Pork Steak in Shio-Koji Paste

Chef Tohru Nakamura is the creator of this dish. I've already cooked many of his recipes.

The Shio-Koji paste was easy to come by. I ordered it online and it even produced here in Germany. Shio means salt- Koji is fermented rice. I marinated the pork steaks for 10 hours.

The next full moon is tomorrow. Sleeping through the night is difficult for me short before full moon. I was awake 2 AM, could not get back to sleep and went in the kitchen at 2:30 AM and started marinating the pork. 

The koji paste makes the pork softer. It needs a lot less heat in the pan to cook.

Recipe:

225 g pork neck steak

4 tsp shio-koji paste

1 tsp grapeseed oil, 1 tbsp sesame oil

1 Dikon or Radish

1 tbsp grated ginger

1 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tsp rice vinegar, 1 tbsp light soy sauce, pepper, 1/2 lime

150 g sugarsnap peas, sesame oil, salt

Bowl of hot shortgrain rice

10 hours before cooking, spread the paste all around the steak. Put in a container in the fridge. An hour prior to start making lunch, get the container out of the fridge to get back to roomtemperature.

Peel the Dikon and grate it on a boxgrater. Wash in cold water 3x. Squeeze out some liquid.

The peas can get in the microwave with a little water at 800W for 2,5 min. Season with salt and sesame oil later.

Cook the rice.

Put a pan on medium heat and add both oils. Sear the steak on both sides and cook on medium low until done. Take out of the pan and cut in slices to eat with chopsticks later.

Melt the sugar in the pan. Add vinegar, lime and soy sauce.

On a plate lay the steak chunks in a row. Put sauce over them. Then top with radish and top that with ginger.

Serve with bowls of rice and peas.

Meggyleves or Hungarian Cherry Soup

It is so hot today!

Getting a cold dessert sounded great and it is cherry season here in Germany.

Due to icy weather during the cherry blossom time and the huge amount of rain in the last weeks, the cherry harvest is smaller than usual. The prices are a lot higher too.

The original Hungarian recipe calls for sour cherries. But sweet cherries work well too. There are two different versions of this cherry soup. You can take the boozy way and cook the cherries in red wine.

But no alcohol for me today. I used water infused with wine berry-cranberry juice.

I had to pit them first. A very juicy work with a lot of splatters.

Recipe for 2:

300 g pitted cherries 

500 ml water

6 cloves

1 cinnamon stick

4 tsp sugar

1 lemon

100 g sour cream

1 tsp potato starch + 1 tbsp water

Add water, cherries, sugar, cloves, cinnanon to a pot, bring to a boil and reduce heat and cook for 10 minutes.

Mix starch with water and add at the 8th minute. Pull the pot off the heat, add lemon juice and check sugar level. 

Stir in the cream and cool down to room temperature. Then put in the fridge.

Cucumber Salad 2.0

This was a Reel from Nicolnic99.

Everybody tells you to eat the cucumbers with their skin. All healthy benefits are sitting on/under the skin.

But sometimes a peeled cucumber is better in a salad. Don't thow the peel in the organic waste, use it for the dressing.

I added the peel to a minichopper and 2 tsp Greek yogurt, 1 tsp mustard, 2 tsp white balsamic vinegar, pepper, salt and fresh parsley and basil. The light green dressing went in the bowl and got tossed.

Refreshing.

Zucchini Tart

My first homegrown yellow zucchini. 

After 4 tiny ones that rotted, the first one took 2 weeks to reach its size. I watched this one like a hawk. We have lots of snails that eat everything. 

I used shortcrust pastry I bought in France yesterday. I did a grocery haul and enjoyed that very much.

To prevent a soggy bottom, I prebaked the pastry. First for 10 min with baking pearls, then brushed with an egg white and baked it then for 5 more minutes.

The zucchini went with bacon bits, green onions and garlic in a pan with some oil. A good amount of seasoning was added and some Noilly Prat for steam. That took 15 min. The time the pastry prebaked.

In a bowl I mixed cottage cheese, eggs, creme fraiche with fresh herbs, 2/3  grated mozzarella and smoked paprika, smoked salt and pepper.

