Hiziki seaweed with roasted walnuts and vegetables

Somehow I think not many people pair seaweed with nuts, but I must say that it´s one of my favourite ways to prepare seaweed dishes! It adds richness and crunchiness to this otherwise “clean” tasting vegetable, which can be a bit bland and/or fishy for some people 😀

I usually also sautee some vegetables on oil as a base – here I used my most common pair of onion and carrot and I also added in parsley stems (don´t  throw away those guys!). Then I tossed in the hiziki (first soaked for at least half an hour in water, then drained and rinsed), poured  in water to nearly cover the veggies and simmered it all for about 30-45 minutes under a lid on a low flame. Near the end I added a handful of roasted walnuts and seasoned the dish with some salt, shoyu soy sauce and apple cider vinegar.

I served the seaweed with rice pressure cooked with chestnuts (dried ones, so I first had to soak them overnight) and some plain black beans, cooked only with salt.

Baked vegetables with mediterranean herbs

Don´t you just love the smell of vegetables roasting in the oven after being infused with a marinade containing fragrant mediterranean herbs? I certainly adore that smell…

Here I cut up onion, pumpkin, carrot and red beet and marinated them for a couple hours in olive oil (just enough to coat), some sea salt and a generous amount of dried oregano, basil, thyme and rosemary. Then I baked them in the oven until they got cooked through and browned a bit, stirring at times to allow them to bake evenly.

I had also some lentils cooked with bayleaf and salt and the grain was a rice/amaranth mixture with nori flakes to top.

Carrot and onion with whole cumin seeds

This is really almost not worth posting, but it was droolworthy in its utter simplicity:

Brown rice

Green peas cooked until creamy with some salt and apple cider vinegar

Sliced caramelized onion, sauteed on oil and whole cumin seeds, then added carrot slices and sauteed some more

The whole cumin seeds add a wonderful fragrant touch I wouldn´t expect and it´s very different than ground cumin 🙂 Anyway, it´s one of my favourite spices!

One-pot rice and black bean dish

One-pot meals are my big love – so soothing, warming, easy to prepare, and so little to clean up afterwards! Oh and a great way to use up any leftovers and odd pieces of vegetables sitting for a long time in the fridge, not to forget that!

Here I tossed into one pot: leftover pressure cooked rice with chestnuts (I was using dried chestnuts, so they were first soaked overnight and then cooked with the rice the usual way), leftover cooked black beans, chunks of carrot and parsley root and hokkaido pumpkin. I seasoned the dish with some nutmeg and ground cumin, and probably some extra salt found its way there too…

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!

A more macrobiotic plate again…

I don´t  post so many of the neat grain-vegetable-legume macrobiotic plates anymore, but here´s one of them, all nice and balanced and colourful 🙂

-Pressure cooked rice with sweet rice and gomasio (currently we have sesame and flax seed about half and half, in a 1:16 ratio of salt to seeds)

-Oil-sauteed daikon, carrot, onion, leek, cauliflower and cabbage with one part of rice vinegar and two parts of shoyu soy sauce to season

-Oven roasted pumpkin sprinkled with salt and dried thyme

-Black beans from Hokkaido seasoned with a tablespoon of shoyu soy sauce, a teaspoon of rice malt, cooked with a few finely chopped sundried tomatoes and organic corn kernels from a can

Homemade falafel

Falafel is one of my most favourite foods, something so deeply satisfying and reminding you of your sweet junkfood past, yet it´s very macrobiotic at the same time! 😀 Ok, not if you eat it three times a week, as it´s still deep-fried food, but once in a while…after a long walk in freezing weather like today….

It´s also really simple, as long as you don´t forget to soak your chickpeas overnight (or at least for a couple of hours, I think 12 hours is a good bet though). I soaked 100 g of chickpeas in a double amount of water, drained them and then added the rest of the ingredients: a bunch of parsley leaves, 1/4 tsp of salt (next time I will use 1/2 tsp probably), 1/2 tsp paprika powder, 1/2 tsp cumin powder, a tiny pinch of chilli powder, one (or two) garlic cloves and one small roughly chopped red onion. Usually there are also fresh coriander leaves in the recipe for falafel, sadly those are not available here at this time of the year, if you want good quality and not supermarket vegetables…Put all in a big bowl or pot. And now comes the tricky part: making a rather smooth paste out of this bunch of ingredients, using an immersion blender. It actually works, but you have to have a bit of patience, move with the blender up and down and let it rest every now and then so it doesn´t overheat. It definitely worked better than in my big blender which would need water to run, but the immersion blender strangely enough doesn´t :-p Then let the mixture rest for a few hours (I´m not sure why, but more people told me this, so I guess something magical happens!). Later on, heat up your deep-frying oil and create about 3-5 cm in diameter large balls, adding breadcrumbs to the mixture if needed. My mixture was too thin so I added some glutenfree crumbs. Fry until dark brown, otherwise the inside will not be done enough (remember – it´s just soaked and not cooked chickpeas).

I served the falafel with bulghur with raw pink radish and green daikon cubes mixed in (to help digest the fats) and a dip made of tahini, mustard, salt and ume plum vinegar 🙂

Angela´s Cinnamon sweet potato chickpea salad with Miso rice

The last few days I´m testing (and adjusting) some recipes from Angela from Oh she glows – the first one to try was Cinnamon sweet potato chickpea salad. I made it more macro-friendly by substituting the coconut oil with sesame oil and only using a tiny bit of it – from a spray.

First I chopped up one medium sized sweet potato into cubes, diced a small onion and mixed these two ingredients in a bowl with about a cup of cooked chickpeas, 1/2 tsp sea salt, 1/2 tsp  cinnamon and a sprinkle of sesame oil. I placed the mixture on a baking tray lined with a silicone baking mat and baked it in a preheated oven on 220 °C for about 40 minutes. Unfortunately, the temperature was too high or the time too long (or I used too little oil), because it came out a bit burnt (especially the onions) and too dry – next time I will need to watch it closer! 😀 Nevertheless, it was a really yummy recipe!

I served the “salad” with pressure cooked brown rice which I cooked in water with diluted brown rice miso (about 1 cup grain to 1 1/2 cup water, and using 2 tsp of miso). I wonder if anybody before had the crazy idea of cooking rice in miso broth, but it tastes surprisingly like risotto 😀

Adzuki-corn soup

This is a slightly modified version of the kidney bean and corn soup which you can find in Wieke´s cookbook. I decided to use some leftover cooked adzuki beans and it turned out delicious! You can use fresh corn on the cob, but it´s not in season yet here, so I just used corn from a jar, which (together with using cooked beans) made this soup incredibly quick.

For one portion add about half a bowl of beans to one bowl of soup, mix in corn kernels (to your liking), chopped carrot, diced onion, some salt or shoyu (my beans already had some shoyu) and bring to a boil. Simmer until the veggies are soft, then add 1/2 tbsp white (shiro) miso diluted in a bit of warm water. Simmer for a few minutes more. Serve with garnish such as chopped parsley or spring onion.

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).