Root stew with white miso and cilantro

The main part of this meal was a root vegetable stew:  first I sauteed sliced onion with a pinch of salt on some pumpkin seed oil, then added medium-sized chunks of carrot, parsley root, red beet, celery root and daikon radish and stirred for a while to coat with oil, adding dried thyme as well. Then I covered the veggies with diluted white miso, there should be enough water so that the vegetables are at least partially submerged. I cooked them until soft on a low flame (the water shouldn´t evaporate totally, but also the stew should not be watery) and at the end garnished them with a generous amount of fresh chopped cilantro.

The other parts of the meal were: chickpeas with pumpkin (pumpkin chunks cooked until soft and then add cooked chickpeas and tamari to season), carrot tops fried until crispy on a bit of pumpkin seed oil with salt, and rice/amaranth mixture sprinkled with roasted dulse seaweed. I used dulse flakes, which are really convenient and roast very quickly – just be careful not to burn them, so keep the flame low 😀

Roasted beets, pumpkin and cauliflower and Hiziki with almonds

The title says it all:

I sliced up a  medium-sized and peeled red beet, took apart some cauliflower florets and made big chunks of hokkaido pumpkin. I sprinkled the veggies with olive oil and tamari (the best is to use a spray to get an even light sprinkle, totally worth the money!) and with some dried rosemary. I placed them in a baking dish with a bit of water on the bottom, covered the dish with tin foil and baked for about 45 minutes until tender. The last 10-15 minutes you can bake them uncovered so they get less soggy. In the end it looked like this:

 

Meanwhile I soaked hiziki (half an hour should do the trick), discarded the water (the flavour can be a bit overpowering), added (overnight soaked and peeled) almonds and cooked the meal for 30-45 minutes on a low flame with some water and tamari. Don´t go too light on the tamari – seaweed needs strong flavouring, otherwise it tastes just like a…well, seaweed 😀 Normally I add some vegetables to the seaweed but this time I left it plain, just hiziki-almonds-seasoning.

I served the dinner with rice and amaranth with some shiso leaf powder.

 

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.

Black amaranth – for real ?!?

Imagine my surprise when I found these tiny shiny black seeds in the health shop in Zagreb – black amaranth! Try and google some information about this grain, you will probably not be successful… It´s apparently very rare. I like amaranth a lot and often cook it mixed into rice, so I thought this would be similar, just black. I decided not to mix it into rice this time to create a visual experience of contrasting black grain with colourful veggies. Well, the black amaranth was a disappointment…It tasted like poppy seeds, except I like poppy seeds better 😀 Actually, it tasted more like wet sand, more so than normal amaranth (which also has an odd texture, but eventually gets creamy). I cooked it for about half an hour, but it was still gritty. There were also quite many tiny stones which were not tooth-friendly… But you must admit it looks pretty, especially with the lightly sauteed veggies 😀

We ended up mixing it into rice/barley which I accidentally cooked for the next day. The next morning we cooked it with the rice/barley into a porridge, but it didn´t get any softer 😀

 

Czech sauerkraut soup with tempeh and one more dish…

Yep, I am back on track with my macro cooking after the ten day rice fast!! 🙂 Feels sooooo good to be back in the kitchen preparing all the yummy food, and not just grains with grains, but also soups, beans, veggie meals and ummm, yeah, some dessert…once in a while 🙂

The traditional Czech sauerkraut soup is something I really love and sometimes I attempt to make a macro version. This time I decided to also record it for you 😀 The original version calls for potatoes and sausage, but obviously I omit those without any negative side effects…

You will need:

1 medium to large onion

1 medium to large carrot

1 small or half of a bigger parsnip

about 300 g naturally fermented sauerkraut

caraway, salt, paprika powder, a few leaves or one twig of sage

mirin, ume plum vinegar, tamari

dark miso

about 1 tbsp brown rice flour

tempeh cut into small cubes

oil (optional)

