Mercedes´ Dancing Soba

Mercedes is one of my favourite food bloggers – she also studied (and taught) macrobiotics at the Kushi Institute in Amsterdam, now she´s running her own cooking school in Almere in the Netherlands. I yet have to taste her fabulous dishes, but my mouth waters each time I read her inventive recipes which are usually influenced by her Caribbean roots 😀

Check out her dancing soba recipe!

I modified it slightly: Instead of soba noodles I used black rice noodles (made by the Terrasana company), for vegetables I used leek, garlic, carrot, green peas and young savoy cabbage, and I tweaked the ratios of the seasonings a bit (2 tbsp rice vinegar, 3 tbsp mirin and 2 1/2 tbsp tamari).

As a topping I made pan-fried cubes of dried tofu, which you first have to soak, then strain the liquid out (most of it, but not every drop, otherwise it soaks up a bit too much of the oil) and then fry it in a shallow layer of sesame oil until browned and slightly crispy.

Gorgeous looking and tasting soup….

Carrot and red beet stewed in apple juice

Who would have thought – mixing root vegetables and apple juice in one meal?! Well, don´t say yuck until you try it 😀

It´s very very easy – slice 2 big or 4 medium carrots and one smaller red beet into thicker diagonal slices. Put them inside a pot with a pinch of salt and about 3/4 cup of unfiltered organic apple juice. The veggies should be covered by the liquid, add some more water if needed. Cover pot with a lid, bring to boil and then simmer the veggies on a low flame until soft. Thicken the remaining juice with a tablespoon of kuzu or arrowroot starch diluted in a tiny bit of water, and cook for five more minutes.

I served the veggies with brown rice/ sweet rice mixture and some deep-fried kombu pieces (just dip the seaweed into a pot with deep-frying oil for a couple seconds until the kombu puffs up and “opens” like a flower 😀 ).

Rice and vegetable dish with shio kombu condiment

This dish is not so spectacular, so I was hesitating whether to post about it, but then I thought I don´t have any recipe for shio kombu condiment on the blog yet 😀

Shio kombu is a simple but very strengthening seaweed condiment which is quite strong in flavour (= quite a lot of salt and minerals = quite yang) so use it in moderate amounts, maybe one tablespoon with your meal… Shio kombu can be very plain, but it´s nicer to mix in some veggies, I used carrot and green beans. First soak (for two people) a 5 cm piece of kombu in half a cup of water, at least half an hour, and then cut it into very thin long strips. Boil it with about one tablespoon of shoyu and the soaking water, for half an hour. By then the liquid should be gone. Meanwhile cut half a carrot into matchsticks and sautee it with a pinch of salt and one tablespoon of mirin. In another small pot blanche a small handful of coarsely chopped grean beans, keep them crispy. Mix all together before serving.

I had shio kombu with two different grain mixtures – rice/sweet rice (with gomasio) and rice/oats which I had left over (sprinkled with dried shiso powder). The vegetable is sauteed white cabbage and zucchini just with salt and a little sprinkle of italian herb seasoning.

Adzuki/kombu/pumpkin dish

The adzuki/pumpkin/kombu dish is another healing and strengthening dish, the adzuki beans are especially helpful (as all beans) for kidneys, thus for overall strength and vitality, the hokkaido pumpkin for the middle organs (stomach, spleen, pancreas) and our sugar metabolism, the kombu adds much needed minerals and helps alkalize the blood. You simply cook the beans with a stamp-sized piece of kombu in a pressure cooker, I used the smaller variety from Hokkaido, so they didn´t need to soak, but otherwise soak your adzuki for a few hours or even overnight, together with the kombu. The Hokkaido adzuki need 30 minutes under pressure, the normal ones need 45 minutes, bean to water ratio is about 1:2.  After the beans are done, open the cooker, add pumpkin (twice the amount of beans) cut into bigger chunks and cook for additional 20 minutes (without pressure) until the pumpkin is soft. Season with tamari/shoyu sauce (towards the end). I garnished my beans with fresh parsley.

As a side I had brown rice with gomasio, blanched greens (green beans, broccoli, celery stalks and chinese cabbage) and a miso soup (made with wakame, celery root, onion, pumpkin, corn kernels, leftover cooked and chopped up kombu, dried daikon and spring onion for garnish).