Summer rice salad

This rice salad can be served warm or cool to your liking. Feel free to play with the seasonings, vegetables…salad is playful by nature! 😀

I mixed together: cooked brown rice, little squares of nori sheets (you can cut stripes with scissors and then make small squares), shortly blanched vegetables (young summer cabbage, celery root, parsley root, red radish and kohlrabi), black pepper freshly crushed, mustard, hemp seeds, wild garlic, lemon and pumpkin seed oil.

 

Kohlrabi sautee with mustard and Spicy sweet potato fries

Just a tiny inspirational post…

Coarsely grated giant kohlrabi sauteed together with sliced onion on some pumpkinseed oil, with a pinch of salt and mustard mixed in at the end

Sweet potato cut into fries, drizzled with oil, salt and cumin, baked in the oven until crispy, turning at times

Rice pressure cooked with amaranth and sprinkled with gomasio

Store-bought seasoned tempeh baked together with the fries

🙂

Marinated tempeh and mustard “sandwiches”

Tempeh is great for two things: marinating it and frying it. I like to connect both. But you can do it in several ways and you can decide whether you first want to make your tempeh crispy and then marinade it, or first marinade it, and then fry it up… Well, this time I first lightly pan-fried  my tempeh slices in some oil until golden and then I let them sit for several hours in a bowl with a solution of water, tamari soy sauce and apple cider vinegar (the ratios were 2:1:1 – I used 50:25:25 ml to be exact). After a good soak, I took the slices out, made little “sandwiches” by connecting the tempeh slices using a thin layer or organic mustard, and then just heated them up for a few minutes under a lid on a pan on a low flame.

I made a sauerkraut sidedish by first sauteeing onion on oil with a pinch of salt and caraway seeds, then adding the sauerkraut and some water to nearly cover and letting it cook under a lid for maybe fifteen minutes. At the end I mixed through about a teaspoon of organic corn starch diluted in a splash of cold water and let it come to boil and thicken.

The two dishes were served with a rice/amaranth mixture with gomasio and some steamed carrot diagonals.

Very simple meal with mustard sauteed veggies

This meal is so simple that it might not even be worth mentioning, yet maybe somebody needs just that little bit of inspiration…

I grated three different root vegetables – celery root, carrot and parsley root, and sauteed them on some pumpkinseed oil, on a low flame for quite some time, towards the end adding tamari and a spoonful of organic mustard (the kind where apple cider vinegar is used).

On the side I blanched some cabbage and sprinkled it with ume plum vinegar. As a grain I had creamy teff.

A perfect cold weather meal featuring Parsnip-millet mash

First of all, sorry for the not appetizing picture, taking pics in the evening light of my dark kitchen sucks :-p

Nonetheless, this dish should not totally escape your attention, as I think it´s really great for those cold days when you just want something soothing, yet not bland!

The thing that looks like mashed potato is a variety of the popular “millet mash” which is usually made with cauliflower. Instead I cooked a cup of millet with a roughly equal amount of chopped parsnip, a pinch of salt and three cups of water, for about half an hour on a low flame and under a lid. Then I mashed it up with a potato masher (actually, I might have used the wooden pestle for making gomasio as I often do! :-D) and seasoned with some fresh cracked black pepper and nutmeg. I topped the mash with shiso leaf powder (shiso is the leaf used when pickling umeboshi plums) – but I think I must have sprinkled it on top after taking the picture 😀

I baked pumpkin with three different toppings: salt only, salt+thyme and salt+ginger juice+cinnamon. Yes, playing around 😀 The pumpkin bakes for about half an hour on 180°C but that really depends on your pumpkin (and oven)!

And I made a lovely stew of sliced cabbage, onion and carrot, simmered gently in a liquid made of diluted white (shiro) miso, apple juice and organic mustard 🙂

Homemade falafel

Falafel is one of my most favourite foods, something so deeply satisfying and reminding you of your sweet junkfood past, yet it´s very macrobiotic at the same time! 😀 Ok, not if you eat it three times a week, as it´s still deep-fried food, but once in a while…after a long walk in freezing weather like today….

It´s also really simple, as long as you don´t forget to soak your chickpeas overnight (or at least for a couple of hours, I think 12 hours is a good bet though). I soaked 100 g of chickpeas in a double amount of water, drained them and then added the rest of the ingredients: a bunch of parsley leaves, 1/4 tsp of salt (next time I will use 1/2 tsp probably), 1/2 tsp paprika powder, 1/2 tsp cumin powder, a tiny pinch of chilli powder, one (or two) garlic cloves and one small roughly chopped red onion. Usually there are also fresh coriander leaves in the recipe for falafel, sadly those are not available here at this time of the year, if you want good quality and not supermarket vegetables…Put all in a big bowl or pot. And now comes the tricky part: making a rather smooth paste out of this bunch of ingredients, using an immersion blender. It actually works, but you have to have a bit of patience, move with the blender up and down and let it rest every now and then so it doesn´t overheat. It definitely worked better than in my big blender which would need water to run, but the immersion blender strangely enough doesn´t :-p Then let the mixture rest for a few hours (I´m not sure why, but more people told me this, so I guess something magical happens!). Later on, heat up your deep-frying oil and create about 3-5 cm in diameter large balls, adding breadcrumbs to the mixture if needed. My mixture was too thin so I added some glutenfree crumbs. Fry until dark brown, otherwise the inside will not be done enough (remember – it´s just soaked and not cooked chickpeas).

I served the falafel with bulghur with raw pink radish and green daikon cubes mixed in (to help digest the fats) and a dip made of tahini, mustard, salt and ume plum vinegar 🙂

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.