Bento n°15: Red Bean Rice & Teriyaki Salmon
Feb0
Exams are finally over!!
I can’t believe that I’m still alive :p I have shadows under the eyes the size of apples, my stove hasn’t been used in two weeks and my cat is deliberately ignoring me because he didn’t get any attention for some time now… But the first thing I did when everything was over was shopping fresh ingredients and making a nice bento which I had for lunch. What a treat after a fortnight of processed foods and salad
Contents of this bento:
- Red bean rice with sesame seeds
- Tamagoyaki
- Snowpeas
- Teriyaki fried Salmon
Verdict:
The bento was quite nice, I enjoyed the red bean rice the most, however next time I’ll have to be more careful with the amount of liquid I put into the rice cooker. With the cooking liquid from the red beans and the soy sauce there was slightly too much, so the rice was a tad on the mushy side (which I hate but my husband likes so that was ok).
Nothing special about the salmon beside that I didn’t like the taste of the Teriyaki sauce. Last time I went to the Japanese shop around here I bought one from Kikkoman, which I had great expectations for which unfortunately were not met. I think I’m going back to making it on my own next time.
Snow-peas were a little bland (think I’m going to add some chili flakes or soy sauce next time). The tamagoyaki on the other hand turned out really well. I’m happy about that one because I managed to make it in a round pan. So far I’ve bought three rectangular frying pans. Yes, three (unfortunately from the same brand because of a lack of choice), and after the first use the non-stick coating of the pans always stopped working (and I didn’t use anything but a plastic spatula inside it). During the second use the egg started to stick so badly that I couldn’t even have gotten it off with a shovel. That means back to good old round pan and it worked!
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Red Bean Rice
Ingredients
- 2 cups of uncooked Japanese rice
- 1/2 - 1 cup of cooked red beans with two Tbsp of the red water they cooked in (you can use canned beans as well or you can precook the beans on the weekend and just use them for this recipe during the week)
- 2 Tbsp of soy sauce
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- Wash the rice according to these instructions and put it in your rice cooker. Add the red bean water to it and the soy sauce. Now fill the pot with water until you reach the usual liquid mark for 2 cups.
- Turn the rice cooker on and proceed as usual.
- When done, serve with toasted sesame seeds for example. Serves 2.
Maple Glazed Salmon on Vegetable Pasta
Nov0
When my mother in law returned from Canada she brought back the most amazing maple syrup. You could literally drink it with a straw the whole day and you wouldn’t get tired of it. Apparently there is a great difference between store-bought maple syrup that we can find in local supermarkets and real maple syrup which is produced traditionally in smaller quantities. The difference is as striking as comparing Blue Nun to an expensive Cabernet Sauvignon (I was told).
Well this maple syrup does taste amazing and I’m actually trying to use it in savory dishes because I’d very much like to get away from the habit of drowning pancakes in maple syrup and only using it for desserts. I was actually inspired by a cookbook from Canada which describes how to marinate fish or any other type of meat with maple syrup before cooking it.
When I tried those recipes I wasn’t all that satisfied because you couldn’t really taste the maple syrup (there were other flavours in the marinade which were simply too strong, like Dijon mustard). So I decided to use the syrup with a neutral soy sauce to create a glaze on the fish. My husband was amazed by the subtle taste of maple syrup on the salmon. The combination with soy sauce made this quite a yummy take on teriyaki. And the best is: the whole dish, whilst looking quite sophisticated etc, was done in less than 25 minutes!
Ingredients
- 2 pieces of salmon (can be frozen)
- 3 Tbsp of soy sauce
- 1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
- 1 zucchini
- 2 carrots
- 5-6 cherry tomatoes
- salt, pepper
- vegetable oil
Preparation
- Wash the carrots, zucchini and the tomatoes. Peel the carrots. Using a vegetable peeler, slice the carrots and the zucchini in thin stripes (like large pasta). Cut the cherry tomatoes in a half.
- Mix the soy sauce and the maple syrup in a bowl. Stir to dissolve the syrup completely.
- In a pan, heat up a Tbsp of vegetable oil. Once the oil is hot, turn the heat to medium and put the salmon in the pan. When the fish is about half cooked, turn it.
