Reciplace

Squash, Tofu, Barley and Green Tea Soup (Superfood Mania!)

 When I saw this recipe, I had no choice but to try it!  The programmer boys at work made faces and gagging noises when I showed it to them, but I knew this type of recipe was right up my alley.  If there was some kind of competition for how many superfoods you can fit into one dinner, I would enter this one.

Not only does it have squash (or pumpkin as the original recipe calls for), tofu and barley, but the broth is actually flavoured with green tea bags!  Have you ever heard such a thing?

Lo and behold, it actually tasted good too.  You HAVE to use good quality firm tofu, don't bother with anything else.  It froze well too, so I took it for work the next week.  And one of those programmer boys asked what smelled so good!

Here is Peter Gordon's Barley, tofu, pumpkin and green tea soup with flax seed oil. 

50g pearl barley
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small red onion, sliced
1 small leek, sliced
2 garlic cloves, sliced
300g pumpkin, peeled and cut into smallish chunks
2 green tea tea bags
2 tbsp soy sauce, or to taste
100g tofu, diced
2 tbsp flax seed oil

1. Put the barley in a pot with 1.2 litres of water, bring to the boil then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a 3-litre pot. Add the onion, leek and garlic and sauté until the onions soften, stirring often.

3. Add the pumpkin to the pot of vegetables, then tip in the barley and its cooking liquor. Bring to the boil, cover and leave to simmer until the pumpkin is just cooked.

4. Turn the heat off under the soup and stir in the teabags. Leave to steep for 3 minutes, then remove the teabags. Mix in the soy sauce and tofu then taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary, adding extra soy or salt if needed.

5. Ladle the soup into bowls and drizzle with the flax seed oil before serving.

Afternoon tea, Japanese Style

The Japanese pretty much do everything better than we do.  This even includes the classic British event of afternoon tea.  What could be better than strolling through a lush Japanese garden on a warm afternoon, surrounded by trickling waterfalls, ponds full of koi fish, little red bridges, and carefully pruned trees.... and then stopping in a little tea house, taking off your shoes, and sitting at a low table drinking tea and eating cake? 

In Japan, the tea served for special occasions like this is called Matcha.  Matcha is a high quality powdered green tea that is made individually in the cup, not in a pot.  If you've ever had green tea ice cream or a Starbucks green tea latte, you'll know the flavour of matcha.  It's very powdery tasting, in a pleasant way.  A bit like green pepto-bismol.  But nice!  The matcha powder is mixed with hot water, and whipped with a bamboo whisk into a frothy drink.  It's a very smooth, subtle flavour - you do not add milk or sugar.

Served with your cup of matcha is a small square red bean paste cake.  If someone ever suggested making a cake out of smushed up adzuki beans, I'd think they were bonkers - but this cake is fantastic!  The beans are mixed with sugar to make it a nice sweet paste, with icing sugar dusted around the outside.  Beautiful!

Then you just sit on your tatami mat, looking out on to the garden and slowly sipping tea.  It's all very zen like - very calming and soothing.

Back in the UK though, I have to admit that ultimately I'll always be a PG tips girl.

Oki-Nami Brighton, what a disappointment!

Since arriving back in the land of dreary skies and signal failures, we've been missing our daily Japanese meals... I haven't really cooked anything Japanese in the past few days.  So tonight we decided to treat ourselves to a rare dinner out in Brighton at a new-ish restaurant called Oki-Nami.  It's part owned by DJ Norman Cook, AKA Fat Boy Slim, and Japanese Chef Mike Dodd.  (Is is possible for a really good Japanese chef to be named "Mike Dodd"?)  From the outside, the restaurant looked really trendy and beautiful... the interior designers certainly got it right.  I think it went downhill from there.

Hilariously, they called Chu Hai their "signature cocktail" in the menu.  Chu Hai is basically the Japanese version of a vodka seven.  It's a Japanese distilled spirit (schochu) in lemonade.  Oki-Nami:  this cannot be your signature cocktail.  Please don't embarrass yourself like this.  And please don't charge £6 for it.

Oki-nami means "big wave" in Japanese.  Which sort of described the big waves of disappointment I felt while perusing the menu. Everything seemed really unimaginative or just plain Westernised.  Perhaps cooking interesting Japanese food is a little too challenging for our "Japanese Chef" Mike?  Or perhaps he's never actually been to Japan, so hasn't read any authentic Japanese menus before?

First things first.... we both ordered simple o-cha (normal green tea) to drink.  In Japan, you get this free when you sit down.  A few minutes later they came over to tell us they had run out.  In a Japanese restaurant.  They had run out of green tea. No problem, we'll have the roasted barley tea.

