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!

Grain&Tempeh Casserole and a Salad

One of my last ovendishes…before the heat struck! 😀 Now I truly don´t bake ANYTHING!!

This one was made by combining cooked leftover rice and hato mugi mixture with some sauteed veggies and pan-fried tempeh. For the veggies water or oil-sautee  some cut up leek, green beans, celery stalk and kohlrabi (I used stems), just very shortly, so they are not raw, and season with tamari, thyme and black pepper. Mix with raw grated carrot. Pan-fry tempeh in a moderate amount of oil until golden and spray lightly with some tamari. Mix all ingredients through, move into a baking form and bake on about 200 °C until crispy.

Casseroles go well with salads, which bring more light uplifting energy – mine is made from lollo rosso lettuce, chinese cabbage and cucumber, with added olives, roasted pumpkin seeds and a vinaigrette of 2 tsp apple cider vinegar, 2 tsp flaxseed oil, a pinch of salt and half a clove of finely minced garlic.

Some simple daily meals…

Honestly, most of my meals are not fancy. Most of them are not from cookbooks. Most of them are not beautiful enough to be photographed. Most of them are rather quick and simple and they get rotated regularly, because I am not a full-time blogger nor a full-time macro cook 😀 Usually it´s something like this…

Pressure cooked rice and hato mugi – green beans sauteed with white (shiro) miso diluted in water – carrot roots and tops sauteed on water with a splash of ume plum vinegar – arame cooked in water to cover + shoyu to taste and some raw spring onion mixed in at the end

Pressure cooked rice with rye – leftover cauliflower/millet mash (check my blog for the recipe) – cubes of smoked tofu baked in the oven – umepaste stew ( cover bottom of a heavy pot with a thin layer of ume paste, then continue with a layer of thin onion slices, thin cabbage slices, grated carrot, chopped kohlrabi, finely chopped dill and about two inches of water, simmer under a lid on low until tender, mix in the end ) – nori condiment made from shortly simmering torn up nori sheets, shoyu, mirin and lemon juice

Sweet millet cooked together with cubes of hokkaido pumpkin – fresh rucola – hiziki cooked with water to cover + shoyu to taste + sesame seeds + thinly sliced onion + presoaked dried lotus – nishime of daikon ( with thinly sliced kombu, sliced dried and presoaked shiitake, 1/2 tsp shiro miso diluted in water and 1/4 tsp of lemon zest)

Pressure cooked long-grain rice with hato mugi and lotus seeds – lettuce, red radish, radish sprouts and lightly steamed green cabbage – roasted hokkaido pumpkin and onion sprinkled with cinnamon – leftover hiziki dish (see above)

13.3.

Rice and hato mugi are one of my favourite combinations! Of course pressure cooked for 45 minutes and sprinkled with some gomasio…

I made a nishime of daikon, turnip (even with some turnip greens), parsnip, topinambour (Jerusalem artichoke), carrot and butternut squash, seasoned with ume plum vinegar.

Arame seaweed was cooked for about half an hour together with finely chopped carrot tops (extremely fiber rich!), presoaked dried daikon and shoyu.

Mung beans flavoured also with a splash of shoyu.

28.11.

For grain I pressure cooked a mixture of brown calasparra rice, sweet rice and hato mugi (my favourite combination as of late!). I quick-sauteed, just on water,  sliced fresh lotus root, daikon, carrot and kohlrabi, and at the end sprinkled on top some dried parsley (of course, fresh would be way better, but even the dried one gave quite a strong and pleasant parsley flavour). The most interesting part of this lunch was long cooked sweet potato (just in enough water to cover it, cook roughly 15-20 minutes), which I mashed in the end with a fork and mixed in ginger powder – take it easy with the ginger, but it´s otherwise a really nice combo!

For dinner that day I made some really tasty soup – I sauteed a large amount of sliced onions on olive oil, together with dried oregano and basil. I added small florets of cauliflower, enough water to cover the veggies, and threw in one block of cubed mugwort mochi (I think I already wrote about mochi – pounded and then dried sweet brown rice, formed into firm blocks, this one was flavoured with mugwort, a wild herb). The mochi totally melts in the soup if you add it in the beginning of the boiling process and it gives your soup this soothing creaminess. In the end I just mixed in some diluted shiro miso (young white miso) and perhaps some salt, as this miso is not too salty on its own. Success!!

17.11. Kale-adzuki bean miso soup

As a grain I pressure cooked short grain brown rice with hato mugi, On top I sprinkled some dried bonito (fish) flakes which I purchased in chinatown. I heard you can use them as a sprinkle this way, but I´m not a fan – the bonito flakes have a reeeally strong fishy smell, which would not be bad in a bouillon (another way how to use these flakes), but as a sprinkle it was a bit too much 😀

My soup was made by boiling water with cooked hokkaido adzuki beans (the variety that comes from the vulcanic soils of the Hokkaido island in Japan), kale, turnip and finely cut ginger, with diluted rice miso added at the end. It was really yummy, but next time I´ll stick to ginger juice – I just don´t like biting into pieces of ginger, no matter how finely cut they are! 😀

 

 

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…

 

 

9.10.

For dinner after coming from the Art of Cooking workshop I made myself some pretty cleansing, discharging dishes, to further continue what I started at the workshop 🙂

I now eat miso soup twice a day – this time it was with dried daikon (for deep discharge of old accumulation), carrot, wakame and chopped leek as a garnish on top.

I cooked brown calasparra rice together with sweet brown rice and some hato mugi. Calasparra is a wonderful rice coming from Spain. Sweet brown rice is a protein rich strengthening variety of rice of the sticky sort. Hato mugi, also called “pearl barley” or “Job´s tears” is a cleansing grain and I must say I fell in love with it, very nice mixed in with your rice!!

With the grains I made a nishime of daikon, carrot and kombu, seasoned with tamari. A nishime is a very nourishing sweet dish. You prepare it by placing a poststamp of dried kombu on the bottom of the pot (preferrably a thick-bottom pot with a heavy lid), then you place big wedges of daikon and carrot (or other hard vegetables), add only about half a cm of water, cover with a lid, bring to boil, and cook on low flame for about 20 minutes (more or less – depending on how quickly your veggies get soft). I love how it brings out the sweetness in the veggies! At the end I added a splash of tamari, but you can also just use a bit of salt.

I also had sauerkraut for a pickle and some raw rapini and mizuna that Nardo got at the organic market – rapini (or broccoli rabe, turnip tops etc.) and mizuna (Japanese mustard, Japanese greens etc.) are both relatives of the turnip, and they remind me a little bit of rucola.