Probably about 20 years ago in Dublin my then boyfriend and I made Puerco Pibil from the Robert Rodriguez movie “Once upon a time in Mexico” and never got around to making it again as you need some special ingredients (banana leaves, annato seeds, habañero chillies) that were hard to come by where we were living after we moved away from Ireland. The other day my now husband and I watched the movie with our son and decided it was time to eat this dish again. I did the shopping and my husband cooked. This turned out so well, it was well worth all the planning and effort. The meat had turned so soft! And the spices were absolutely mouth watering. 🤤
Mapo (or Mabo) Nasu. Minced meat with aubergine in a dark sauce. Good as always but noticeably darker than when I made this before. I was so annoyed with it being so pale last time and this time I didn’t really do anything different. Maybe it’s the new oyster sauce or a slightly bigger amount of Haccho Miso that did the trick. I also used more meat but that should not influence the colour. 🤔
I had bought some ready made cevapcici last week which I got out of the freezer last night. The name alone makes me think of 1970s style summer holidays in what used to be Yugoslavia. I never went there but Balkan style food got very popular with Germans and there used to be Yugoslav restaurants everywhere. Strangely we never went there either as far as I remember, so it took me until well into the 2020s to discover the delight they are.
I researched what to eat with the cevapcici and settled on tomato rice and a Greek style farmers’ salad with lots of feta cheese. I also made sure to have Ajvar in the house, another specialty from that region, a dip made from bell peppers and it’s supposed to be spicy.
What can I say, the family was very satisfied, my son said this felt like summer on a plate and made him happy. 🤩
The only letdown were both versions of Ajvar, neither of them were spicy, not even what Germans call “pikant”, despite both jars claiming to be just that. Next time I buy Ajvar from a Turkish supermarket. 🔥
I wanted to make an udon soup dish and when I read that I need dashi I thought, don’t I still have some instant soup packages from one of my kokorocares.com deliveries left in the shelf? I pulled out the pack of Kyushu Dashi Hot Pot Soup from my winter box and when I red the ingredients list (flying fish, bonito flakes, shrimp and obviously more) I instantly changed my mind. No more simple udon soup but hot pot it was!
I got my induction cooker for the table out, put the four packs of concentrated soup base in a saucepan with the right amount of water and heated that up.
Of course I also got out a range of things to put in there and had prepared them:
🥢 Napa cabbage, the top of the head in one piece 😅
🥢 May turnip, sliced thinly
🥢 Carrot, cut into “flowers”
🥢 Spring onion, in 4 cm pieces
🥢 Spinach, chiffoned, to be used like a topping
🥢 Shimeji mushrooms, roughly separated
🥢 Smoked tofu with almonds, sliced
🥢 Thin pork meat rolls (from Spain!)
🥢 Chinese dumplings with tasty fillings
Yes, there were also udon noodles, and I decided to make this a little more Chinese by adding a punchy dipping sauce with sesame oil, soy sauce, vinegar and chilli pul biber.
I think the whole affair cooked for about ten minutes and by that time it was perfect so I turned the temperature down and called the family.
I don’t know how but this was sooooo good and so perfect on a cold almost wintery day! I really think it was the absolutely delicious soup base that made this, we finished it all in one setting. (I remember having a flying fish based soup product from Kokorocares before and I loved that too.) But I also have to give a honorary mention to the May turnip which was exquisite and the Spanish pork that had a great taste.
Today’s food was wafu style pasta with garlic, shichimi togarashi, konbu cha, and parsley. The whole kitchen smelled of the carefully sautéed garlic, so appealing!
Since there weren’t a lot of vegetables involved with this one I decided to add some chiffoned baby spinach leaves and also to have namase, a daikon and carrot salad, with it. When getting my plate ready, out of a whim I simply put my salad on top of the pasta, the others copied this, and we all agreed it tasted really good that way.
The last two days we had Indian style fried chicken breast and spinach in tomato sauce with basmati rice. Actually, todays version was with May turnip greens and and also aloo chaat. 😋
As for the Eat-30-Plants-A-Week plan: with 70 different types of plants in total we have far surpassed the target this week. I guess it was simply a really varied vegetable week, I can’t really see us eating that many plants all the time. But 30 should be possible. Especially when you find a display like on photo 2, loads of different aubergines in our local supermarket - I’m seriously impressed!
The last two photos show a small but pretty bowl that somebody discarded. I found it in our building’s refuse area and just had to pick it up.
Germans like asparagus, but not so much the green stuff but lots and lots of white asparagus. Growing up I was never too much of a fan, it was edible but nothing that I would want to cook myself. Until I discovered green asparagus in the UK. I’ve loved it since and I think it’s much easier to deal with than the white spears. It also features in East Asian cuisine, so what’s not to like!
