Recipes on Nanikore

Recipe: Gazpacho Soup

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:58:08 +0000

As it’s probably been noted - it gets pretty hot in most of Japan in the summer, so what could be better than a nice bowl of chilled soup? Over the years I’ve come to quite like gazpacho soup, made famous to my generation in the UK from the comedy ‘Red Dwarf’, where the character Rimmer ruins his career by asking the chef to ‘heat it up’ whilst at the captain’s table. So then here is a recipe for gazpacho soup. The soup itself is Spanish in origin, so you can expect a lot of juicy ripe fruit in there.

Anyway, I’ve digressed already, this soup is prepared chilled from fresh ingredients, and should be chilled in a fridge before serving - it tastes very good after being chilled overnight. To make it, you really just need that fridge, some ingredients, and a blender. One thing I like about Gazpacho soup is that it’s difficult to say it’s wrong since there are so many permutations of it based on local recipes (a bit like Miso Shiru!).

For mine I get the following ingredients and roughly chop them into a bowl - this should make 6+ servings:

500g chopped Italian tomatoes
300g of bell peppers
200g of cucumber
juice of 1 lemon
50g of celery
5 cloves of garlic
100g of red onion
30g parsley
pinch of oregano

That goes into (and essentially fills) my blender! Give it a whirl around a bit until it’s broken down a bit, then add:

100g virgin olive oil

after a bit more time you can add some of the following to taste:

salt
pepper
balsamic vinegar
pepper sauce

You can really blend it as far as you like - I’ve tried leaving some more chunks in there, and I’ve tried taking it all the way down to a thick liquid, and it tastes good most ways, so you can’t really over blend it. You can also add some ingredients at the end just diced if you prefer.

Variations

There’s lots of ways you can do Gazpacho, adding a few things - I quite like adding a few olives, or sometimes a piman (a smaller Japanese non-spicy pepper) from my mini-garden. I’ve done some with several drops of Tabasco and it’s actually ended up really quite good for accompanying a BBQ, with that added spice and a drink. If you want it less spicy, you could add some cold boiled potato which would also thicken it up.

Also, if you don’t think you’ve got enough liquid in there after a minute or so of blending, you can add some tomato puree or juice.

Please post good variations in the comments!

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Kirsty Girl — 2011-07-27

This looks really good. Methinks I will be making this for lunch tomorrow.

gurahamu — 2011-07-28

It’s fairly quick n easy to make (just that principle chopping time) and if you have a small garden, you can make use of veg from there, which can be nice.

Recipe - Chicken Kiev

Sun, 15 May 2011 12:52:13 +0000

I’ve always liked chicken Kiev, though usually it’s been in a restaurant, or from a pre-made one back when I lived in the UK. I like the idea (garlic butter in a bread crumbed chicken breast) so I thought I’d have a go at a recipe for Chicken Kiev myself, from (almost) first principles.

I looked around and found quite a few recipes, but in the end they morphed something of my own. Some suggested deeper frying in corn oil which didn’t appeal to me, so I went for a more oven based approach with olive oil.

This was for two adults and a child. So then, the most important part:

485g of chicken (2 breasts)
1 egg
2 tblspn of flour
chicken filling: 1 tblspn of lemon juice
2 large cloves of garlic, chopped
~100g of butter salt and pepper
‘herbs’ - I used some parsley from the garden but tarragon seems popular
breadcrumbs - 100g from 3 slices of rye bread - dried a bit then blended (with no crusts in there!)

Oven: pre-heat to 200C

Prepare the chicken by cutting along the thickest part of the chicken breast to form a pocket as large as possible - you may even want to remove some of the chicken for this (I didn’t though).

Get all your filling together in a large bowl, and mix with a fork until it’s well mixed together, then leave it to sit.

Get three plates or bowls, and put a couple of tablespoons of flour in one, and in the other beat the egg. In the third bowl we want fresh breadcrumbs - get two or three slices of bread, minus the crusts, blend them for a couple of minutes and then put them in the bowl and let then dry a little.

Now stuff the butter/garlic mixture into the pocket - really pack it in there - then drag it in the flour, then the beaten egg, then roll in the breadcrumbs. I then closed the pocket with a couple of wooden skewers to keep as much butter in the chicken as possible.

Heat up a very thin layer of olive oil in a frying pan, and place the chicken in it, turning when it looks browned. Now put all of this (including the olive oil) into the 200C pre heated oven for 18-20mins. We have a handle-less frying pan which we simply placed in the oven, but an oven tray would be fine too.

Then, when the time is up, serve and eat! We had ours with boiled new potatoes and some pickles since it was a hot day - you can use the butter/olive oil in the oven tray as some sauce for the potatoes.

I really enjoyed it, though I’d like to make my own bread for the breadcrumbs too if I had time. The only thing I’d say is that it might be better going for smaller chicken breasts.

If you’re in the mood for something else along similar lines, try ‘ double stuffed pork chicken breasts’, which are delicious too, if something of a meat overload.

January Recommends: Simple Recipes

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:48:32 +0000

In November last year, I had this idea that each month I’d have a post recommending stuff. Different stuff. In November it was free e-books. Then in December… nothing. Yes indeed, a continuous series of one. Well, now, after that December hiatus, here are January’s recommendations: simple recipes. These aren’t high brow items to keep you in the kitchen for hours, just nice, simple, tasty dishes. Spend some time on each website too - good food likes company.

