Leaves and buds, plant powered early Spring meal

The big lunch. A veggie orgy.
You have seen already 3 dishes, here is the final installment.

I cooked this with all the veggies leftovers I had. Spring cabbage and maitake mushrooms that you see here. Also onion, kintoki red carrot and I’ve added potatoes. At the end, more greens of shungiku.

The veggies are cooked without oil, steamed in the pan. Just salt. They bring enough complementary flavors.

The dish : jardinière de légumes (vegetable garden lady). That looks dry, but it’s very mushy, soft and juicy.

Garlic and yuzu sautéed tsubomina. That you are detailed here.

The main dish maybe is the tofu on wasabi leaves, from this post.

The last slice of this delicious black sesame azuki bean terrine that I had frozen, a while ago (here). I had 2 huge bean terrines that fed me for a while. Now I need to bake the next ones.

Butakimchi nabe, spicy Japanese steamboat

A meaty nabe today. As previously, I only show the preparation for the night time hot pot. Buta is pork, and kimchi well, there is some in it :

That spice pickle will flavor the broth. I add miso and raw ginger too. That will even be too spicy and salty, so some more neutral ingredients are necessary for balance.

Konnyaku, made from some kind of root veggie. It has nearly no calories, and no flavor but the texture in the hot soup is very pleasant.

Enoki are not full of flavor either. They soak the soup and bring some texture.

Chrysanthemum greens, they have some sourness like aragula.

The meat. It’s pork sliced very thinly. The amount seems important, but that’s only 100 grams.

So everything is ready… curtain.

Post-scriptum : miam miam miam…

Spring festival : here is the roll…

Spring chrysanthemum Spring rolls !

Still celebrating the Lunar New Year with food… Well this week is really busy, with also Carnival and Valentine. But this food is lighter and refreshing.

Let’s prepare the ingredients :

Rice paper.

Shungiku (young chrysanthemum greens), carrot, shrimps (boiled), onion (blanched).

Ground sesame.

Bean sprouts (blanched).

The dip : sweet chili sauce, rice vinegar and sesame.

It’s complete.

Let’s roll them…

Sukiyaki, beef and sake

Sukiyaki. That simmered nabe (Japanese hot pot) used to be my favorite Japanese dish before I came to Japan. Well, maybe that was the only thing I knew. It’s true that it travels well, it’s easy to adapt and you can’t get it wrong.

It’s meat based. The beef is cut very thinly. It’s good to have fat for the flavor. Not a big amount is needed, as there are all the other ingredients. Maybe 70 g per person.

A egg yolk to dip the cooked meat and making it feel like velvet in your mouth.

For the sauce, shoyu (soy sauce) and nihonshu (Japanese sake). That doesn’t need to be a great sake, I refill the nice bottles. I’ve added mirin too.