Wild salmon and vegetable salad

I´keep it short and just tell you what I mixed all together:

-canned wild salmon (please please do avoid farmed salmon contaminated with antibiotics, colouring agents and pesticides)

-rucola leaves

-blanched kohlrabi slices

-blanched chinese cabbage slices

-blanched diagonals of parsley root

-raw baby carrot slices

-chopped chives

-whole black olives

-fresh green peas

-raw fennel bulb, leaves and stems both, finely chopped

And a dressing of olive oil, salt and balsamico vinegar

Served with boiled sweet potatoes

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.

Fish tempura with onions and raisins

I think that I found my favourite fish dish!  It takes some time to prepare and is very rich, but worth the time and effort.
I had a fillet of black pollock which I cut into bite-sized pieces and dipped them in a glutenfree tempura batter: white rice flour (you could use brown rice flour, but this makes for a much lighter batter), some arrowroot starch, salt, water and a pinch of aluminum-free baking powder. I used about half half of the starch and flour and added enough water to make a batter that is not too thick but also doesn´t slide easily from the fish chunks – you really have to experiment with this one to get the right consistency. I deep-fried the coated chunks until light golden and let them drip excess oil on a paper towel.

Then I sauteed a large onion cut into big rings on some olive oil with a pinch of salt until soft and shiny. At that point I added a handful of raisins and some water and covered the pan with a lid to allow the raisins to absorb some water. When the raisins soaked up the liquid, I added a good splash of mirin and continued to cook for a while under the lid, on a low flame. The mirin makes anything cook really fast!

I arranged the fried fish chunks in a baking dish and covered each with a slice of organic lemon, peel included. Then I spooned on top the onion/raisin mixture and baked the dish in an oven on about 170°C, some 10-15 minutes, just until the lemons shrink and the onion starts to caramelize. The raisins should not get burnt!

The meal was served with a dip of tamari soy sauce, water, lemon juice and wasabi powder, with some blanched greens and with steamed rice sprouts.

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.

 

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

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.

Two soups: Creamy parsnip soup and Bonito bouillon

I am a soup freak, everybody can attest to that. I didn´t use to be. Luckily my boyfriend is pretty much the same. He likes clear bouillon type of soups. I like more thick creamy soups with the veggies blended, and possibly added mochi for extra cream 😀 The solution is: I make both…

The creamy parsnip soup comes from Kristina Turner´s awesome “The self-healing cookbook” and it´s very simple as all her recipes in this book. For two people, just add one and a half cup (or two) of parsnips cut into chunks to the boiling water and simmer about 15 minutes until they soften, then blend until smooth with an immersion blender. Add half a cup of broccoli florets and cook a couple minutes more. Flavour with your favourite miso – we used dark rice miso. I also made a little addition of a small chunk of mochi, and instead of water I used stock leftover from making nabe vegetables (a vegetable stock with kombu and shiitake in it).

The second soup is a clear bouillon soup, a very minimalistic one to top. I just boiled water with some diced celery stalk and added a coffee filter filled with about a tablespoon of dried bonito (fish) flakes (can be purchased at asian shops) which I tied with a rubber band and it worked pretty well! I turned off the flame and let it release the flavour for maybe 5 or 10 minutes. Then I added a good amount of chopped wild garlic, brought the soup back to a simmer and added miso to taste and a good squeeze of lemon, to lighten up the soup significantly.

Sorry for the quality of the picture :-p

Thyme flavoured mussels with greens

After a long time I pulled out another seafood dish, since I had cooked mussels stored in our freezer… Seafood is very yang and contracting on the macrobiotic scale (though not as yang as other meat, not even as salmon or tuna), so I made sure to have plenty of vegetables to go with them!

