Complete meal idea

I just thought that this looks really pretty and that it´s quite a nice balanced macro meal, so here you are 😀

Grain: rice+25% sweet rice, with gomasio

Vegetable dish 1: kinpira made from dried/soaked burdock, carrot, a splash of tamari and ginger juice and finely cut carrot tops

Vegetable dish 2: chopped red cabbage sauteed under a lid with a bit of water and a tablespoon of ume vinegar and a bit of dried thyme

Protein: chickpeas with chunks of hokkaido pumpkin and some salt to taste (not in picture)

Greens: raw rucola and corn-salad lettuce

Pickle: sliced takuan (daikon pickled in rice bran)

Winter vegetable-chickpea stew

This cold January weather really called for a hearty long-cooked bean and veggie stew…so here it is! You need

about a cup of cooked chickpeas

a cup of chopped kale

a handful of small brussel sprouts cut in halves

half of a portobello mushroom, sliced

a cup of hokkaido pumpkin cut in cubes

one small onion, diced

one-inch thick slice of daikon, cut in diagonal slices

half of a carrot, cut in diagonal slices

half of a parsley root, cut in diagonal slices

1 tsp dark miso

1 tsp ginger powder

one inch piece of kombu seaweed

salt

First sautee onion with a big pinch of salt on a bit of water, until soft. Add kombu, carrot, parsley root, daikon, chickpeas, mushroom and hokkaido pumpkin and stir for a little while. Add enough water so that the vegetables are nearly submerged and cook on a medium flame for about 15-20 minutes, without a lid, until most of the water evaporates, then you can put a lid on. When kombu softens up, take it out, chop finely and return to the pot. When the pumpkin is almost soft, add brussel sprouts and kale, cook 5 more minutes. Season with ginger powder. Turn flame on lowest setting so that the water stops bubbling. Add diluted miso and simmer for 5 minutes. I served this lovely fragrant stew on a bed of pressure cooked rice with sweet rice.

28.10.

 

For lunch I cooked millet with mung beans and green/grey hokkaido pumpkin chunks – all in my new lovely pressure cooker! So easy, just put it all in, add water (3 parts of water to one part of grain in this case), bring to pressure on high flame, then put on a lower flame (possibly together with using a flame deflector) and cook for half an hour, done! Just wait 5-10 minutes for the pressure to come down on its own. And you actually have grain, vegetable and bean 3 in 1! 😀

But anyway, I made some quick extra greens – shortly blanched kale and cabbage. You just bring a pot of water to boil (enough water to have the veggies covered later on) and when it starts boiling, transfer the vegetables inside and let them cook for just about a minute or two (they should get a deep green yet bright colour and become softer yet firm and crispy – a bit of a challenge, yes! 😀 trial and error!).

 

For dinner I had the leftover grain from lunch (with new and not burnt!! self-made gomasio) plus I made a quick miso soup with carrot and tofu cubes. In a wok I sauteed (with no oil) paksoi, carrot and leek, seasoned with tamari and mirin. And I had to try out my newly purchased tempura pan and made a glutenfree deep-fried tempura: sweet potato slices dipped in a batter of brown rice flour+kuzu starch+water (you have to experiment with the consistency, that´s the hard part!) and deep-fried until golden. It was a great success, I really liked it!

 

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!).

Quick hokkaido pumpkin dessert

I looooove hokkaido pumpkin – mostly cooked in a main dish, using salt and spices. But this time I made it into a dessert, which is not hard, because the pumpkin is very starchy and sweet in itself. To make it just a little bit sweeter, I added a handful of raisins while cooking the pumpkin in a few cm of water. Be smarter than me and add a few grains of sea salt too, it will bring out the sweetness 😀 When the pumpkin is soft enough that it´s easily mashed by a fork, it´s ready! Serve with a teaspoon of almond butter.