Cumin flavoured seitan and glazed sweet and sour beets

I just love how the colours combine in this dish, so elegant! And the seitan tempura is rich enough to satisfy even those who think macrobiotics is a very bland tasteless diet.

For the tempura I covered the seitan chunks in a batter made of wholewheat flour mixed 50:50 with organic white flour, water, a pinch of salt, a pinch of aluminum-free baking powder (adds extra crunch) and the secret ingredient – cumin powder. Add as much as you think is suitable for your condition and tastebuds 😀 The more you add, the more tasty the seitan will be, of course, but don´t go overboard. The batter should not be runny so that it doesn´t slide off. Deep-fry each piece in hot oil and place on napkinks to soak excess oil.

For the glazed beets cook sliced beet (or bite-sized chunks) slowly in a small pot on a low flame with water to barely cover and a good pinch of salt. Towards the end season with mirin (rice cooking wine), ume plum vinegar and rice vinegar, the beets should be a bit more tart than sweet. Mix a spoon of kuzu starch in a bit of cold water and add at the very end, while stirring to prevent lumps, be sure to let the kuzu boil for a while and thicken.

I served the meal with a pressure cooked rice/barley mixture with gomasio and quickly water-sauteed greens (curly cabbage and white cabbage with some salt and dried oregano to lightly flavour).

Carrot leaf tempura!

The main meal is not actually something that I would necessarily need to share with you in this blog (though it was really tasty): I made a rice/amaranth mixture sprinkled with dulse seaweed flakes and an ovendish of long baked red onions, cauliflower and seaweed-flavoured tofu (conveniently premade by our local macro company). All marinated for a couple of hours in olive oil with salt, minced garlic and dried thyme.

But the extraordinary thing was the carrot leaf tempura! Carrot leaves can have quite a strong flavour and tough texture so sometimes I´m not sure how to use them properly, but this definitely is a winner 😀 I used a tempura batter of white rice flour, a pinch of aluminum-free baking powder, pinch of salt and enough water to make a runny but still sticky batter (mine was too thin :-p), and then I deep-fried the little “branches” of carrot greens until crispy. Another nice idea is deep-fried daikon greens, I just made a few (without the batter) as a decoration 🙂 I definitely recommend eating your greens quickly blanched, steamed or sauteed 90% of the time, but this is sure a nice treat!

Fish tempura with onions and raisins

I think that I found my favourite fish dish!  It takes some time to prepare and is very rich, but worth the time and effort.
I had a fillet of black pollock which I cut into bite-sized pieces and dipped them in a glutenfree tempura batter: white rice flour (you could use brown rice flour, but this makes for a much lighter batter), some arrowroot starch, salt, water and a pinch of aluminum-free baking powder. I used about half half of the starch and flour and added enough water to make a batter that is not too thick but also doesn´t slide easily from the fish chunks – you really have to experiment with this one to get the right consistency. I deep-fried the coated chunks until light golden and let them drip excess oil on a paper towel.

Then I sauteed a large onion cut into big rings on some olive oil with a pinch of salt until soft and shiny. At that point I added a handful of raisins and some water and covered the pan with a lid to allow the raisins to absorb some water. When the raisins soaked up the liquid, I added a good splash of mirin and continued to cook for a while under the lid, on a low flame. The mirin makes anything cook really fast!

I arranged the fried fish chunks in a baking dish and covered each with a slice of organic lemon, peel included. Then I spooned on top the onion/raisin mixture and baked the dish in an oven on about 170°C, some 10-15 minutes, just until the lemons shrink and the onion starts to caramelize. The raisins should not get burnt!

The meal was served with a dip of tamari soy sauce, water, lemon juice and wasabi powder, with some blanched greens and with steamed rice sprouts.

Yuba tempura in sweet-salty-sour glaze

This meal was rated as one of my best creations by my (picky and not so macro) boyfriend. so you better watch out for this gem!

I attempted making dishes out of yuba already twice before making this one, but it was always a big failure, mostly because I didn´t know that the dried yuba (“skin” or layer on top of tofu during the tofu production) has to be soaked really long and thoroughly to soften up. This time I played safe and soaked it all night long in a large bowl of water, pressed down by a small plate so that none of the yuba sticks out of the water 😀 It became really soft and flexible!

Then I proceeded to cover it in tempura batter (in my case glutenfree batter of white rice flour and water mixed until you get a somewhat runny but not too thin consistency) and deep-fry it until golden. Meanwhile in a saucepan I heated up slowly 1 tbsp of tamari, 1 tbsp of mirin, 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice and 1/2 tbsp of maple syrup with some water (so that the liquid is about 2 cm high). I transferred the pieces of yuba into the liquid, stirred to coat well and simmered until all the liquid evaporated and created a glaze looking like caramel. Be careful not to burn the sauce. Yuba prepared this way tastes nothing like “tofu skin”, it´s actually pretty good as a poultry substitute I´d even say, and it is used that way in oriental cuisine.

I served the tempura with brown rice and steamed veggies.

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!