Photo 1: As it’s asparagus season I have made fried green asparagus with a Thai style red curry from an actual Thai curry paste (not one of those limp versions sold in German supermarkets for three times the price). It was spicy despite a whole tin of coconut milk but oh so good. For a while Thai food was my favourite go to East Asian cuisine in restaurants and this dish reminded me of those days. 🥰
Photo 2: Yesterday we had an East Asian style mushroom dish that was fine but not that exciting. But it definitely contributed to my plan to eat more than 30 plants a week. I have kept track since Monday and can report that the total is now at 54 different plants which I didn’t quite expect.
Are you familiar with Japanese, or better, Okinawan Fu? It looks like sliced white bread and in a way that’s what it is, but it’s made entirely of wheat gluten. In Japan it’s used to make all sorts of cooked dishes. I really should have taken a photo of the little bread slices before cooking them as it’s completely unrecognisable in my dish after I cut it into 1 cm cubes and soaked it in egg. We quite like it.
The dish I made is called Fu Chanpuru, which essentially means Fu with something mixed (in this case stir-fried). I loosely followed a recipe but replaced the sausage with rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, the fish based dashi with shiitake dashi (to make it vegetarian), and also added some chiffoned baby spinach and a little leftover shredded Napa cabbage.
As I had too many bean sprouts, I used the rest of them as salad with a leftover dressing of sesame oil, red wine vinegar, soy sauce and sugar.
At the end I decided that I also wanted a mashed up pickled plum with me rice, as I like the tangy kick from it. My husband opted for red cabbage kimchi instead.
Being curious, I even found an app to help with counting all the different plants I’ve been eating since Monday morning and can report back that it took me only two days to go over the limit of 30. The app is not quite as strict as the method described in the first article but I think I’m probably on a good track in feeding my family. looking smug
Today was the more interesting day, we had pan fried lemon marinated salmon fillets with a Greek salsa paired with (maybe not quite so Greek) goose fat roasted potatoes. The goose fat aroma from the potatoes was possibly not the perfect thing to add to a fish dish but everything was still very tasty. The salsa with feta cheese, lemon juice and honey was the secret star of it all.
Yesterday we had our “normal” Greek style meal with gyros, tomato rice and various delicacies from our local Mediterranean food stall.
Quite a while ago I bought a pack of three takuans (Japanese pickled radish) on a whim and couldn’t quite think what to do with it. Today I looked it up and yes, it’s just eaten like a pickle at the side. The taste reminds me of very mild and ever so slightly sweet sauerkraut. My husband liked them a lot, so I think we’ll have no problem finishing them off. The look of the half slices reminds me of candied lemons but of course those taste totally different.
With the takuan we had rice, mackerel in XO sauce, oven baked pak choi, miso soup and homemade red cabbage kimchi which turned really nice.
I cooked this pasta with lamb ragù dish from a recipe recommended yesterday by @xvf17 and what can I say, yet another good meal was enjoyed in this house. 😋 All the different tastes (fennel, mint, harissa, lamb mince, etc.) worked really well together and there was a nice kick to it.
It didn’t take me quite as long as advised in the recipe (2 hrs 15 mins) but I only made half the amount and didn’t have to wait for that much liquid to evaporate, so everything was done after 90 minutes. It was really worth every minute. 👌🏻
As pasta I used a type of Rigatone as that works really well with ragù, and I like this one despite being wholemeal.
I had defrosted 500 g of lamb mince over night and was contemplating what to do with it. Looking for something suitable I stumbled over a JustOneCookbook.com recipe for menchi katsu (a kind of breaded burger with beef and pork mince) and it sounded doable with lamb. I added homemade tonkatsu sauce, rice, shredded Napa cabbage, and a cucumber salad with shio konbu and a dressing of soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar and red vinegar. Sooooo good!
My husband commented that he was disappointed that I didn’t make this one earlier… 😅
Since there was still some of my tomato sauce in the fridge and I wasn’t too happy with my efforts yesterday, I tried making sweet & sour sauce from it again. It was definitely worth it!
While the rice was doing its thing, I went back to the basics and only fried green peppers with red onions. I mixed the sauce ingredients in a small saucepan and heated them up. Those items stayed on low heat and had to wait while I made some Chinese street style tofu slices (I had prepared the ingredients for that first). At the very end I put potato starch mixed with water into my sauce, to thicken it slightly. I served everything up. Yummyyyy!
Recipes used: https://www.copymethat.com/r/rRH3dBtlo/vegetables-with-sweet-and-sour-sauce/ https://www.copymethat.com/r/WF39ZbMLy/fried-tofu-chinese-street-food-style/
Meatless Monday was about eating up leftovers and stray items from the fridge. I made rice with stir fried vegetables, and garlic and coriander tempeh. I tried to use up a leftover tomato sauce by turning it into sweet and sour sauce but somehow I didn’t add enough vinegar. It was still nice. That reminds me, I need to get some chinkiang vinegar, I’ve heard it’s the go to vinegar in Chinese cooking. 🤔