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

Chestnut mochi kanten

Ok, three things to say up front: finding a name for this recipe was really tough, it could also be called chestnut-mochi-kuzu-agar agar dessert. But I spared you and chose a simplified version 😀

Second, this dessert is ugly. It really is. It looks like wet grey concrete. Somehow chestnuts, at least the dried ones, don´t make for a pretty dessert. But who cares, right? It´s the taste that matters…

Third, this dessert is absolutely guilt-free. It´s even healthy! There is not a gram of added sweetener, no rice malt, maple syrup, fruit, nothing. Just chestnuts to make it sweet (which are really healthy for your blood sugar levels). This also means that this dessert is very mildly sweet. But for us who have sensitive taste budes and who are on a restricted diet with zero or very few desserts, this is still a blessing 😀

Now back to business. You just need to soak (preferrably overnight) about half a cup of dried chestnuts (add water to make the cup full). The next day pour it all into a pressure cooker and add about 1/4 cup of sweet brown rice. Add a pinch of salt, water to cover, bring to pressure and cook on a low flame and on a flame tamer for about an hour. Transfer to blender (you should have enough liquid, but adjust as needed) and puree. Bring back to the pot, add 1 tsp of kuzu diluted in a tiny bit of cold water and 1 tsp of agar agar powder (if using flakes or bars, you need to follow package instructions for the amount used). Bring mixture to boil while stirring, let simmer gently for a few minutes and then serve warm or let cool down and solidify. The texture is amazing…….

28.11.

For grain I pressure cooked a mixture of brown calasparra rice, sweet rice and hato mugi (my favourite combination as of late!). I quick-sauteed, just on water,  sliced fresh lotus root, daikon, carrot and kohlrabi, and at the end sprinkled on top some dried parsley (of course, fresh would be way better, but even the dried one gave quite a strong and pleasant parsley flavour). The most interesting part of this lunch was long cooked sweet potato (just in enough water to cover it, cook roughly 15-20 minutes), which I mashed in the end with a fork and mixed in ginger powder – take it easy with the ginger, but it´s otherwise a really nice combo!

For dinner that day I made some really tasty soup – I sauteed a large amount of sliced onions on olive oil, together with dried oregano and basil. I added small florets of cauliflower, enough water to cover the veggies, and threw in one block of cubed mugwort mochi (I think I already wrote about mochi – pounded and then dried sweet brown rice, formed into firm blocks, this one was flavoured with mugwort, a wild herb). The mochi totally melts in the soup if you add it in the beginning of the boiling process and it gives your soup this soothing creaminess. In the end I just mixed in some diluted shiro miso (young white miso) and perhaps some salt, as this miso is not too salty on its own. Success!!

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.