Inarizushi

Cooking at a room temperature of 29°C is no fun. Thankfully I have a tower fan that I can take with me from room to room.

I had wanted to eat Inarizushi again for a while. Essentially it is sushi rice (=seasoned Japanese rice) with chopped shiitake in a tofu pouch, quite basic really when it comes to sushi. However do not underestimate how fiddly it is to open the pouches and if you are using a pointy knife you have already lost. But I’ve done this before, I got out a knife with a round tip and managed surprisingly well. Since we had some leftover smoked salmon in the fridge I topped some of the pouches with that (and regretted not having more as this was a very tasty combination).

Our child made a cabbage salad as a side.

We also had a clear soup with flying fish and shiitake (Shiitake & Ago Dashi Osuimono) and Red shiso Hakuhou Rakkyo (Japanese spring onion), both delicious and all the way from Japan via from Kokorocare Food (kokorocares.com).

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Tamagoyaki egg fest

After my tamagoyaki pan turned out to not be working well on induction I’m back to using my non-coated steel pans. Lo and behold, sometimes I’m actually able to follow instructions and learn a new trick (at least somewhat new to me): the other day I cooked something where you heated up about a teaspoon of oil and then wiped it with kitchen paper all over the pan, while also removing excess amounts. The pan has to be quite hot for this. Afterwards you go back to the temperature you need, and voilà, your pan has become non-stick. With this method my two different tamagoyaki worked really well today and didn’t get too burned for once.

I also made sesame asparagus and quick pickled daikon. Yum, yum.

Recipes used:
https://kokorocares.com/blogs/recipes/recipe-sesame-tamagoyaki-japanese-egg-omelet
https://www.japanesecooking101.com/tamagoyaki-with-green-onions-recipe/

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Frankfurt Green Sauce on potatoes

Nothing too special but I was impressed with how perfectly my egg yolk came out 😅

This is skin on boiled potatoes (but peeled before eating) with what we call Frankfurter Grüne Sauce (Frankfurt green sauce). This time I couldn’t get the selection of fresh herbs that go into it, so I used a frozen mix of eight herbs. It worked but is not quite the same. And despite there being eggs already in the sauce mix, I wanted more and made for each of us a boiled egg, with the egg yolks still soft. My timing apparently was perfect and the yolk popped out like this, keeping its shape. A perfect spring meal!

Recipe:
https://www.copymethat.com/r/qXHWvNoUz/frankfurter-grune-sauce-frankfurt-green-/

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Onigiri with a spinach side dish

I will never ever again buy the Onigiri that get sold in supermarkets here in Germany. Once I bought some that had been frozen, they were the worst - and they even came from an Asian supermarket 🙄 No, the best ones are 100% made at home and that way you also get to choose your favourite fillings!

Thanks to a great Onigiri shaper that my friend brought back from Japan and gave to me already a year ago, today I made the shapeliest Onigiri ever. I had been wanting to try the tool out but somehow never got round to it. The contraption makes six in one go and once I had figured out that it helps to make it slightly wet before filling it with rice, the Onigiris came sliding out quite easily. I made one set of six with tuna mayonnaise and another one with chopped pickled plum and toasted sesame seeds.

As eating just Onigiri seemed a bit incomplete, I also made a spinach side dish. I blanched the spinach and then seasoned it with a little sesame oil, soy sauce, shio konbu (salted algae) and katsuobushi (smoked, dried, and shaved skipjack tuna). This was absolutely perfect with the Onigiri!

Recipe used:
https://norecipes.com/onigiri-japanese-rice-balls/

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Annatto, I love you! 😋

My husband had just come back home on Friday from a work trip to Budapest that needed a detour via Riga to get there because of the Lufthansa industrial action. On the way back things were more straightforward with a stop in Zurich that wasn’t on the original itinerary. On Saturday I made him cook a dish that he had suggested a couple of weeks ago, Achiote Chicken with Potatoes. This one was with homemade achiote, and while cooking the Annatto seeds (that are essential to Achiote) they once again exuded their earthy yet somehow flowery aroma that I love so much.

Yesterday we added broccoli with oyster sauce as a side and our offspring all of a sudden was waxing lyrically about how well the sauce went with this type of broccoli, for him even better than the broccolini that I usually use for this dish. I agree it’s a match made in heaven but I’m definitely not as good as our child in describing a taste despite being so much into cooking. We suggested becoming a food critic would be a good career choice 🧐

In the afternoon trying to fix some minor problem in the kitchen sink cupboard I discovered that one of the pipes under the sink looked odd, very dirty, and seemed to be somewhat leaky. On inspection I found that the top ring that fixes it to another part had come loose and water was able to come out. Luckily nothing too major had happened yet; tightening the ring back in position and cleaning everything did the job.

This morning my husband had to leave again for his next work trip and the child and I had the leftovers for lunch. As today’s side I made a tomato feta cheese salad that fit quite well with the chicken dish too.

Recipes used:
https://www.notquitenigella.com/2018/06/14/achiote-annatto-recipe-chicken/
https://thewoksoflife.com/chinese-broccoli-with-oyster-sauce/

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Pasta with mushrooms and wild garlic pesto

Every spring ever since I discovered wild garlic some years back I’m looking forward to eating this particular dish. (Yes, you can make it with other greens and ordinary garlic but that’s somehow not the same as proper fresh wild garlic 😅)

You can easily forgo the extra time needed to make your own pesto if you have a good store bought green pesto and only mix in fresh wild garlic with the mushrooms. I also like to keep some for garnish. It will still taste great and is ready in 30 minutes.

I used oyster mushrooms, king and normal, out of the two I think I prefer the normal ones in this dish.

https://www.copymethat.com/r/758EwYNFp/pasta-with-mushrooms-and-wild-garlic-pes/

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“Bavarian rice” with roasted beets and carrots

Last weekend we had this interesting dish from the Fork Ranger website. It was lovely, featuring beet root, carrot, mushrooms, brown lentils, walnuts and yogurt. The one thing I found a bit weird at first was the fresh mint in the yogurt but after a while I got used to it. I’ve eaten minty yogurt many times before but usually with dried mint, that’s apparently somehow different to my palate 🤨

We used pearled spelt instead of bulgur but the rest was pretty much as per the recipe. Pearled spelt is something I came across in my life in the UK and I was trying for quite a while to find something like that here. Eventually I did, and to my surprise it’s marketed as Bavarian rice. Yes, it’s spelt - but polished -, and it really is quite a bit like rice. You can even cook it just like rice.

https://recipe.forkranger.com/roasted-beets-and-carrots

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