Second came the edamame.   It was clearly from a bag of frozen edamame, and had been slightly over cooked.  Very average.... I even prefer Wagamamma's edamame. 

Next was the miso soup.  It was in a very slick looking bowl, but it was incredibly salty... much more than it needed to be.  And for £3, it was a very simple miso. 

Then things started getting worse.  We'd ordered a couple of the 'specials' going that night.  The Husband ordered soba noodles in broth with vegetables and tempura.  Interesting, it sounded....  until it came, and you realised how quickly tempura'd vegetables disintegrate in soup.  Tempura needs a SAUCE not a SOUP!  It was only a few minutes before the soup turned into a soggy battered mess.  The "vegetables" were clearly shaken from a bag of Tesco crisp salad mix.  It reminded me of one of those cringy episodes of Masterchef, where the competing chef tries really hard to do something risky to get noticed, John Torode gives it one look of horror, shakes his head, and the chef goes home in tears.

My salmon terriyaki with rice pretty much did what it said on the tin...  some strips of salmon sitting on a bed of rice, with the rest of that Tesco bagged salad shaken over it.  The sauce didn't quite stretch to cover all of the rice, so it was pretty bland.   And it was so simple that I loathed paying £9 for something I could have made myself at home.  (With a lot more flavour, I might add.) 

The final chopstick in the heart was dessert.  I fell in love with green tea flavoured desserts while we were in Japan...  Matcha ice cream, Matcha cake, Matcha pancakes....   so we ordered Green Tea Cheesecake.  When I took my first bite, I started to wonder if the chef had actually tasted any of these dishes himself before inflicting them upon us.  You could barely taste the matcha powder in the very thin layer of 'cheesecake', and the base of the cake wasn't even a proper cheesecake base with graham crumbs...  in fact I can't even tell you what it WAS made of, because it had no flavour - just a sticky tasteless mess.  The most unbelievable thing was the blueberries and raspberries on top of the cake.  We might as well have been eating little sacks of water for all the taste they had.  I've never, ever, ever eaten a blueberry with absolutely no taste... but they managed to find some for us.   Probably in the back of the freezer.

If you've never tried Japanese food, please don't go here - you will incorrectly think Japanese food is disgusting.  I'd rather you keep going to Wagamammas and think it tastes like that.  If you have tried Japanese food and love it, I urge you to send a donation to Oki-Nami to raise some money to send our friends Mike Dodd and Norman Cook to Japan, so they can see what tasty creations a real Japanese chef cooks.  Then they can stay there, open up a burger joint, and leave us the hell alone.

Update:  The Guardian agrees with me...

Traditional Japanese Breakfast

In most of the places I've traveled, the breakfasts are pretty similar.   Maybe they give you slices of cheese in Germany, or lots of different meats in Prague, but it's all pretty bog standard.  Not so in Japan!!  Here is our first Japanese breakfast, in a lovely ryokan called Fujitomita, looking out onto Mount Fuji. 

All Japanese breakfasts consist of steamed rice, miso soup, and various bits of pickled vegetables.  You will get a bit of green or black tea to wash it down with.  This is the basic breakfast, but if you are being served breakfast in a nice inn (or presumably someone's home), you will get a few other dishes to go with it.

 This particular morning our extra dishes were an egg, cracked onto some lettuce - very simple but very fresh and tasty, some lightly steamed broccoli with sesame seasoning, various types of seaweed, soft and delicious, some fruit, a little bit of radish, and .... the main attraction... an entire fish!  

I've only been confronted with an entire fish body on a plate a handful of times in my life.   This was the first time I was told to eat the entire thing!  The fish is cooked for 7 hours, and so the whole body becomes soft and edible.  Horrors!   

The entire meal was prepared so beautifully, and tasted incredible, so I gave it a go.  I started with his stomach, then his back... all very sweet and sticky and soft.  I even ate his spine.  

I'm sorry to admit it, dear readers, but I did not make it as far as his face and tail.  I just couldn't do it.  I did get brave later on in the trip and eat an entire fish (minus the tail, which looked like a brush), but on that particular morning underneath Mount Fuji, I just couldn't pull it off.   

The Husband ate the entire thing though - brave soul!  I really should have done it, as it was so tasty, but the entire meal was fantastic!  I did get pretty addicted to pickles and rice and miso for breakfast, and now that we're back in the UK, musli just isn't doing it for me....

Back from Japan

After three incredible weeks on our honeymoon in Japan, the best country in the world, we're back.  I actually cried on the plane when we left.  We had the most amazing time, and of course, some amazing FOOD!  I dutifully took lot of photos of the really interesting food, and will be blogging about it over the next few days!