour into the hot grain so that the porridge-like consistency got transformed into a tougher dough and I let it cool.

Meanwhile I prepared kinpira by slicing carrot, parsley root and soaked dried burdock into matchsticks, I sauteed them for a few minutes on a bit of oil with a pinch of salt, in a heavy-bottom pot. When they softened, I added about 1 cm of water into the pot, covered with a lid and let the veggies cook for half an hour on a low flame, using a flame tamer. Towards the end I added a splash of tamari and about 5 cm of finely grated horseradish which I actually mixed in when the flame was already off and just let it steam through.

I also cut up some carrot tops, curly cabbage and white cabbage and sauteed them on a tiny bit of oil with minced garlic and a pinch of salt, just shortly so that they stay crisp.

When the dough cooled off, I formed round dumplings (you might need to wet your hands slightly to prevent sticking), lined them up on a greased baking pan and baked them on 200°C until their surface got crispy. They were a bit bland as I didn´t add any flavour to the dough, so we ended up spreading some coarse mustard on top 😀

 

Grilled macro kebabs

I think it´s always fun to create a makeover of a popular dish from a certain ethnical cuisine – translated into macrobiotics! If you manage to make something look and maybe even taste like fast food, you win a lot of praise usually! 😀 I definitely did at home with these pretty looking kebabs…

And the only thing that makes them special are the thin bamboo sticks you use for holding your kebab ingredients together!

You can use pretty much any veggies but I recommend tougher ones as they will not get so limp but will stay a bit firm after being grilled. I made rounds of carrot, zucchini and parsley root, onion wedges, thin slices of celery root and chunks of smoked tofu. I lined up the sticks on a baking tray covered with a silicone baking mat and poured a marinade over them. The marinade consisted of 4 tablespoons of water mixed with 1 tablespoon of tamari, 1 tablespoon mirin, a splash of apple cider vinegar, half a teaspoon of dried garlic powder, 1 teaspoon of olive oil and a big pinch of psyllium husk to create a more gel-like substance, so that the marinade doesn´t all slide down… I imagine it would be best to use a brush for spreading the marinade :-p

Then just shove the kebabs into a preheated oven, bake for some 15 minutes on 200°C, then flip them (if possible) and bake another 15 minutes on a lower temperature (around 170 °C).

I served them with rice and amaranth.

ready to be baked

finalized meal

 

 

 

Celery root bacon

I´ve never seen recipes for “celery root bacon” in foreign macrobiotic cookbooks but for some reason here in Czech Republic it´s a big hit 😀 It´s really easy to make and it does bear a certain resemblance to fatty bacon bits…with some imagination, that is…

Just cut up celery root into tiny cubes (the smaller, the better they get fried) and fry them in a skillet with a generous amount of oil. I flavored them with some salt, dried oregano and dried basil (added towards the end so that they don´t burn).

Served with brown rice with a sprinkle of gomasio and dulse flakes, and blanched turnips.

Rice with blanched greens and creamy dill sauce

This creamy sauce would perhaps even more suit a pasta dish, but I decided to make an ultracreamy dish and pair it with pressure-cooked short-grain rice, along with some blanched veggies (in my case broccoli and green beans).

The sauce needs to be first blended in a blender and then cooked on the stove. Place a small chunk of tofu (you really don´t need very much, maybe quarter of a 200 g block), one clove of garlic, a dash of ground black pepper, 1 tbsp of ume plum vinegar and 3 tsp of brown rice flour into a blender and blend shortly with about half a cup of water. Add a big bunch of fresh dill and blend more until you get a bright green sauce.

In a smaller pot sautee some onion on oil with a pinch of salt, then add the blended sauce, bring to boil and simmer for a few minutes. The sauce should thicken thanks to the rice flour, but feel free to add more. It depends a lot on how much water you used… You might have noticed I am bad with estimating measurements 😀

Pour hot sauce over cooked rice and blanched veggies.

Pasta with homemade almond-basil pesto

There´s nothing like a good bowl of pasta with a delicious pesto sauce…it´s not a very typical macro dish, but it´s something I appreciate immensely. This pesto is dairy-free and uses almonds instead of the more usual pine nuts or cashews. Almonds are the most alkalizing of nuts, so why not 🙂

I made corn pasta (my favourite glutenfree type of pasta) with some blanched carrots and green beans and a sprinkling of organic corn kernels from a jar.

For the sauce you will need 1 or 2 cloves of garlic (I used 2 for my candida clearing plan :-D), a generous bunch of fresh basil leaves, 1/2 tsp sea salt, 2 tbsp of oil (I used the incredibly fragrant cold-pressed pumpkinseed oil purchased in Slovenia), a dash of black pepper, 1 tbsp lemon juice and 1/4 cup of almonds which I soaked overnight and peeled their skins off the next day. Soaking almonds makes them more digestible and removes the enzyme inhibitors found in all nuts, seeds, grains and legumes.

First place the nuts with oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice and garlic into your blender on “pulse” setting and shortly process into a chunky mixture (depending on your preference, of course). When that is done, add basil and pulse again for a more chunky pesto or blend on higher speed for a smooth cream. Serve on top of pasta with veggies.

 

Spring rolls with a spicy yuba and veggie filling

 

This incredibly hot weather is perfect for a meal such as spring rolls, don´t you think? It doesn´t involve a whole lot of cooking, just prepare the filling and then roll away. The rolls are eaten at room temperature or even chilled if you wish.  I used rice paper wrappers which you can purchase at an Asian shop.

For the filling I soaked some  dried yuba (tofu skin) sticks in water for a couple of hours and cut them into about 3 cm long pieces. I sauteed half of a medium sized onion (cut into half moons) in about 2 tbsp of oil, until softened, then added the yuba and fried until the yuba became a bit crispy. I stirred in a sauce prepared by mixing 1 tbsp of organic coarse mustard with 1/2 tbsp of tamari, 1 tbsp of lemon juice and a pinch of chilli powder. I added about half of a carrot cut into matchsticks, sauteed some more, and towards the end mixed in shredded young cabbage and chinese cabbage and let it heat through. Spoon a bit of the mixture into the centre of the wrapper (you need to first soak them in warm water for a minute or two, but be careful that they don´t stick to each other and don´t let them soak very long) and fold into an envelope shape. They will become less wet on the air and will seal nicely. But it certainly is a thing where you need some practice 😀