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).

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! 😀

 

 

29.10.

 

On 29th October my boyfriend arrived from his vacation, so I wanted to surprise him with a bit of a more fancy meal. He loves miso soup, so I had to make that one – this time with fresh daikon, plenty of onion slices and with mugwort mochi (I think I mentioned already that mochi is a Japanese product made by pounding sweet brown rice into a firm sticky block, this one was flavoured with a herb called mugwort, it´s a dark green mochi!!).

The main course was pressure cooked brown rice with buckwheat (about 3:1 ratio), tempura of sweet potato and carrot slices (see previous post for the simplified recipe), sauteed cabbage, leek and fennel (without oil, just using a splash of mirin towards the end), a pressed salad from pointed cabbage

-thinly slice cabbage and place in a deep bowl, sprinkle about half a teaspoon of salt for two big handfuls of cabbage (it´s a bit hard to tell the exact amount of salt you need, but don´t use too little, you need the salt to start the fermentation), massage in for a minute or two using your hands, put a small plate on your salad in a way that it sits directly on the salad and put something heavy on the plate (you can of course use a salad press if you have one…I don´t). Let sit for at least half an hour, but preferrably for a couple of hours. The salad will release some water and it will be slightly fermented, just to break down the tough and hard to digest cellular structure, plus it gives the salad a pleasant fresh taste. You can rinse the cabbage in case you find it too salty.

and a kinpira…

-cut an equal amount of carrot and burdock root (can be found in some health shops, but it´s quite rare, you can also find them in nature) into quite thin matchsticks, quickly sautée on a high flame using a tiny bit of water, add sesame seeds if you like, put a lid on, change to very low flame, and slowly cook for 20-25 minutes. Be sure your kinpira doesn´t burn, but don´t lift the lid too often…at the end season with tamari.

For dessert I made a white rice pudding – I cooked a cup of white organic dessert rice (a sticky short-grained rice) with 4 cups of fruit juice (I used water mixed with fruit concentrate, in Holland called “diksap”), add chopped up dried fruit (I used a handful of organic dried apricots) and perhaps a squeeze of lemon (if you want to, you can also add lemon or orange peel, and vanilla essence or powder…). Bring to boil and cook under a lid for half an hour. Turn off heat and let sit for a few more minutes and better even longer so that the water soaks in a bit more. You can mix in a spoon or two of almond butter – I didn´t have any so I just sprinkled some roasted almond flour on top of my servings. If needed, add a natural sweetener, like maple syrup, or rice malt. Next time I have to be more careful with the liquid (I used too much) and maybe I will try and make this dessert in a pressure cooker for a more dense texture.

 

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!

 

My typical breakfast

Since starting my MB studies, I transformed my breakfast meal from a sweet porridge with a looot of nuts and seeds (I used to sweeten it with stevia or raisins or rice malt, and always used rice milk as well…) to a much healthier savoury version.

I always start my day with miso soup – honestly this has been the best step for me as of lately!! Such a great food to get you started. I make it less salty in the morning (just using half a teaspoon of miso per bowl). I try to use some form of daikon to induce discharge (either dried daikon or fresh, as in today´s soup), I always add wakame as is traditional in miso soups (I add a poststamp of it just a minute before turning the soup on low to simmer, that´s when you add the diluted miso). I often add carrot or onion, but not today – instead I finely chopped some ginger to give me extra warmth on this cold day. I add a garnish of chopped leek greens, or spring onion (as you can see in the pic).

Then I make a savoury porridge from leftover grain (today it was leftover quinoa/buckwheat mix), sprinkled with roasted seeds, with some pickle (sauerkraut and pickled gherkin are nice in the morning, they give extra live enzymes). Plus today I added a spoon of the arame dish from yesterday.

I don´t even miss my sweet breakfasts!!

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.