Baked fish with almond and dried tomato sauce

You can use any fish for this recipe, my local fish shop had plaice, so that was what I used.

For the sauce you will need to soak almonds overnight and the next day peel off the skins. Soak a few (one or two per person) dried tomatoes for at least half an hour in water. Place both in a blender with a pinch of salt and half a teaspoon of dried garlic powder. Add enough water to enable blending into a smooth paste (or chunky, if you like that better). Adjust salt.

Place plaice (pun!) in a greased baking dish, spread sauce on top and bake about 20 minutes on 200°C, the crust should get a bit browned. Serve with a grain or (for easier digestion) with steamed vegetables, preferably leafy greens.  I had curly cabbage, string beans and cauliflower leaves. Raw daikon with a drop of tamari soy sauce and some finely chopped spring onion will help to digest the fish and oils as well.

 

Macrobiotic stamppot

Stamppot is THE most traditional Dutch meal of all time and so you can imagine my mostly-macro Dutch boyfriend misses it at times 😀 I promised him that I will try to make a macro stamppot one day – without the potatoes and fatty bacon bits! Finally I got to this experiment a few days ago and we were both pleasantly surprised, my boyfriend even admitted that it does resemble real stamppot (I suppose with a bit of imagination, like always! :-D). Well, try out for yourself…

Start with a classical macro “mashed potato” recipe, that is by cooking millet and cauliflower in a pot with a 1 to 3 grain to water ratio and a pinch of salt, until soft, then mash until smooth with a potato masher or surikogi (wooden pestle) or anything that will do…

Then…add more salt and spices of your preference (I added black pepper powder and ground nutmeg) and mix in a LOT (trust me…it has to be quite green in the end) of leafy greens, I had some beautiful swiss chard from the farmer´s market. You might need to blanche or steam your greens very lightly before mixing them in, but the chard was fine when mixed through the very hot grain. Stir very long until all the greens get soft and well incorporated in the mess mass.

Top with long cooked caramelized onions (I even added a bit of brown rice flour to mine to create a more gravy-like effect).

 

Boiled vegetable salad with nori

This recipe is included more because I really like the look of it 😀 But otherwise it´s super simple and hardly worth posting, I guess 😀

Just cut up any veggies you´d like to eat in your meal into bite sized pieces, blanche them separately (or in groups with approximately the same blanching time, like I do) in a pot of slightly salted boiling water, assemble together in a bowl and season according to your tastes and needs.

I used: yellow string beans, leek, curly cabbage, young carrot, broccoli, daikon, kohlrabi, parsley root. Then I added fresh rucola and lettuce leaves, some chopped up green olives, a touch of olive oil and apple cider vinegar and a special addition – torn up pieces of half a nori sheet! 🙂 I like the accent nori gives to salads…

I served the salad with some leftover amaranth sprinkled with nori flakes and shiso leaf condiment…

Savoury zucchini pancakes

I grew up often eating the traditional Czech savoury potato pancakes – these come pretty close without using potatoes, white flour or eggs that belong to the original recipe! 😀

Just grate a few small zucchinis (I used two for the two of us) on a coarse grater, sprinkle with about half a teaspoon of salt, add seasonings to taste (I chose 1/2 tsp ground coriander, 1/2 tsp ground cumin and one pressed garlic clove) and enough water and arrowroot starch to make a slightly runny pancake type dough. Amount of water depends on how much your zucchinis release water, I needed to add just a tiny bit. Heat oil on a frying pan and fry until golden on both sides. The pancakes had a really nice taste, but next time I might choose a flour instead of starch (I chose arrowroot because I am avoiding flours due to candida). The starch turned out to be a bit too sticky in the texture :-p

My pancakes went with amaranth sprinkled with nori flakes, some fresh rucola leaves and steamed brussel sprouts.

Tangy hiziki salad

At the summer conference I attended several amazing cooking classes, the most memorable ones being led by the originally-Spanish and now in Japan residing Patricio García de Paredes. The recipe for this hiziki salad is a slightly adapted version of his “hiziki ceviche”.

First soak a small bunch of hiziki seaweed, at least for half an hour, then cut the “strings” of seaweed into bite-sized pieces, transfer to a small pot with boiling water and boil for about five minutes. Drain and rinse and set aside to cool down. Meanwhile slice a (preferably red) onion into very thin halfmoons, remove the bitter ends, because the onion will not be cooked. Place onion into a bowl, sprinkle with a large pinch of salt (maybe half a teaspoon) and massage for a minute or two with your hands until the onion becomes limp, then set aside for at least half an hour so the sharpness is reduced and digestibility improved by slight fermentation. All previous steps can be prepared ahead of time. When the seaweed is cooled and onion ready, rinse the onion well (otherwise it would be way too salty), mix both in a bowl, add chopped fresh parsley (and fresh cilantro if you have it), some more salt to taste, a bit of oil (I added pumpkin seed oil, but you could use toasted sesame oil), a generous squeeze of lemon and some optional cayenne powder (my addition). The original recipe also called for shoyu and a sweetener, but I omitted those. Salad is best if left for a couple of hours in the fridge or at room temperature, so flavours can meld.

I served it as part of a dinner with sweet millet and gomasio, kinpira of dried burdock,carrots and parsley root, and a condiment of carrot tops sauteed in mustard and a bit of water.