Tomatoes stuffed with guacamole - More of a spring or summer side dish, but I really liked these, perhaps because I love guacamole (though apparently many of my friends don’t - it’s always left over at pot luck gatherings). They make a good addition to a salad or baked potato or such.

High Protein Mashed Potatoes - If you’re looking for something too add to basic mash, or balance those carbs, give this a try - just remember you’ll need fewer potatoes for the whole dish. This was another simple one, using ingredients you likely have around anyway.

Houjicha Cheesecake -I have a real liking for cheesecake, and so when I saw this recipe I thought I’d give it a try. Houjicha is basically roasted green tea leaves, and this recipe uses them to get a nice smooth flavour. I went with a basic, thin pastry.

Chicken Skewers and Cashew Nut Satay - this is on the Hairy Biker’s website, which is one I recommend everyone have a click around on. This made a great BBQ dish as well as on a grill; the satay sauce was particularly nice.

I could also plug a couple of my own simple recipes - miso shiru or tsukune - and why not. Also, take a look at CookingInJapan for some other tasty dishes - all very healthy.

Recipe: Tsukune

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 01:48:49 +0000

Just like the recipe I put up before for misoshiru, I’m playing safe with another Japanese dish in that there are lots of different versions, so no-one can say I’m definitively wrong so this is a recipe for tsukune.

Tsukune is essentially a chicken ‘meatball’, often cooked over a flame or hot coals in restaurants - especially in yakitoriya. I quite like tsukun e so I thought I’d cook my own a bit more over the summer since they’re great over BBQ, and they’re really simple.

Ingredients:

400g of fresh chicken breast (no skin!)

~5g of fresh garlic (1 clove)

75g of diced fresh onion

1 tablespoon of olive oil

a little Tabasco sauce

a little soy sauce (usukuchi)

salt and black pepper

some tare sauce

some small wooden skewer/kebab sticks

a blender

The Making Bit

First, chop up all the chicken into chunks into a bowl, then add the olive oil, Tabasco, soy sauce , salt and pepper and stir it up to get it all well mixed in and whilst it’s sitting, dice up the onion and garlic quite finely, and add that to the chicken, stirring it in well.You can let it sit a bit now, and put your skewers into water, which should reduce the amount they burn later on.

Next, get your blender / food processor ready. In all honesty, you can just keep chopping the chicken and other ingredients up to get the consistency you want, but the blender is going to save you time - however, we’re aiming for a meatball type consistency, not a paste! Put everything in and work it through - chicken is quite fibrous, so you need to make sure you’ve got all the large chunks cut down. The onion should still be visible.

Once you’re happy it all looks right and consistent, ball it up, with a size of about an inch (~2.5cm) across. The mixture can be sticky, so don’t be afraid to use some flour to keep them from sticking to the plate and everything else, and keep your fingers wet when picking the mixture up.

Then simply place a few on each skewer and we’re ready to cook. When we aren’t having a BBQ, I tend to use our ridged Le Creuset skillet, but you can also grill them. Once they’re cooked through you can server them with a tare sauce.

As an option, you can put some fresh parsley or other herbs into the mixture, and cook with a little olive oil. you can also serve with some sliced lemon between each ball.

If anyone has any suggestions - please put them in the comments.

Recipe: Miso Shiru

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:22:51 +0000

I just thought I’d post on a little bit of simple cooking for a change, and something fairly synonymous with Japan - miso shiru. This is one of the recipes I’ve kind of worked along with of late - a carrot and daikon vegetable one.

I’m a big fan of soups generally, growing up with Scotch broth and chunky vegetable soups in the UK, so I tend to go a little heavier in this recipe than others.

Ingredients:
1 litre of water
150g of daikon
80g of carrots
100g of miso/dashi paste
135g of kinu tofu
Some Worcester sauce
Some wakame (type of seaweed)

Cooking time: 20-30mins. (to whatever). Makes 4-5 bowls worth.

First off, get the water boiling in a decent sized pan. Add the carrots and daikon to this. I tend to leave the vegetables chunky - about 1cm+ on a side - and since carrots and daikon are fairly hard, you want to soften them up a little before adding the rest of the ingredients.

This is when I usually add a few drops of Worcester sauce, which some people don’t go for, but I find it a bit more subtle than soy or bare salt, but still adding something to the background flavour.

Once the vegetables have softened up a little I take it off the boil, then slowly stir in the miso-dashi paste. I’m lazy - I don’t make my own dashi, and since I’ve seen nice old ladies buying the same stuff I use, it must be legitimate, right? I just don’t have time for boiling up various fish and such. Either way, it tastes pretty good.

Now is a good time to add wakame if that’s your thing, and after a few more minutes, add the tofu, once you’ve sliced that to the size you like. I find it prudent not to cut it too small, especially with kinu tofu, so it’s still easy to retrieve from the bowl when you’re eating, and so that it doesn’t fall to pieces if it’s sat cooking for any period of time.

Keep it going for a few more minutes, by which time the daikon should be cooked and the tofu will be mixed through and then serve in a small bowl.

For those not too familiar, you can usually get two main types of tofu in the supermarkets here - kinu （絹）and momen (木綿) - named after how they’re made, being from silk and cotton sieves respectively. The kinu tofus are a bit smoother, but some prefer the more solid momen variety.

A couple of friends have commented that I use more miso-dashi than they would, and from having had a lot of miso shiru in various restaurants, that’s probably true, so you might want to reduce the amount of miso. The truth is, I like miso. I like miso ramen. I like miso onigiri.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this simple recipe out there but it’s so simple it seems just too obvious. Any tips or family recipes always appreciated.

miso dashi