Ma fille de 7 ans est intolérante au #lactose et avec l'été, ça devient plus compliqué (elle en a marre de prendre uniquement des sorbets).
Une allergologue m'avait parlé de pastilles (ou autre forme) à prendre avant une éventuelle exposition difficile à maîtriser.
Je n'y connais rien, mon pharmacien non plus, donc je tente ma chance ici.
Est-ce que ça marche ? L'estomac digère bien le lactose quand on prend qqch ?
Quelle marque me conseillez-vous ?
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. 🤔
Today was an easy food day, we had the much loved pierogi from our once weekly Silesian food stall and a mixed salad.
I made a very intense tomato sauce from tomato purée, seasoned mainly with Harissa to eat with the meat filled pierogi. We also had some mushroom and sauerkraut filled ones for which I prepared a bread sauce.
I had seen an inspiration for the second sauce on social media and they claimed you don’t need milk or cream to make a creamy sauce, just use bread. I was intrigued. Incredulously I fried onions in olive oil and plenty of butter, put those in a blender with onion bread pieces, garlic purée and some water. Then I put all of that back in the frying pan to reheat. In the end I decided I needed a little lactose free crème fraîche to make it fresher tasting, pepper and salt - and some mustard. It was fine and suited the mushroom sauerkraut pierogi really well.
Yesterday there was a juicy pork neck steak with potato mash and caramelised onions made by my husband. I had planned to have green beans with this but a last minute change of heart resulted in a mixed salad with three different dressings. The reason for this was that I had found radishes with healthy looking leaves and I wanted to see what they taste like. They were absolutely fine (I should have used more) and the different kinds of dressings (with the last of the chopped nuts from the other day) were appreciated too:
🥗 mayonnaise with a special spicy soy sauce that contains habanero pepper
🥗 walnut oil with apple cider vinegar, garlic granules, pepper & salt
🥗 olive oil, apple cider vinegar, red bell pepper flakes, garlic granules, pepper & salt
The mayonnaise one ended up being the most popular one but they were all fine really.
The other week I bought a whole tray of tinned Fried Mackerel in XO Sauce. Today we had two tins between the three of us; it’s such a powerhouse tastewise, you don’t need a lot at all to spice up your rice. The rice was takikomi gohan, rice cooked with seasoning and vegetables. I used carrot and kohlrabi. The latter still had leaves that looked edible so I put them on top of the other vegetables in the saucepan to steam them.
There was more green stuff to garnish the meal, the always required spring onion and on top of that I had foraged wild garlic this morning. I’m on a mission with greens, I want to try even more. A lot of them are full of vitamins, so why do we disrespect them so much?
Oh and I bought a little plate to grate ginger on, it’s perfect. 😍
First of all, so many new followers over the last week, that’s a bit scary, but welcome to my cooking adventures! 😅 My tastebuds like Japanese, Indian and East Asian cuisine and after falling in love with food at a Bangladeshi friend’s house I simply started cooking from recipes at some point and this opened up a new world for me. I hope I can inspire at least a few of you to try out either some of the recipes I keep trying myself, or to simply sample something completely new should you stumble across something that you have never tasted before in your supermarkets or even better on a market. I usually attempt to find a suitable recipe online. I’m also not afraid to substitute hard to get ingredients with local ones, reading up on what might be a good match. You have to work with what you can get or find in your fridge. 😄 I think most of my cooking is fusion food, where you combine products and ideas from different food cultures to make them your own.
The meal in the photo was a typical “what you find in the fridge” affair. There were many fresh vegetables that needed to go: okra, pak choi, napa and red cabbage, carrots, spring onion, half a jar of shiitake mushrooms, and also some soy mince based niku soboro (seasoned minced meat to eat with ramen or whatever you fancy). With this my son and I prepared the meal:
🥢 okra with ginger/soy sauce
🥢 Asian coleslaw with a sesame dressing
🥢 freestyle mixed fried vegetables with gochujang
🥢 niku soboro
🥢 Japanese rice
🥢 chopped peanuts and pine nuts were added as well
Today’s dish was selected as I had bought jigarashi miso (miso paste with Japanese mustard) and wanted to try it out. I found this noodle and bean sprout salad with doubanjiang (a Chinese spicy bean paste) and chicken, and I’m pleased I did as it was very tasty.
One drawback was the structure of the recipe, it felt like cooking by numbers. 🤪 In the end I wrote it down in a way that made more sense to me. You can compare below.
