Hokke quick lunch

Prepared in 10 minutes, a grilled fish lunch. Let’s start with sides.

Seaweed konnyaku (eaten with sweet chili sauce).

Daikon radish.

Leftover of rice (white + black + sorghum), recooked with onion, garlic, eggs.

Boiled sweet potatoes. And grilled salted hokke.

The carbonara trick

The Carbonari revolution plotters had no time to cook for hours, no time to stands in the line of a fast-food where they could have been recognize… So they made their pasta quickly, stir-frying them with salted meat, since they had not the time to go and get fresh ingredients at the market everyday.

So what ? Salmon is the meat here. Italia has guanciale, Japan has salted Hokkaido Autmun salmon.

They were using this for the sauce :

EGG YOLK ! A powerful weapon. Add it raw on the hot pasta, and miracle, that’s all creamy.

Add lots lots of carbon black pepper. As the Carbonari had a day job, or a night job, depends on shifts, as coal miners, put some coal !
The comparison stops here. I’m not a plotting coal miner, I’m a blogger and if I’m plotting a revolution (could be), I don’t post teasers on my blog.
Well, a little freshness never hurts : A few leaves of basil are always welcome.

Eat your greens. Even if they are yellorange.
Fashionable color for veggies this season…

The yellow paprika brings its juicy freshness (after being sliced, salted, let 15 minutes, well rinsed).

Morue parmentière au yuzu-kosho, bathing in a fragrance of osmanthus

A fusion version of the morue parmentière (click here for the classic) with a touch of green yuzu… That was delicious.
That smells fish ? No, not at all. In this season, Japan smells so good, you can’t even imagine. Each block of houses has its bush of kinmokusei (osmanthus) like the 1st photo.

And these flovers have a sweet and encanting smell. Maybe you know jasmine ? Well, it’s super-jasmine…
So back to food.

The morue is cod fish (salted, unsalted…).

The parmentière, it’s potatoes. I finished 2 batches, one white, one saffron-colored. They were boiled and crushed by fork.

Making of… The fish was soaked, as you’ve seen for the fierce avocados.

Then the fish was stir-fried in olive oil, with lots of garlic. After cooking, I added negi leek, and yuzu-koshio, the condiment made of green yuzu peel and green pepper.

Making yuzu kosho

Served with kale soup. Why ? Shopping mistake. I like the wheat grass juice and I wanted to restock some. They had that discount on normally more expensive kale juice and I thought that was the same. Pfff, not at all, the kale juice tastes like broccoli soup. That’s not bad… as a soup, but really average, under average, nearly awful as a drink. So I have a stock of instant kale soup. Convenient : add fresh thyme, salt, hot water, shake. That’s a nice side-dish soup.

The fish’n tater was a delight. The citrus flavor changes it all.

In the mist of nishin-soba… iwashi-soba (sardine soba soup) (via Gourmande in Osaka)

This is my image of traditional food of Japan… but probably certainly not one of the dishes most Japanese people would present you. When you travel in the misty lands on the West coast of Kyoto Prefecture, going down to the pittoresques villages of fishers, you see many many fish being dried with a lot of care in front of the houses. And most small restaurants propose "nishin soba", a simple bowl of dashi (fish broth), with soba buckwheat noodl … Read More