Fish flavoured millet croquettes

This is another brilliant recipe from the Czech cookbook from Dagmar Lužná.  I made some small adjustments only. It´s pretty much a usual deep-fried millet croquette, yet the subtle fish flavour coming from the bonito flakes gives it a special exotic touch. I didn´t see bonito flakes (dried flakes of a fish from the tuna family) anywhere here in CZ, I am still using my old ones from Amsterdam. But perhaps they sell them in some Asian specialty shops, who knows…

First you need to cook millet (about 3/4 cup for two people is more than enough) for about half an hour in a 1: 2,5 ratio of grain to water, with a small pinch of salt. I always presoak my grain and then rinse it, but it is not necessary. Meanwhile you can finely grate one large or two smaller carrots, finely mince one smaller onion and one (or two) garlic cloves. When the cooked millet cools down, mix in the grated carrot and minced onion and garlic. Add 2  tablespoons of dried bonito flakes, 1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg and 1/2 tsp of salt. If the mixture is too thin, you could add some oat flakes to thicken it. Otherwise just make small round balls with your hands and roll them in breadcrumbs (I used glutenfree corn crumbs) and deep-fry your millet croquettes until golden and crispy. Spray them with some shoyu or tamari soy sauce immediately after taking them out of the oil ( I do that with a slotted spoon or special tempura strainer). Keeping soy sauce in a spray bottle is very very handy 😀

I served the millet balls with some pickles and raw green daikon.

Anise flavoured vegetable stew with hiziki

Yep, you got it right – I DID mix seaweed and anise! Together with a load of sweet vegetables and miso! 😀 Sounds maybe a bit odd but it´s a lovely comforting stew which is pretty warming in spite of the cooling seaweed featured. Anise definitely adds extra warmth to the long cooked winter vegetables…

I cut up carrot, parsley root, parsnip, turnip, hokkaido pumpkin, red beet, curly cabbage and onion into medium-sized pieces, placed them into a thick-bottom pot and covered the vegetables with water. They don´t have to be fully submerged, you can just add some water accordingly during the cooking time. I mixed in a handful of presoaked and rinsed hiziki seaweed (it needs to soak for about an hour). I also added a generous sprinkle of anise seeds and a pinch of salt.

Cover the pot with a lid, bring to boil and afterwards just simmer on a low flame, keeping the lid on and watching that the vegetables don´t get too dry. At the end you can add a tablespoon of brown rice miso diluted in some warm water and let it gently simmer with a lid off. The stew should not end up being too watery, you can also always thicken it with corn starch, arrowroot or kuzu…

I served it with a rice/barley mixture with gomasio.

Veggie sautee with apple and walnuts

Normally I don´t mix fruit or nuts into my vegetable dishes (it is not something for delicate digestion to mix these with grain or with each other), but once in a while this adds some fun and unexpected details to an otherwise standard veggie macro dish such as this simple sautee-

I just heated some oil on a pan and then sauteed onion for a while until soft and beginning to brown. Then I added leek, white cabbage, curly green cabbage, carrot, turnip, all cut up into rather small pieces. The fun addition: a small amount of cubed apple and chopped walnuts, cooked together with the rest. The sautee was seasoned with a splash of shoyu soy sauce and apple cider vinegar.

Served with a rice/amaranth mixture topped with a gomasio of black sesame and salt (love the colour contrast!).

A quick lunch of leftovers!

Sometimes there just is a fridge full of leftovers and a lunch that needs to be quickly assembled…it´s great to have some extra cooked grain and beans, and a few fresh veggies to liven up the meal!

Here I had leftover rice and hato mugi which I sprinkled generously with freshly toasted sunflower seeds (toast on a dry pan until they start getting golden and fragrant).

I had leftover cooked lentils, so I mixed them with cubes of hokkaido pumpkin, organic corn kernels from a glass jar and water to barely cover, cooking the meal until the pumpkin got soft. I seasoned this with some shoyu soy sauce and ground coriander.

Very quick and tasty!

Miso risotto with mushrooms and celery root

I love to make creamy risotto-style rice. With brown rice it´s a bit difficult to make a real Italian risotto, which requires stirring in small amounts of liquid at a time, which means a lot of time spent standing above the pot…not such a task with quick cooking white rice, but quite a job when you´re using slow cooking short-grain brown rice! 😀 This is a bit of a compromise, but the flavour is very rich and surprisingly similar to an authentic risotto!

I pressure cooked my regular brown rice with water and rice milk, in a 1:1 ratio. After the pressure came down, I took the lid off, placed the pot again on a low flame and stirred in some rice miso diluted with a little bit of water and let the rice absorb the liquid while stirring with a wooden spoon, for maybe five minutes. The whole point is to get the rice creamy, that´s all…

While pressure cooking, I sauteed some sliced onion with a pinch of salt, on a bit of olive oil, and when it got translucent, I added chopped mushrooms and thin strips of celery root and proceeded to cook until all got soft and caramelized. I seasoned the vegetables with tamari soy sauce and caraway seeds. When the rice got creamy, I stirred in the veggies. The risotto was served with a side of freshly blanched curly (savoy) cabbage.

Glutenfree and yeastfree pizza dough that works!

This time I´m gonna do something I don´t normally do: just link to an awesome recipe from another blog. I really like Solveig´s glutenfree and vegan recipe blog, and I already tried out many of her entries, which usually turned out great. Long have I looked for a yummy glutenfree pizza dough which would not contain yeast either, and well, here it is! It´s even oilfree, beat that!

I followed it to a T except that I also added a teaspoon of salt and I didn´t use the nutritional yeast, which was listed as an optional ingredient anyway…

On top I spread some not-so-macro but traditional pizza ingredients: tomato puree, Italian herbs and black pepper, organic corn from a jar, green bell pepper, onion and fresh champignon mushrooms.

Here is the link.