Pork fillet in cocotte

I have a beautiful Staub cocotte that I use  not often enough. It's a pity because I love vegetables cooked in the cocotte, when the juice and extracts mix together.

So today I decided to use it and prepare a Japanese style pork filet in cocotte with new onions and carrots.

 In the cocotte I put a little of sunflower oil, 2 new onions cut roughly, 2 little taro potatoes and one carrot, then I lay a large pork filet on top, salt, pepper, laurel and cooked for 30-40min. (In my case the vegetables were perfect for two, but I seeved only half of the filet)

Once finished, I opened the cocotte and added a little of soya sauce to dilute the extracts, which gave a dark beautiful and delicious glazing, almost tasting like miso.

Served with rice with soya beans and fresh pickled vegetables.

.

One-bowl lunch

This is definitely the end of winter! But the spring greens and veggies are not yet ready, we'll have to wait a few weeks, so in between, mizuna, brocolli, spinach, na no hana are the best options!

I find that mizuna really goes well with plain Japanese rice, so I prepared it on a rice bowl with some steamed brocolli, and I made some pork-okara-curry bites.

For the mizuna just wash it in clear water, the brocolli I steamed them on top of thd rice for 2 min, the bites, I mixed pork meat with 2 large spoons of okara, one egg, a spoon of curry powder, salt, pepper and cooked then golden. Served all in one bowl, topped with some sesame seeds.

I believed that the pork can be removed and replaced by a little of panko for a veggan experience.

Meat ball Japanese style

It's really easy and simple to make a Japanese style diner. I made meat balls with porc (or veal), add ginger, soya sauce and potato starch.

Mix all the ingredients, make balls and fry them. 

Serve them with soya sauce, and sesame seeds. 

Homemade gyoza

Japanese meal for Parisians today! I've decided to make gyoza, it's quite simple and much better than the one you can buy in Paris. 

You just need chopped pork  meat (or veal) about 200g for 40 gyoza, add 3 leafs of Chinese cabbage thinly cut, a piece of ginger grated, 3 black mushrooms (dried shiitake) cut in thin slices, soya sauce and one spoon of potato flour. Make balls and put them in the round dough (bought in a Japanese grocery, but you can also make your own). I used a shape to close the gyoza, but there is also a technique to close them without.

A drop of oil in a fry-pan, when the gyoza are golden on each sides, add some water and wait a couple of minutes. 

Eat with soya sauce, spicy oil and pepper. 

Turnips filled with miso and pork

Sunday as a side dish of the buta shoga yaki I prepared an experimental recipe of some turnips filled with a mixture of miso and pork. This idea comes from two Japenese dishes, one is quite classical: boiled daikon in dashi topped with chicken and miso (for the recipe please contact me), the other is more refined and learned it at the cha-kaiseki cooking class (I'll write more about that soon and introduce some recipes) I used to take, we once prepared some turnips filled with a mixture of shrimps. Actually I wanted to repriduce that dish, but I find it extremely difficult to find good shrimps (by "good" I mean wild shrimps that haven't grown in shit-pools, sorry for being gross!). Being unable to find what I was looking for I decided to take the safe path and go with some Isumi pork (again...). That being decided the recipe needed to be adjusted.

I peeled the turnips (they were rather small ones), boiled them in salted water but could have been dashi, until soft (use a little wood toothpick to check), then removed a bit of the top and cut the base to make them stand. In a bowl I mixed the grinded pork meat with miso (with a ratio of about 1/5 of miso for meat). Then with a spoon I filled the turnips, lined them in an oven dish and baked them until the filling was well cooked. It's better to serve them while hot. Since the turnips were small it made a lovely one bite size.

Ginger and pork

Isumi in Chiba (where we spend most of our week-end) has very good pork meat. It is not as famous as the one from Miyazaki in Kyushu, but it's as delicious and local, which for me is enough. I don't eat much meat anyway, only pork and chicken breast, and only when I know where it comes from. 

One of my favorite Japanese recipe to cook thin slices of pork cutlet is the "buta shoga yaki" (grilled pork with ginger). It's one of the basic Japanese recipes. It's also a standard in lots of Japanese style cafes. It's usually served with rice.

Today I had nice thin slices of pork cutlet and a piece of fresh ginger, a good opportunity to make some grilled pork with ginger. 

My version is simple: I grat (i use the daikon oroshi type gratter) the fresh peeled ginger on top of the pork sluces in a container. Then I had a bit of soya sauce and a little of cooking oil. I close the container and shake well before I leave to rest gor 5-10minutes (time to start cooking the rice). Then I heat a frypan and delicately put the slices to grill. Since I've put already a bit of oil in yhe mixture there's no need to add more. I like my pork to be golden brown, so I cook it until it has the desired color.

And since I really like ginger, I also used the fresh ginger roughly sliced to treat myself with a "hot ginger". For that I just top the ginger slices with boiling water and a spoon of honey!

The dish on the bottom left are some turnips filled with miso and grinded pork. An experimental recipe that was really nice.