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.

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.

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.

 

Tangy hiziki salad

At the summer conference I attended several amazing cooking classes, the most memorable ones being led by the originally-Spanish and now in Japan residing Patricio García de Paredes. The recipe for this hiziki salad is a slightly adapted version of his “hiziki ceviche”.

First soak a small bunch of hiziki seaweed, at least for half an hour, then cut the “strings” of seaweed into bite-sized pieces, transfer to a small pot with boiling water and boil for about five minutes. Drain and rinse and set aside to cool down. Meanwhile slice a (preferably red) onion into very thin halfmoons, remove the bitter ends, because the onion will not be cooked. Place onion into a bowl, sprinkle with a large pinch of salt (maybe half a teaspoon) and massage for a minute or two with your hands until the onion becomes limp, then set aside for at least half an hour so the sharpness is reduced and digestibility improved by slight fermentation. All previous steps can be prepared ahead of time. When the seaweed is cooled and onion ready, rinse the onion well (otherwise it would be way too salty), mix both in a bowl, add chopped fresh parsley (and fresh cilantro if you have it), some more salt to taste, a bit of oil (I added pumpkin seed oil, but you could use toasted sesame oil), a generous squeeze of lemon and some optional cayenne powder (my addition). The original recipe also called for shoyu and a sweetener, but I omitted those. Salad is best if left for a couple of hours in the fridge or at room temperature, so flavours can meld.

I served it as part of a dinner with sweet millet and gomasio, kinpira of dried burdock,carrots and parsley root, and a condiment of carrot tops sauteed in mustard and a bit of water.

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)

Hiziki with tofu, carrots and green beans

As a sidedish for my lunch I picked another recipe from Wieke´s cookbook (I am trying out several recipes from this cookbook lately, as I really need new meal ideas), this time a hiziki seaweed recipe (actually the recipe called for arame, but I didn´t have that one). I soaked a small handful of hiziki for about half an hour (but less will do), then I changed the water (you can use the soaking water, but then the fishy seaweed taste is stronger, which my boyfriend dislikes :-D) and placed the seaweed in a little pot, with water just to cover. I added half a tablespoon of shoyu and half a tablespoon of mirin and simmered for about half an hour until the liquid evaporated. Meanwhile I shortly blanched chopped up green beans and carrot matchsticks, keeping them crispy. In another small pot I crumbled up about 100 g of firm tofu and simmered it under a lid with 1 tablespoon of ume plum vinegar (you can add water if it sticks too much). At the end I mixed all together. It looked something like this….

 

Yummy!!

I ate the hiziki with nishime vegetables flavoured with barley miso, a carrot top condiment (made by long simmering of chopped carrot tops with shiro miso and water) and with teff. Don´t you think the tiny teff grains looks supercute??

Soba noodles with scrambled tofu

Soba noodles are very pricey, but once in a while, totally worth it! I used to eat only 100% buckwheat soba (glutenfree, but also the most expensive ones), but now my system tolerates (wholemeal) glutinous grains better, especially in an alkaline environment. So I had 40% buckwheat soba (the rest is whole wheat). They already contain salt, so you just cook them in a large amount of water for 6 minutes (or per package instructions) and you get the best result if you cool them down twice during the cooking with a bit of cold water, so they stop boiling and then bring back to rapid boil. They come out nicely firm and not soggy at all.

We had them with scrambled tofu. I started with sauteeing a larger onion with a bit of wild garlic (totally optional, but it´s nice), then adding a pinch of salt and little chunks of carrot, green beans and celery stalk. When the veggies softened up, I crumbled in a 200 g block of firm tofu, added a tablespoon of shoyu (natural soy sauce) and between 1/4- 1/2 tablespoon of organic sugarfree mustard. Let sautee for another 5 minutes at least, so the flavours combine.

I also had a little serving of chickpeas (seasoned only with salt) and of hiziki seaweed (cooked for at least half an hour with some of its soaking water, sliced onion and shoyu to taste).  Cook the hiziki until the water evaporates 🙂

4.12.

As a grain I cooked millet with amaranth (2 parts millet and 1 part amaranth), about half an hour, with 1:3 grain:water ratio. Surprisingly nice combination.

For a seaweed dish I soaked hiziki (or hijiki) for maybe 15 minutes, until it got a bit softer and doubled its size, then I cooked it with a part of its soaking water (just enough to cover), dried daikon (I didn´t soak it this time, which turned out fine), sesame seeds,”shavings” of carrot and burdock root. At the end I added tamari to season and let it cook away (it shouldn´t be swimming in too much liquid, not nice to serve).

As the main veggie dish I cooked chopped kale in some water until it softened a bit, then added small chunks of cucumber, and let it simmer for a while still, seasoned with ume plum vinegar and finely cut dill. I love dill and it goes really well with cucumber, and actually even with the kale.

I also had leftover black hokkaido beans which I just heated up with a bit of diluted dark rice miso – I always like beans with miso in them.

Very strengthening menu!

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…

15.10.

 

On 15th October I started my level 1 Art of Life school at the Kushi Institute in Amsterdam. For lunch that day (my last homemade lunch, because at school we get fed 3 times a day) I made millet (with some of my, ummm, lightly burnt gomasio :-p) with a hiziki dish:

Soak hiziki sea vegetable in water for about half an hour to reconstitute it, then cook with a little bit of the soaking water and sliced onion for 30-60 minutes (the longer the better), towards the end add corn (I used corn from a can, because I didn´t have fresh…), roasted almonds (I roasted them shortly in the oven, just for about 10 minutes) and season with tamari.

I also cooked orange hokkaido pumpkin with a bit of salt and water until it became all soft and mushy and towards the end added some cubes of tofu to the dish.

Served with lightly pickled cucumber (just cut the cucumber into chunks, sprinkle generously with big grains of sea salt, let sit in a bowl or on a plate for 15-30 minutes, then WASH OFF the salt, ready!).