甘だい

After trying famous japanese beef, I decided to try famous japanese fish. Not fugu, but amadai, supposedly one of the best fish here. My Chef uses it all the time, apparently it's a speciality of the Kyoto prefecture.

Now that was a large piece of fish!

How is it ? Definitely a fine taste, but the texture is a bit weird I find, somehow spongy. In any case, I still prefer the much cheaper hokke.

Mushroom-cream Bread

I thought it was over, but here they are again: hatake-shimeji (or tanba-shimeji), my favorite japanese mushroom. I jumped on the occasion and did my favorite starter (actually tied with tomato-mozzarella). Of course those mushrooms are not always available especially ouside Japan, so use any other that has strong flavor (cèpe/porcini, chanterelle, etc).

The bread:
on rather thin slices of baguette, spread olive oil and very thinly sliced garlic. Grill until the bread just starts to get brown.
The topping:
in a pan fry the mushroom cut small, in a mix of butter & olive oil, with salt & pepper. When done, add fresh cream and let cook for 2mn.

It looks & tastes better with sprinkled chive, but I didn't have any at hand.

Wagyū

I wanted to try this japanese beef for some time. Wikipedia states "Highly prized for their rich flavor, these cattle produce arguably the finest beef in the world." Of course, that ain't come cheap. I recently found a shop that sells it at a "reasonable" 5000¥ / Kg (50€ / 65$), so I bought 100g. Now this is some of the best beef I've had. Maybe only matched by black-forest beef filets straight from the farm, back in rural Germany. And even then.
So my starter was 黒毛和牛 with fried eggplants from Kyoto. The finer the ingredients, the simpler the presentation. The beef with just salt & pepper, the eggplants in olive oil & salt.

Boy, this was good... :-)

I'm always puzzled by food prices in Japan. Most of the time, the bill is way more than you thought. But sometimes it's way less than you'd expect... not sure why. This time, the great started above, together with the dish below, only cost 1000¥ worth of ingredients. Go figure.

Udon with season-vegetables

In the same pan where you grilled the beef, add with time interval eggplant slices in olive oil, finely-chopped garlic, sliced green & red tōgarashī (japanese long peppers), enoki mushrooms. Finish frying in a bit of soya sauce, then add water and let cook for a few minutes. Then add udon noodles and let cook for 3mn, mixing well.

Shimeji-Tagliatelle

Yesterday I was going home via the Shijo-bridge, and that same old lady that sells vegetables from the Kamigamo shrine was just arriving. I helped her push her vegetable carriage the last meters. When I asked how she was getting here from the shrine, she said by foot! That 70+ years old lady is pushing that huge carriage 7 Km through the city (one-way) to come sell these vegetables downtown! When I think that most people use escalators & elevators whenever they can...  She made me a deal on a huge bag of shimeji mushrooms, so the same evening I made a french-style mushroom cream soup. Then I went back there and offered some of it to her. Now japanese people often hide their true feelings, but I think she really appreciated. She also gave me some Tōgarashī to thank me (japanese long green peppers).
So, today, with the remaining mushrooms and the Tōgarashī, I made shimeji-tagliatelle, with home-made tomato sauce. This turned out to be really good!

Ahh... for once, taste turned out even better than I expected (that's not often the case!)

Start by making the tomato sauce. In a saucepan over low heat, cook tomatoes with seeds removed, garlic, and a bit of herbes de provence. Later add a bit of olive oil and salt. Cook until tomatoes are melted. In a pan, fry the mushrooms and green peppers in a mix of butter and olive oil, with salt & pepper. End by adding some fond de veau, cook a 2mn. Then add the tomato sauce and cook for 5-10mn. Add tagliatelle cooked beforehand, and simmer for a few minutes, mixing well. At the end, add a bit more olive oil (off the heat).

Carrots Rice

Another rice variation. This one is inspired from one of the dishes I saw at Takashimaya, a department store whose basement is food galore.

Cook rice together with carrot cut in small cubes, and a bit of soya sauce. In a pan, fry cut red onions and flavorfull mushrooms (here eringi) in sesame oil. Finish by adding some soya sauce. Frying in soya sauce will add intense flavor. When the rice is done, add to the pan and mix well.

Shiitake Heads With Tapenade

Every now and then the Omiya-Randen train terminus near my place hosts a small vegetable market in a train waggon! Local farmers from the surroundings come sell their vegetables there. The people are always very nice. Today I bought Eda-mame and sweet potatoes, and was offered a mini-lunch consisting of a cup of Miso soup and a rice ball, with a topping I've never tasted before. It turned out to be marinated japanese mountain pepper (sanshō). Very strong, very tasty. I bought some and thought of this new starter dish.

Fry shiitake heads in a mix of butter & olive oil, both sides. Then top with sanshō-tapenade:
smash together black olives, sanshō, very finely chopped garlic, and olive oil.
It would probably look better with chopped herbs on top, like parsley. Might taste even better too.
Or what about thyme or rosemary ?! I've got to try that...

Hokkaido Beef with Local Vegetables

Try to buy local when you choose your ingredients, even if it means paying a bit more. How did we end up in a world where buying local lamb costs more than lamb imported from New-zealand, half-way around the world..?!
This dish is -almost- as local as it can be (for me!) Beef from the country, long beans and eggplants from Kyoto. I could buy beef from Kameoka, just outside of Kyoto, but at 5 times the price, principles are confronted with the reality of the wallet...

