Sesame sweet and sour tofu

Tasty tofu. Good tofu is tasty. A tasty tofu dish.
I don’t like when people say “it’s a recipe for people that don’t like such ingredient”. If you don’t like tofu, there is no obligation to eat some. But,but… Let’s say this is a recipe that makes tofu taste and feel differently. It is marinated and prepared in a Chinese style sauce.

It’s very firm momendoufu (cotton tofu). I’ve put a plate on the block during 15 minutes to squeeze out excess water.
Cut, and mixed with a marinade (1 tbs soy sauce, a pinch of sugar, 2 tbs Chinese wine, 1/2 ts wuxi 5 spices mix) and let 1/2 hour.
Then I passed the cubes in a plate of potato starch and stir-fried till golden.

For the sauce :
Heat 1 tbs of sugar (here kurozato black cane sugar), when it’s getting into caramel.
On lower heat, add in water, paprika powder or paste, grated garlic, the rest of the plate of starch and the plate of marinade.
Stir till it takes texture. Add some black rice vinegar. Check salt, add chili pepper to taste, more water if you want.
Reheat the tofu in the sauce.

Top with a little fragrant sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds.
Yuummmmm….

As a side a salad of lettuce, onion, parsley and umi-budo “sea grapes”.

umi-budo (more here)

Served with genmai (brown rice).

Tai no kabuto-ni. A helmet of sea bream.

A Japanese meal with tai no kabuto ni as a main.
Yes, kabuto means helmet, and the resemblance is clear. Well think about those samurai helmets that everybody wears to ride a bicycle in Japan… er, no, but that’s this type with 2 ear flaps :

kabuto source :blog from the place where they make them (click here) . Visit the page for more details. They are display models for Little Boy Festival in May.

That’s an economical dish as they sell fish heads cheaply. And they sell them ready for this dish. I mean the scales are grated (roughly), and it is split in two. Well veggie readers (I doubt you’re still here) sorry for the view. But for us that eat animals, it’s better to avoid wastes. That said I would eat fish heads anyway. Because there is a lot of flesh in it, and it is of finer texture and tastier.

Recipe :

-Rinse the fish. What you can do is put it on a grill and pour boiling water on it, just once. It makes the fish white and the scales very easy to notice, so you can finish the fismonger’s work. For myself I don’t care if I have scales in my plate, anyway, you need to pick the bones and bits.
-Then it’s a classic nitsuke sauce 1:1:1 , sake, mirin, shoyu soy sauce. And a small piece of kombu seaweed. Put these in a pan with a little water, bring slowly to a boil.
Add the fish. Make a foil cover. Pass to moderate heat. Cook about 15 minutes.

The veggies are steamed separately. Here 2 colors of carrots. And I had frozen garlic stalks. Let’s get the sides :

I had kintoki red beans, and kimchi ready.

A grated veggie salad. A soup, a drink-soup. It’s really water, veggies and black pepper. No salt as there is enough for the meal.

Genmai, brown rice.

Sansai. Japanese mountain vegetables in a meal

Here is the meal that completes the black tofu and agedashi taro in the previous post.

Let’s talk a little about 山菜 sansai mean litterally mountain vegetables. That’s a generic name for many plants wild or cultivated in small amounts that are used in Japan, but also in Korea and China. The hermit Buddhist monks were counting on them to diversify their dishes, and they are often used in the shojin ryori (monk fasting meals) and kaiseki ryori (refined meal before tea ceremony). You can go and gather yours if you live in the countryside. I’m not sure that what I’d pick up near Osaka would be edible particularly with the current level of air pollution. So I usually find mines in the store, and they are cultivated.
There is no complete list of the varieties of sansai. It’s whatever you can eat. 　

I had a mix containing nameko (orange mushrooms), enoki (white long mushrooms), warabi (in green, it’s fern sprouts), zenmai (in brown), small takenoko (bamboo sprouts, slices), kikurage (in dark brown, wood ear mushrooms). And I had renkon (lotus root).

They were boiled. So I rinsed and reheated them with dashi (fish broth), a little mirin and soy sauce.

Grilled komochi shishamo fish, with yuzu-kosho citrus pepper condiment.

Pastel salad : cabbage, kabu turnip and vinegar pickled ginger.

And genmai (brown rice). Well, that makes a nice Japanese meal. That’s not so long to prepare as the tofu was made in advance, the rice is done in the cooker, the veggies were pre-cooked.

3 simple sushi

A sushi lunch. Whole and basic.

The rice is genmai (brown rice), simply flavored. This first is a makizushi filled with goya bitter squash, wrapped in nori.

Ginnan (ginkgo nut) and natto.

They are the fruits of ginkgo tree, that I always mispell. They are gathered and cleaned Autumn (the outer part stinks, really).

I broke the shell, took it away, boiled the nuts and took out the little skin. It’s also possible to slightly break the shell and then roast them. They have to be eaten in small amounts to avoid toxicity. Well 4 is OK.

Natto sesame. It’s an uramaki, with the rice rolled around.

With wasabi and pickled ginger. Soy sauce too. Served with sencha green tea.

Easy mudardara

Today a delicious Lebanese dish, that takes only a few minutes of your time to prepare. It’s freely inspire from this recipe from the blog OneArabVegan. Thanks for the inspiration.

That’s basically rice and lentils.

And usually I cook these in my rice-cooker, not on the same day. Well, I mixed them, rinsed, added water and switched :

Ping ! Already ? I grabbed a red onion, garlic, some leftover of leek that I stir-fried with chili and lots of grated coriander seed. I made a lot of topping to compensate the lack of seasoning of the base.