Very green soup

I love it how the cold weather gives us a chance to make thick stew-like vegetable soups, very warming! And I like how green this soup looks 😀

 

half a medium broccoli head, cut into florets

1 medium onion, diced

half a portobello mushroom, cubed

about 3/4 cup cubed hokkaido pumpkin

handful of chopped kale

half of a smaller parsley root, cubed

half of a medium carrot, cubed

a small handful of small brussel sprouts, cut in halves

a 2 inch piece of wakame seaweed

a couple of sage leaves

2 or 3 heaping tsps of dark miso, diluted

salt

 

First sautee the onion on a bit of water with a pinch of salt until it softens, then add sage leaves. Continue with adding the hard vegetables – carrot, parsley root, pumpkin and also the mushroom, cover with water to submerge and cook for about 10-15 minutes. Add more water, broccoli, kale and a piece of wakame and cook for another 5 minutes. Take the pot off the stove and blend with a handheld mixer until the soup is mostly smooth, but it´s nice to leave some chunks if you like that. Add brussel sprouts and bring back to boil. After about 3 minutes (if the sprout halves are really small, this is enough) turn the flame to lowest setting so the soup stops bubbling, add diluted miso and gently simmer for 5 minutes.

I served the soup with pressure cooked rice and hato mugi (1:1 ratio) and some sauerkraut.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

Kinda Middle Eastern lunch

Yesterday I had a lunch comprised largely of bean products seasoned in a mediterranean/middle eastern way. I made chickpea flour pancakes by mixing half a cup of the flour with about the same amount of water, a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of olive oil and a bit of dried thyme. I made two pancakes (fried on a tiny bit of oil on a pan), but I could have easily made three thinner ones from this amount of batter. They were nice and aromatic thanks to the thyme, but next time I´d let the water absorb the flour for a longer time (a few hours), as it is often seen in recipes using chickpea flour. There are also recipes where you don´t fry the pancakes but bake them in the oven – I will tackle those some other day.

I served the pancakes with a variation on hummus made from canned fava beans (since I had a can that needed to go…). First I sauteed thin sliced onion with a clove of minced garlic, then added the beans and a pinch of salt. After ten minutes I transferred the mix into a blender, added about a tablespoon of ume plum vinegar, a tablespoon of tahini and 1/4 tsp of cumin and blended adding some water as required. This is SO much better if you use freshly cooked fava beans though! Sadly the can cannot compare (maybe because it wasn´t organic beans, but from the local turkish shop, the quality is not the same).

I also sauteed some finely cut kale with chinese cabbage and towards the end seasoned with tamari and mixed in raw rucola (arugula). The combination of these three dishes was a good idea 🙂

5.12. Fava bean hummus anybody?

I reeeeally love hummus. Yet, I DID not plan to make it that day. It kind of…happened. I soaked fava beans overnight, then spent a looong time peeling their irritating skins off (they are too hard to digest), pressure cooked them for 45 minutes, and…they turned into something resembling porridge. They just totally fell apart. Too long cooking time, I assume. Anyway, that was their way to tell me to make hummus. So I heated them up in another pot (there was more than enough water still), added salt, cumin powder, lemon juice, chopped garlic (optional) and a good spoonful or two of tahini. Just a few stirs, some minutes to let it thicken, and voila, fava beans hummus is born! Really good stuff! Not the same as chickpea hummus, but not worse.

As a grain I had sweet millet cooked with hokkaido pumpkin (just 20 minutes and it´s ready). And I blanched some chinese cabbage, green beans and kale with it.

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!

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.

 

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! 😀

 

 

Boerenkool – let the kale season commence

So….last weekend I found the first fresh “boerenkool” of this season (kale in Dutch) on the market, to be exact, at the Nieuwmarkt Saturday organic market. I was waiting for it impatiently for weeks, knowing that it will only make its appearance earliest in September. Everybody was assuring me that it is, indeed, a winter vegetable, which is true. But you CAN already get it now, at the end of summer.

I admit I got the frozen one a few weeks ago, and made a delicious sidedish out of it, sautéeing it with minced garlic, onions, black pepper, oregano and basil. This time I desired to make kale chips, which are a popular snack in the US. I found the basic recipe online: all you do is tear up the kale into smaller pieces, get rid of the thick stems, mix the pieces with olive oil and salt and then bake in the oven until crispy. Sounds easy, BUT I managed to screw it up :-p Too much oil, way too much salt, but most importantly – we don´t own a proper oven at the moment. Our mini-oven has no choice of temperature and it tends to burn things…so my chips were either on the raw side or on the nearly-burnt side 😦 Well, I am not giving up on them yet!

However, today I just blanched two big kale leaves with a few grains of salt and maybe an inch of water in the bottom of the pot, for 5-10 minutes. A bit too raw for my taste – next time cook longer. I served it with my number one tahini dressing, based on the ume-tahini dressing from Susan Marque´s cookbooks. Mix:

1 teaspoon umepaste

2 teaspoons tahini

some water to thin

This time I chose to add a bit of chopped up fresh coriander leaves, because they ummm…needed to go :-p

As for grain and protein (:-D) I cooked up brown rice (the Dutch “zilvervliesrijst” – I assume it is short-grain brown rice) in the same pot with a special sort of lentils that are called “berglinsen” (from the German Alnatura brand, they look like something between red and brown lentils). Seasoned with a splash of tamari. Yum!