1 cup of cooked mussels

a few cm piece of leek, finely sliced

a piece of fennel, sliced

a couple of chopped up green beans

a handful of chopped kale

dried or fresh thyme to your liking

1 tsp lemon juice

oil, a few drops

 

On a tiny amount of oil sautee the sliced leek and add a bit of water (or juice from the cooked mussels, which I used) and thyme. When the leek is softened, add mussels, green beans, fennel and towards the end kale, which should cook only shortly. Keep adding water as neeeded. Season with lemon juice. The dish doesn´t need salt because the mussels release quite a lot of saltiness on their own. I served the dish with leftover cooked rice and millet (1:1 ratio) oven baked until crispy, and a little bowl of grated raw daikon and a few fresh fava beans (blanched for a minute or two and then peeled). The raw daikon helps lightening the dish as well.

 

 

 

 

6.1. Lunch, dinner and dessert :)

For lunch I could re-cycle the black bean dish from yesterday (see previous post), it was very nice mixed into water-sauteed vegetables (paksoi, leek, pointed cabbage and two types of green beans – flat and pointed ones), seasoned with a tablespoon of tamari. As a side I had sweet millet cooked together with chunks of hokkaido pumpkin (my favourite sidedish just after brown rice!) and fresh rucola (arugula) and olives to compliment the meal.

For dinner I decided to bake a fish in tin foil (since we have a wonderful big oven now :-D). I seasoned the slices of codfish (I buy only MSC certified fish) with a bit of salt and an organic herb mix which is sold specifically for seasoning fish. On top I sprinkled a generous amount of thin sliced onion and fennel, wrapped all inside the foil and baked for 30 minutes covered and then 15 more minutes uncovered so the fish and veggies could get a bit of a “tan”.  I served the fish with blanched greens (paksoi, pointed cabbage and mixed in raw rucola) and quinoa mixed with fresh parsley leaves (they add a nice colour contrast). It was really yummy!

I even made a decadent dessert…very quick and easy rice crispie dessert! In a saucepan over a low flame I liquified 2 parts of tahini with 1 part of maple syrup and 1 part of rice malt, stirred in a handful of cashew nuts and a cup of brown rice crispies (puffed rice). I spooned the sticky creation onto a wooden cutting board covered with baking paper and evened it out a bit, something like this…

It´s best to let this dessert cool in a fridge before attempting to cut neat squares with a sharp knife. But to be honest the dessert didn´t become as solid as I would have wished, making it hard to cut slices which don´t fall apart. There is lots of room for improvement but the taste was great! 😀

November 1st: A meal of fish and Chestnut-amasake dessert

On November 1st I made a meal of Pacific cod, short grain brown rice pressure cooked with hato mugi (aka pearl barley aka Job´s tears), kinpira, and blanched veggies. The cod was steamed in a steamer basket, after being coated with salt and black pepper, olive oil, dried basil and rosemary, and at the end I squeezed some lemon juice on top (I always add lemon juice to fish – it helps balance the strong yang quality of fish meat). The blanched vegetables that day were kale, paksoi and green beans. The kinpira was traditional: “shards”of carrot and burdock root, cooked with a tiny amount of water, first on high flame for a few minutes, then under a lid on low flame for around half an hour, seasoned at the end with tamari.

As a dessert I served chestnut – amasake cream. I might have not been the first one who came up with this, nevertheless I regard it as my own recipe, because I didn´t look it up anywhere 😀  I roasted a couple of chestnuts in the oven (15 minutes should be enough, I can´t tell the temperature, because our “micro-oven” doesn´t have any temperature settings…), then I blended them in a blender with a bit of water (just to make the blender able to function…) and a generous amount of brown rice amasake (which is fermented brown rice, using a “koji” culture, it is used as a sweetener, a healthy one indeed!), then I transferred the purée to a pot. I added a bit more water and a pinch of salt, cooked the mixture for a while,  then mixed in diluted kuzu starch, brought to boil while stirring continuously and cooked for 1-2 additional minutes. Super easy! And soooo yummy – it actually reminded me of ice cream thanks to its rich creamy texture…