The beans, though, I got from this nice old lady that sells a few vegetables on the Shijo-bridge. They are (organically!) grown at the Kamigamo temple, in the northern part of Kyoto.

Kamigamo-jinja

Grill slices of eggplant in olive oil, season with herbes de provence. For the rest, the pictures says it all, except the name of the wine: 'Sirocco' from Tunisia. And the laptop ? IBM Thinkpad! :-)
Don't forget to deglaze the pan the maximize the use of the beef flavor! Use the resulting sauce to pour over the vegetables.

Beef Rice

Another rice variation.

Shortly grill cubes of eggplants in a pan, then cook together with rice. In the same pan, grill thin slices of beef, then set aside. Still in the same pan, grill pieces of green pepper. At the end, add everything together in the pan and mix well, under low fire, so that flavors mix. Serve with sprinkled pepper.

Mushroom-cream Pasta

A wide variety of mushrooms is available in Japan at reasonable price, so I use them a lot.

While cooking pasta, fry stripes of pork in a pan. Remove from pan and fry mushrooms of your choice in a mix of butter and olive oil. Then add the pork again, along with fresh cream, and cook a some minutes. Add the pasta to the pan and cook 2mn more, mixing well. Serve with chopped chive if available. Ah, and a dish like dish demands to be served with wine :-)

Salade Niçoise, express-edition

This is another very well-established dish of mine. Along the same lines as the Avocado Salad previously posted, this modified Salade-Nicoise recipe was designed to be quick to make, no more than 15mn. Actually, it only takes as long as it takes to cook the pasta. Most notably, the anchovies have been removed and the potatoes replaced with pasta.
Also very healthy, I like to alternate lunches with one or the other of these two salads.

 

For 1 person (big portion, as shown in the picture above):
start by cooking 1½ eggs (= 1 or 2, your choice... actually it's 3 eggs for two), until the yolks are still a bit liquid, but just about to turn hard. At the same time, cook green beans and Barilla Girandole pasta in the same pot, so that the flavor of the beans partially enters the pasta. In a bowl, mix 1 medium-tomato cut in halved-quarters, sliced black olives, half a small red onion, cut very thinly, the (quartered) eggs, the pasta and the green beans. 
The sauce is the same as for the Avocado Salad (french-style vinaigrette).

Autumn Salmon with Mushroom Sauce

Autumn being just around the corner, 'Autumn Salmon' from Hokkaido starts to be available. A nice healthy lunch, pretty affordable too (at least in Japan.... with everything being over-expansive, fish is comparably very cheap). At about 400¥ for the whole dish, it's the same price as this one zucchini I used for my last Ratatouille!

Boil small potatoes (with the skin for preserved nutriments), and green beans. In a pan, grill the salmon skin-side first, with salt & pepper on top. When turning over, the salt & pepper will be exposed directly to the pan, creating a slight 'crust' that is pretty good. Once the salmon is done, remove from pan and fry finely-chopped mushrooms (maitake in the picture). Deglaze with a bit of red wine vinegar, then add some fresh cream, water and old-style Dijon mustard. Cook for a few minutes until a smooth consistency. Serve the sauce over the potatoes, cut in half. Last, the way ketchup matches french fries, Dijon mustard matches green beans!

Avocado Salad

This is a very well-established dish of mine. It has been refined over many years, with the initial goal of having a good & quick-to-prepare meal for lunches at work. The idea first came more than 10 years ago, while I was riding the TGV from Marseille to CDG airport, the couple in front of me had a lunchbox with a tomato-corn-tuna salad. I later reused this idea, and enhanced it together my cooking partner at work, with many tries over more than 5 years, into its current form, where the various flavors mix almost perfectly. Tuna was eventually dropped because of environemental concerns of my cooking partner. By now, I do believe it can't be made any better :-)
It also turns out to be a very healthy dish, with antioxidants & vitamin C from the tomatoes, fibers & proteins from the kidney beans, good fats (unsaturated) & vitamin E from the avocado, vitamin B from the corn, carbohydrates from the pasta and calcium from the cheese.

I usually only give broad instructions for the dishes of this blog, because the purpose is more to give ideas than actual recipies. But for this particular dish, the proportion of ingredients is quite important to obtain the right flavor balance, for I'll give a detailed description.
Ingredients for 1 person (big portion, the same as shown on the picture):
- 1 medium tomato, cut into half-quarters
- half an avocado
- half a can of corn (or one mini-can)
- half a can of kidney beans (or one mini-can)
- 10-15 cm² of some kind of hard cheese, cut in small cubes (we often used Comté, but it might be expansive in some countries)
- 2/3 cup of Barilla Girandole pasta, or anything similar than has this smooth inner-curved twisted spiral (avoid similar-looking fusilli, they are too rough in the mouth)
The sauce: french-style vinaigrette:
- two tbsp of olive oil
- one tbsp of red wine vinegar
- half a tsp of Dijon mustard (regular or old-style)
- salt & pepper to taste
-> add in a cup in that order and mix until a smooth consistancy is obtained
True to its initial goal, this dish can be made in 15mn!