 

Preheat the oven 200 C.

Seperate 1 egg and put the yolk in the bowl with the other 2 eggs. After the prebake, put the zucchini mix on the pie, pour over the cottage cheese mix and sprinkle the 1/3 of grated mozzarella on top.

Bake for 30 min. Let it sit on a baking rack for 10 min, then get it out of the tart tin.

Recipe:

1 medium yellow zucchini

2 green onions, 3 garlic cloves

80 g bacon bits, 1 tbsp grapeseed oil

Salt, pepper, herbes de Provence, Tomato Garlic seasoning

3 eggs

200 g cottage cheese, 50 g creme fraiche

75 g grated mozzarella

Fresh chives, basil, oregano

Smoked paprika

30 ml Noilly Prat

 

Gamja Jorim or braised Potatoes

An other Banchan dish from Korea.

Slightly sweet braised potatoes that cook in the dark liquid. When you use Yukon Gold potatoes or European salad potatoes, they have the right texture and wont fall apart. The idea of this recipe is from one of my hundreds of cookbooks, the one from AARON HUH

I love these kind of small veggie dishes. They are usually on a table with lots of others when people have Korean BBQ. But you can serve these potatoes with a bowl of hot rice as well. 

Ingredients for 1:

400 g potatoes

1/2 green bell pepper

1 1/2 cup water

Pinch of salt

1 1/2 tbsp dark soy sauce

1 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp corn syrup

1/2 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp Perilla oil

3 tbsp toasted sesame seeds

Put everything except the green pepper, perilla oil and sesame seeds in a wide pan or small pot. Cook with a lid for 10 min, than for 10 min without the lid. Toss in the chopped green peppers. Reduce the liquid to 85 %. Add the perilla oil.

Put in a bowl and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

I ate it with young herring.

You can store the potatoes in an airtight container in the fridge for 3 days.

Croissant Dough Bread with Black Currant Jam

One croissant dough roll was left over from my Churros Cheesecake baking. It needed to be baked.

I saw a couple of recipes with these kinds of dough, like Cruffins and Croissant waffles. But a loaf of sweet bread sounded good to me.

I filled it with the black currant jam I made two weeks ago and a tiny bit of creme fraiche.

The outside was sprinkled with salted caramel seasoning. Just press them in a small loaftin and bake them at 190 C for 25 min

..

Swiss Chard, Beluga Lentils with Feta

Summer salad with homegrown Swiss chard. 

My 9 plants Swiss chard are thriving and that means eating them. Until today I only had them cooked in some way. But today the leaves went in raw and the colorful stems just had 3 min in the pan.

Beluga lentils are very small and nutty. They need 25 min to cook.  Lots of bits and pieces went in the salad.

Ingredients for 1:

60 g beluga lentils, 1 bay leaf

60 g swiss chard

100 g feta

4 cherry tomatoes, 1 green onion, 2 garlic cloves

3 stalks basil, 3 stalks parsley, 3 stalks coriander

1 tbsp capers

40 g almond slices, 50 ml olive oil

30 ml raspberry vinegar, 1/2 lemon zest + juice

1/4 tsp cumin, 1/4 tsp piment d'espelette, salt and pepper

Cook the lentils with the bay leaf until done, drain.

Cut the stems off the chard and in 1 cm pieces. Take the inner stem off the leaves and discard. Chop the leaves in 2 cm wide bands.

In a medium pan heat up the olive oil and toss in the almonds first. Give them 3 min, add chopped onion and garlic. Sautee 3 min and now in with cumin, piment d'espelette, salt and pepper.

The chard stems follow now. Zest the lemon, add capers and raspberry vinegar and finish cooking. Set aside to cool down a bit.

In a bowl add chard, lentils, chopped tomatoes and fresh herbs. Break the feta in small chunks and add to the bowl. Finish with the mix from the pan. Toss the salad and check the salt level.

If you use capers in salt, wash them. But they are still saltier than the capers in vinegar.

Let the salad sit for 20 min before serving.

Harvest season behind the house has started.