- Heat up another Tbsp of vegetable oil in a second pan. Put the vegetables (beside the tomatoes) in there and let them cook on medium-low heat.
- When the salmon is just about cooked, add the soy/maple mixture and turn up the heat a little. Let the fish cook in the liquid (tilt the pan a little if needed) and using a spoon keep pouring the liquid over the fish. Towards the end, when the liquid has almost evaporated, turn the fish another time and continue cooking it until it has that golden brown/glazed look on both sides (be careful though, the sugar from the syrup burns really fast if there is no liquid left anymore). Remove from heat.
- Toss the vegetables a little and finish cooking them. Add the cherry tomatoes. Season to taste and remove from heat.
- Serve the salmon pieces on a little pile of the vegetable pasta.
Serves 2. Enjoy
Crispy Sea-Bream on Rustic Ratatouille
Oct0
It’s the second day of my Gordon Ramsay test cooking. As I posted yesterday, I’m going to try out three recipes from the cookbook “Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy
I was particularly intrigued by this dish because of the Ratatouille. As you might have read already, I’m living and studying in Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful town in the heart of the Provence region, about 30 kilometers away from Marseille. If there is one dish from Provence that almost everyone knows, it’s Ratatouille. This vegetable stew originated in Nice but it is eaten almost everywhere in France.
(One of Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St. Victoire, the mountain that
reigns over Aix-en-Provence. The famous painter was born in Aix.)
About the dish itself: I loved the combination of Ratatouille and fish. The dish felt very light and it was relatively easy to make. The only criticism I have is for the Ratatouille itself. In the recipe the vegetables are cooked very shortly (about 5-7 minutes) which is good if you want to keep the vegetables a little crunchy, but which isn’t so great if you leave the skin on the aubergines. Of course it probably depends on what kind of aubergine (eggplant) you use, but the one I used had a quite thick skin and when the dish was done it was hard to chew the aubergine pieces. Apart from that I might add a little tomato purée the next time but that’s optional.
(The recipe is adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s cookbook “G.R. Makes it Easy”)
Ingredients
For the rustic ratatouille:
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
- 1 tomato
- 1 yellow pepper (or 1/2 red pepper and 1/2 yellow pepper)
- 1 courgette
- 1/2 aubergine
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 1 handful of basil leaves, roughly chopped
- 1 tsp of balsamic vinegar
- salt and pepper
For the fish:
- 2 nice sea-bream fillets (buy them fresh with the skin on)
- 2 Tbsp of olive oil
- salt and pepper
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Preparation
- Wash and cut the tomatoes in quarters. With a sharp knife slide along the flesh to deseed them. Finely chop the flesh.
- Wash and deseed the pepper(s). Cut them in 1cm dice.
- Wash and cut the courgette in 1 cm thick dice.
- Wash the aubergine and cut it into 1 cm dice. If the skin is very thick rather remove it.
- Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Wait until it’s hot.
- Cook the garlic and the onions (on medium heat) in the pan for approximately 2 minutes until they are soft.
- Add all the vegetables to the pan and cook everything for about 5 minutes while stirring every now and then.
- Add the basil and the vinegar, season to taste.
- Remove the ratatouille from the heat and keep it warm.
- Clean the bream fillets, be careful to remove all scales and with your finger drive along the line in the middle of the fillets. If you feel any bones, remove them with a pincher.
- Lay the fish on your cutting board, skin-side up. With your hand squeeze the fillet together a little so the skin gets stretched. Now cut into the skin leavin less than a cm of space between each cut. Salt the fish on the skin side and be careful to put salt inside every of the “lamelles” you created.
- Heat the olive oil in a non stick frying pan.
- Once hot (and really let it get piping hot first) put the fillets in the frying pan, skin side down.
- Let the fish cook like that on medium-high heat and don’t touch it. Give it time until 2/3rd of the fish is cooked. (3-4 minutes)
- Turn the fish once, letting it cook for about a minute on the other side (check if it’s done completely).
- When it’s done, turn it around on the skin side and remove the pan from the heat.
- Put half of the ratatouille on a plate and put the fish on top, skin-side up.
Serves 2, enjoy
