Fall salmon pot pie

A salmon and mushroom pie hidden in a pumpkin. That’s Halloween on the plate.

This month :

Hannah of Rise and Shine was our October 2013 Daring Bakers’ hostess and she challenged us to bake our own double crusted savory pot pies. Using any from-scratch crust and filling we choose, we were allowed to get completely creative with our recipe, showing off the savory flavors and fillings from our own home or region.

So let’s go for Japanese season produce and even tofu for a dairy free pie :

Autumn/Fall is the season of kabocha pumpkin, salmon, mushrooms (shiitake).

Kabocha pumpkin crust : 1/3 boiled kabocha flesh, 1/3 flour, 1/3 whole wheat flour. Plus a little baling powder, salt, chili flakes and enough of the squash cooking water to for a dough.

The fresh ingredients.

Gravy : I stir-fried onion, garlic, the feet of the shiitake with salt and black pepper. Then added the shiitake hats, the peas. To cream it, passed in the blender : 1/2 block of silky tofu, 1 glass of white wine, a tbs of potato starch. I’ve added the fish and parsley raw.

Baked 45 minutes.

The crust is perfectly cooked. The inside is a little curded (I should have added the wine to the onions to avoid it), but it looks nice.

Cress and parsley pesto on the plate.

Curried chick pea dosa, with coconut gravy

An Indian brunch maybe not so Indian… Well, dosa is the pancake from India, but this recipe has traveled via Canada, it seems.

This month is a retro challenge, as we had to pick an older one we had not done yet, so mt choice was September 2009’s Indian Dosas (Vegan Style) :
Recipe here.

The 3 elements : curried chick peas and veggies, dosa crepes and the coconut sauce.

The curried chick peas with shishito peppers and kabocha pumpkin.

The coconut gravy with a shishito pepper and a little bit of habanero pepper.

I made the dosas with plain flour. Well, that’s easier and quicker, I prefer rice and lentil dosas :

red dosa
green dosa

Side veggies : goya bitter squash and cucumbers.

So let’s fill the crepes…

… pour the sauce and sprinkle coconut snow.

Swedish mean balls

Oh they’ve done nothing bad. It’s just they are not made of meat so they needed a new name. And they’re served with Japanese greens. That’s still the Nordic and Swedish inspiration for flavors. As you know, I’m a bean maniac, so here is another delicious way to get my daily serving of great plant protein. It’s a vegan menu.

Double bean, onion and negi balls, baked 20 minutes.

I’ve used hanamame giant beans and black soy beans, both are mashed, mixed with minced onion and negi leek white, spice with Chinese miso, a little pasted sesame, thyme, laurel, nutmeg, pepper. For the binding some buckwheat flours. The greens are komatsuna.

A laurel and thyme flavored onion gravy with a little bit of oil and flour to start a small roux, very little, just for the color. I’ve let it simmer while the balls were baked and passed the mixer at the end to smooth it.

The balls and a few beans reheated in the gravy. I’ve added a little veg’ cream.

That’s how they look inside. A nice texture, a bit crunchy around.

The veggies are briefly stir-fried with just a little oil. No seasoning.

I had no cranberries or whatever similar preserve. So I’ve soaked prunes and mikan orange peel in strong hot tea, and after one hour, roughly mashed. That gives a Christmas mood jam, high in citrus flavor but not too sweet.

The veggies, the sauce, the balls, all together… Yummm…

Far-East vegetable biryani

The inspiration was Indian vegetable biryani. Except that I have changed nearly all ingredients in order to use what I had at home to make this vegan rice-less version. And that’s delicious.

For the gravy, grated onion and spices, then a paste of sesame and coconut.

Green peas, kabocha pumpkin and more onion as vegetables.

My fresh herb is shiso. There is no rice as I said, it’s sorghum, the Chinese grain (kaoliang). It’s well for biryani because it stays apart and takes a firmness comparable to a basmati rice.
I have cooked it till al dente, sprinkled with lemon juice a little oil.

Making the gravy.

Layering. First half of the grain, with shiso and saffron.

The veggie mix. Then more rice, sprinkled with olive oil. And baked 15 minutes.

From the oven. On that, fried onion, walnuts and shiso.

Mouth refresher. Well that’s a feast meal !

L.O. day 3 : omu-raisu (omelet-rice)

Omu-raisu, omelet filled with rice is a yoshoku (Western dish adapted to Japanese taste) that is so popular that there are many restaurants dedicated to it. They serve only that, but they have 30 variations for the rice flavoring and the sauce. It’s also very popular at home.