First sautee onion chopped into halfmoons on a bit of water (I am limiting my oil intake, but feel free to use a little amount of oil of your choice)and to soften add a bigger pinch of salt . Stir while adding rice flour and more water if needed, to create a very light bechamel type of soup base. Then add a generous sprinkle of caraway and paprika powder (the soup should be light red in the end) and a twig with a few leaves of sage (dried or fresh), at the end of the cooking you can take the sage out if you used the tough twig or if you don´t want the leaves floating in your soup. Add diced carrot and parsnip and drained sauerkraut (if you like it less strong, flush it a few times with water to get rid of the salt and acid). Cover veggies with water and let boil gently for at least half an hour. Add more water depending on desired soup thickness. Season to your liking with tamari, mirin, ume plum vinegar and diluted dark miso (I used a full tablespoon). Top with cubes of tempeh either dry-roasted on a pan or deep-fried in oil, and afterwards sprinkled with tamari (best is to buy a oil/vinegar spray).

The next day for lunch I had rice cooked in a pressure cooker together with amaranth (1:1 ratio), sprinkled with gomasio. I made a kinpira out of diagonally cut carrot, burdock root and parsnip, seasoned with tamari. And to add some lightness and yin I shortly sauteed chopped green beans and leek and made a sauce out of 1 teaspoon of white shiro miso, 1 teaspoon of lemon juice and 1 teaspoon of mirin 🙂

2.12. Black hokkaido bean-pumpkin-kale stew

Yeah, lately I´m all about stews! It must be the cold, wet, windy weather we are getting lately. I´m eating more and more beans and a TON of pumpkin. Seems I cannot get enough pumpkin, ever. Well, it´s abundant at this time of the year!

As a sidedish I picked amaranth, which I cooked 1:3 (grain:water) for 30 minutes, on a very low flame, using a flame deflector. It was sooooo creamy! Sprinkled with homemade gomasio, of course…I got pretty good at making my own gomasio 😀

For the stew I cooked a small bunch of chopped kale with small chunks of carrot, butternut squash and hokkaido pumpkin (you can pick just one if you want, I had both at home) in enough water to cover, until the pumpkin is soft. Towards the end I added black hokkaido beans (you can also get ordinary black beans, the ones from Hokkaido island are grown on vulcanic soil and are more mineral rich), slices of leek and tamari to season.

Note: the black beans I first dry-roasted in a pressure cooker until the skins cracked and the white inside got a bit golden, then added a double amount of water, a piece of kombu, brought to pressure and cooked 45 minutes.

 

3.11. Experimenting with hiziki and yuba

On November 3rd I went really wild with my lunch, just listen!

I pressure cooked short grain brown rice with amaranth. Ok, not special. And lesson learnt – amaranth needs really a lot of water, even in the pressure cooker! It was a bit too dry and undercooked thanks to that…

I sauteed (without oil) chopped fennel, leek, green beans and pointed cabbage, and seasoned with dried coriander. Ok, also, not so special, I should have added more water while sautéing, since I didn´t use any oil…

But then it starts getting interesting – it was the first time I used yuba, which is dried soya bean curd (the top layer of soymilk when you make tofu, something like a thick tofu cream layer…dried into yellow sticks, or sheets). First you have to reconstitute it for about half an hour, by soaking in water. Then you can do lots of things with it, similar as with tofu or tempeh…I just fried it on some oil and seasoned with tamari. But boy, does that yuba need a lot of soaking time! Next time more time needed…

The best part of the lunch (the only TRULY successful part) was the seaweed. I soaked hiziki (again, needs soaking to reconstitute, but perhaps 10-15 minutes are enough), then cooked it with a part of its soaking water, together with diced onion and diced butternut squash, for about half an hour or even a bit longer. At the end I sprinkled in some toasted pumpkin seeds and mixed in a sauce of diluted shiro miso (young miso) and rice malt, mmmmm!! Sounds pretty freaky I know, but actually this combination was really good, slightly sweet but complimenting the hiziki more than I would expect…

24.9.

Here is another Very Easy Recipe for a quick macrobiotic plate – cooked amaranth (this time I cooked 1 part of amaranth to 3 parts of water and it ended up much better than just 2 parts of water!), steamed carrots and onions (steamed onions become really really sweet, my favourite veggie to steam!), a spoonful of sauerkraut (I got one with juniper in it, be sure to get organic sauerkraut which has nothing but cabbage and salt in it, or some herbs, but no sweetener or vinegar!) and green fava beans from the can.