I wanted to make May Turnip steaks and then I ran out of time and ended up with wild garlic tofu steaks instead. 🥴 The tofu came as it is and I just needed to heat it up, easy peasy.
But I did make pickled napa cabbage (with a little added red cabbage which gave everything a hint of blue), and also blanched okra with ginger soy sauce. And of course rice and furikake (it said やさい／野菜 on the sachet). A good meal after all.
Sometimes you think you‘ve done everything wrong only to be rewarded with a super fragrant and extremely delicious dish. Such a lucky day!
I had been trying to use up a small pack of dried Hokkaido Scallops that had arrived last year with the Fall Kokoro box - but I kept forgetting that they needed to be rehydrated over night. I finally managed to do that.
The recipe I had for them was basically a takikomi rice dish (rice cooked with all the seasonings and ingredients) so I had the idea to use up my Okinawan sauce leftovers from my rafute the other day, together with the soaking water from the scallops (as per the recipe), not really thinking that through. Once it was all in the saucepan (with chopped shiitake, kohlrabi, ginger and spring onion), it occurred to me that I probably just murdered the delicate taste of the scallops. 🥴 Alas, it was too late, I had to go with the flow. What can I say, the longer the rice steamed away, the better it smelled in the kitchen. And the taste was just as delicious, somehow this was a marriage made in heaven and my family agreed.
The rice is topped with marinated silken tofu. I had frozen it a couple of times as that changes the structure and had it marinate away over night in a mix of gochujang, soy sauce, and mirin. It was still quite delicate but mostly held up to my clumsy efforts of turning it in the frying pan. And it tasted really nice too. This was also appreciated by my not so tofu loving co-eaters; they really have been good sports over the last years, trying the many tofu variations I’ve served them.
There was also a Napa cabbage salad but somehow it did not make it on a photo.
Since I couldn’t concentrate on cooking as much as I usually do over the our moving house period, some of my Kokoro items from last year are still waiting to be used. I decided it was time to change that and made plans to use them up bit by bit, especially as I have also just received the spring box.
So today we had this:
🥢 Miso soup
🥢 A salad made with Pak Choi and Chirimen in olive oil**
🥢 Japanese Zha Cai (a pickled Szechuan vegetable)**
🥢 Daiginjo Narazuke (pickled melon)*
🥢 Sansho Teriyaki Sardine Jerky***
🥢 Courgette fried with soy sauce, sake, mirin and sesame oil
🥢 Niku Soboro (pork mince with seasoning)
🥢 Rice with Shiso furikake
Winter box
** Spring Box
*** Special Kokoro shop order
Everything was fine, but we all thought the pickled melon was a bit strong, tasting almost of alcohol. I hadn’t realised that the melon is pickled with sake lees. If I had I would have used it to marinate chicken meat with it. What a wasted opportunity!
Takikomi gohan, Japanese rice cooked with seasonings and vegetables and then jazzed up with mackerel from a tin, kimchi, sesame chilli oil and spring onions. 😋😋
I had some Raclette type meat slices in the freezer and decided to try out making Korean bulgogi with them. After defrosting I marinated them and left them overnight. Today I fried them and made rice, a cabbage salad, miso soup and rice. A can of kimchi and a jar of pickled beetroot also came in handy. All in all very moreish, I will definitely make this again.
When we were living in the UK Pancake Tuesday became a thing in our family. At first I was confused as there is no such custom where I grew up in Germany but reading about lent (Fastenzeit in German) it all made sense, it’s about using up all the high energy but easily spoilt food items before you start “giving up something for lent” (in the past that was fasting). I didn‘t grow up in a religious family so these concepts were not familiar to me at all but they seem to be still part of British culture. Here in Germany this time of year is all about carnival, at least in certain areas. 🥳
The pancakes eaten in the UK on this Tuesday are usually simple ones with lemon juice. I like them but my guys don’t really take them seriously, especially not as a proper lunch. So over the last years we started having more varied pancakes, Indian or Japanese types are very popular. Today we had Okonomiyaki. So good!
Yesterday we had Mapo Tofu (minced meat and tofu) with just a little bit of Napa cabbage. It was nice and spicy because of the Pixian Doubanjiang (spicy fermented bean paste) that I used for it. There are so many interesting seasonings in this world.
This main meal was very nice, yet somewhat unusual as it was so simple and comparatively mellow.
I defrosted the cod while I boiled sliced salad potatoes and prepared the marinade for the potato salad. At some point I also found the time to boil some green beans (seasoned with pepper, salt and garlic granules). The defrosted fish was then also seasoned and covered with flour and quickly fried in oil and butter.