Crumpets

It's been sometimes I wanted something that changes from the usual scones/pancakes/crepes... I often prepare for breakfast and I was longing for English crumpets. I checked on my usual resource for English recipes: the bbc website and thought I could make crumpets right away. Not so simple. You need circles to bake them and you need baking soda, and instant yeast something I not often use. I must admit that I had to do some research too about the differences between instant yeast, active yeast, baking powder and baking soda...

So I finally manage to gather everything and cook them according to the bbc recipe. It was a little more fastidious and time consuming than expected but it was really worth it!!!

Some of the crumpets ready to be eaten!

The growing batter

Saturday lunch: potato cakes

I needed some energy before going to play tennis in the cold so I made these potatoes cakes served with leek and shiitake. The leek and the shiitake are thinly sliced and cooked slowly in a bit of olive oil. For the potato cakes, I gratted roughly 2 potatoes, mixed well with 2 battered eggs, added salt and pepper, and cooked both sides in a circle in a frypan greased with olive oil.

DIY lamp in a basket

The other day at Yasukuni Shrine flea market I bought 2 bamboo baskets for 500Y. Usually such baskets are use for flower composition, but I liked so much the bamboo pattern of one of them that I wanted to make a lamp out of one to enjoy the projection of the pattern on the walls.

With such basket it was really easy to mount as a lamp, and here is the result!

How do you like it?

Kara-age chicken

Today, small Japanese meal for lunch with kara-age chicken and rice with marinated seaweed. It's very simple: you cut the breast chicken in small bites, and you add fresh ginger and soya sauce and let it for a couple of hours. Then just before fry the chicken in oil you add 

potato starch. And it's ready to be cook. When the chicken is gold, you can serve it. I add a drop of mixed sesame-Japanese pepper on it. Bon appetite. 

Zucchini soup

Quick soup Mase with one zucchini and one small potato just steamed, mixed. I added some "chia" seeds and topped it with copes of gouda cheese, and that's it. A perfect diner for a cold evening. 

Oat bran mini pancakes

Sometime it's nice to have a drink and a few snacks to go with but no junk, no nuts nor cherry tomatoes...

As I mentioned the other day, I quite addicted to making pancakes and similars. It's really super simple, it takes a few minutes and it is possible to create any variation. So today I made some salty oat bran mini pancakes to top it with whatever you have: here melted cheese and French pâté (not for me the pâté of course!!).

The base for the pancakes is made of plain flour, oat bran, baking powder, salt and water. I adjust the quantities of flour and water to obtain a not too smooth mixture so that when I bake it in the pan the shape won't collapse and I don't need circles.
And you, what kind of pancake addict are you?

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.