Warming red beet soup with horseradish

This soup looks so amazing, don´t you think?!? It also tastes amazing…so soothing, warming and energizing! Too bad pumpkin season is long over here, I miss the pumpkins dearly 😦

To make the soup, first sautee some sliced onion in a pot with a small amount of sesame oil and a pinch of salt. Add chopped up carrot, hokkaido pumpkin, parsley root, red beet and a small piece of apple – you have to play with the ratios and each time you will end up with a different soup depending on which vegetable you decide to emphasize! 😀 Sautee together for a while, add a bit more salt and cover with hot water so that all the veggies are submerged. At this point you can add bayleaf, allspice and whole cloves (adds great depth of flavour). Boil slowly with a lid on for 15-20 minutes until the vegetables become soft. Season with ume plum vinegar. Blend the soup in a blender or use an immersion blender (I think that´s the easier way to puree soups, because you don´t need to transfer it anywhere!).  Don´t forget to take out the spices before blending…After blending, let the soup simmer for a while longer and then turn off the flame and mix in some finely grated horseradish – the amount depends on how spicy you want your soup to be… You can still season the soup with some lemon juice and add a nice green garnish, such as chopped fresh parsley.

Marinated vegetable oven fries

Since I try to avoid potatoes for their weakening effect and alkaloid content, I like to make oven fries from all kinds of vegetables, of course, not all of them are suited for this purpose. What works great are pretty much any root vegetables, especially carrot and parsnip. Also sweet potatoes, naturally, because they resemble standard potatoes so much. Also pumpkin, because it´s so high in starch. That´s actually the main criteria: it has to be starchy! 😀

Here I cut up carrot, pumpkin and sweet potato into the shape of french fries and marinated them for a few hours in some oil with salt and ground cumin, lovely, trust me! 🙂 Then I baked them on a tray in the oven, using a parchment paper, and turning them every 10 or 15 minutes to bake evenly. About 180-200°C and 30-50 minutes should work – but every oven is different.

I had the fries with millet cooked together with some already cooked dried chestnuts (yeah, they really were somewhere there!) and gomasio.

Baked vegetables with mediterranean herbs

Don´t you just love the smell of vegetables roasting in the oven after being infused with a marinade containing fragrant mediterranean herbs? I certainly adore that smell…

Here I cut up onion, pumpkin, carrot and red beet and marinated them for a couple hours in olive oil (just enough to coat), some sea salt and a generous amount of dried oregano, basil, thyme and rosemary. Then I baked them in the oven until they got cooked through and browned a bit, stirring at times to allow them to bake evenly.

I had also some lentils cooked with bayleaf and salt and the grain was a rice/amaranth mixture with nori flakes to top.

Anise flavoured vegetable stew with hiziki

Yep, you got it right – I DID mix seaweed and anise! Together with a load of sweet vegetables and miso! 😀 Sounds maybe a bit odd but it´s a lovely comforting stew which is pretty warming in spite of the cooling seaweed featured. Anise definitely adds extra warmth to the long cooked winter vegetables…

I cut up carrot, parsley root, parsnip, turnip, hokkaido pumpkin, red beet, curly cabbage and onion into medium-sized pieces, placed them into a thick-bottom pot and covered the vegetables with water. They don´t have to be fully submerged, you can just add some water accordingly during the cooking time. I mixed in a handful of presoaked and rinsed hiziki seaweed (it needs to soak for about an hour). I also added a generous sprinkle of anise seeds and a pinch of salt.

Cover the pot with a lid, bring to boil and afterwards just simmer on a low flame, keeping the lid on and watching that the vegetables don´t get too dry. At the end you can add a tablespoon of brown rice miso diluted in some warm water and let it gently simmer with a lid off. The stew should not end up being too watery, you can also always thicken it with corn starch, arrowroot or kuzu…

I served it with a rice/barley mixture with gomasio.

A quick lunch of leftovers!

Sometimes there just is a fridge full of leftovers and a lunch that needs to be quickly assembled…it´s great to have some extra cooked grain and beans, and a few fresh veggies to liven up the meal!

Here I had leftover rice and hato mugi which I sprinkled generously with freshly toasted sunflower seeds (toast on a dry pan until they start getting golden and fragrant).

I had leftover cooked lentils, so I mixed them with cubes of hokkaido pumpkin, organic corn kernels from a glass jar and water to barely cover, cooking the meal until the pumpkin got soft. I seasoned this with some shoyu soy sauce and ground coriander.

Very quick and tasty!

A winter stew and pumpkin with a maple-miso sauce

The idea for the maple-miso pumpkin comes from my Dutch friend Sonya – you can check out her recipe and blog here.

So I cut a big slice of pumpkin and smeared it with a thin layer of shiro (white) miso mixed with a teeny bit of maple syrup and sprinkled it with dried rosemary. I baked it in the oven for about half an hour, in the last ten minutes adding a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds.

For the stew I took a pot and spread some ume plum paste on the bottom. Next I placed a post-stamp sized bit of kombu and one soaked and sliced shiitake mushroom. Then I layered thin rounds of red beet, carrot, turnip and onion. I added about 2 to 3 cm of water and simmered the stew for about half an hour on a low flame and a flame tamer.

The meal was served with a short and long grain rice and oat mixture sprinkled with dulse seaweed.

Millet-pumpkin mash and tahini vegetables

How delightfully simple macrobiotic cooking can sometimes be! You don´t always need to go for five or six different small dishes, sometimes less is really more…

I just cooked up some millet until soft (achieved by cooking in a 1:3 ratio of grain to water), adding small chunks of pumpkin in the beginning. After about 20-30 minutes of cooking both can be mashed up with a potato masher or surikogi (wooden pestle), anything that works…Serve with or without gomasio. It´s a really lovely combination, so sweet and nourishing!

As a side I made water-sauteed matchsticks of carrot and kohlrabi, with salt to season and some organic corn kernels thrown in, and a spoon of tahini to add extra flavour and texture.

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 🙂

A more macrobiotic plate again…

I don´t  post so many of the neat grain-vegetable-legume macrobiotic plates anymore, but here´s one of them, all nice and balanced and colourful 🙂

-Pressure cooked rice with sweet rice and gomasio (currently we have sesame and flax seed about half and half, in a 1:16 ratio of salt to seeds)

-Oil-sauteed daikon, carrot, onion, leek, cauliflower and cabbage with one part of rice vinegar and two parts of shoyu soy sauce to season

-Oven roasted pumpkin sprinkled with salt and dried thyme

-Black beans from Hokkaido seasoned with a tablespoon of shoyu soy sauce, a teaspoon of rice malt, cooked with a few finely chopped sundried tomatoes and organic corn kernels from a can

Soba noodles with curried pumpkin sauce and tempeh crumble

Aaaaah, my favourite soba noodles! I have them so seldom, because they are so expensive! 😀 While I believe that nothing compares to authentic Japanese soba ( buckwheat and wheat or pure 100% buckwheat noodles), here in the Czech Republic I choose to substitute them with the cheaper local buckwheat pasta. I´m actually happy we have such a great buckwheat-product brand, not every country is so lucky! But here I used my long-saved stack of real soba, bought during our stay in Slovenia..

I made a sauce of long cooked cubed hokkaido pumpkin and onions – nearly cover the cubes with water and boil on low flame until soft. I seasoned the sauce with black Indian vulcanic salt and a generous amount of curry powder. I blended the sauce in a blender for a perfectly creamy texture.

On a pan I sauteed on oil a bunch of green beans, cut into tiny pieces, along with crumbled up tempeh and a splash of shoyu soy sauce.

Layer the bean/tempeh mixture and the pumpkin curry sauce over the noodles 🙂