A Healthier Potato Salad and Cheesecake

Both recipes inspired by Petite Kitchen 

Potato Salad:
3 large potatoes of choice
1 small-medium cucumber
2-3 medium gherkins/pickles (chopped small)
A handful of dried blackcurrants
1/2 cup of raw pistachios (chopped small)
A large handful of fresh mint (roughly chopped)
Juice of one lemon
4 tbsp natural yoghurt
a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Pepper

Scrub potatoes well then cut in to small cubes. Place in a large saucepan, cover with salted water and bring to the boil. Then simmer, uncovered until just cooked. Be careful not to overcook!

When ready, strain potatoes and set aside to cool.

Once cooled, combine and toss all ingredients in a large bowl.

Cheesecake: 
6 free-range eggs
1 cup natural yoghurt
1 cup of mascarpone cheese
1/4 cup of honey or maple syrup
1/4 cup of almond meal/almond powder
juice of half a lemon
1 tsp vanilla essence

Topping:
Note: alternatively, you can use 100% store-bought fruit jam. 
1 cup of fresh or frozen strawberries
2 tbsp honey
1/4 cup of water

Decoration:
Silvered almonds and flowers

Preheat oven to 180C

Grease a round cake tin then line with baking paper -grease that a little bit too.

Combine all cake ingredients in a food processor and blitz until combined. Since my blender couldn’t fit/handle all the ingredients at once, I managed this part by blending in batches at a time.

Pour batter into a cake tin and bake for about 45-50 min or until set. Note: batter will be very runny, this is normal.

Keep a good eye on the prize, if the top starts prematurely browning because your oven is shit like mine, use a sheet of tin foil to cover the top.

As your cake bakes, add all topping ingredients to a saucepan, bring to the boil then simmer until juicy and thick- set aside to cool.

Once both topping and cake have cooled, bring the two together in the most perfect union using the back of a tablespoon..

Decorate with silvered almonds and small flowers. Last but definitely not least, Instagram it.

A big shout out to Daniel and Mariko for having me over, listening to all my Japan problems and giving me kind brotherly and sisterly advice and my tummy, vegetarian gyoza and perfectly cooked brown rice!

People Who Love To Eat Are Always The Best People

“People who love to eat are always the best people.”

“In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.”

“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”

“A party without cake is just a meeting”

“You don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.”

“Bon Appétit”

-Julia Child

From left to right: kale and spinach salad with boiled quail eggs and yuzu peel, sweet potato frittata, potato and venison in tomato sauce and last but not least, braised cabbage with cumin. Top centre is home-made mustard mayonnaise. Oh my goodness. If Julia were there, she’d have loved it.

Fried little fishes, that were scary at first but turned out to be super oishi (delicious) and fried sunchokes aka Israeli artichokes.

My favourite dish of the night! Parsley crumbed fresh sardines. Oh mama mia!

Persian stuffed peppers (dolmeh felfel)

As promised, more Middle Eastern style food.

Last night we ate Middle Eastern food. I made (anticlockwise), Persian stuffed peppers, curried couscous salad, hummus, babaganoush, and a garden salad with avocado and artichoke. Chips. Artichoke chips, sliced thin, rubbed between paper towels to drain excess liquid and baked, on high (no oil no seasoning just as is) in my toaster oven. So delicious! The small orange bowl is Indian-style pickled/chutnied yuzu (a Japanese citrus) made by Shogo-san.

Also, Lifa, my Israeli friend said my hummus was world-class which means I don’t need any more compliments for at least a year. Okay, go ahead, one more won’t hurt. For dessert, we had Persian Wife Cake. Which is basically a baklavaesque cake that I assigned a silly name.

The original Persian dolmeh is made by stuffing grape leaves but we also make them by filling eggplants, tomatoes, pumpkins and bell peppers. Dolmeh is delicious because it’s packed with so much flavor. As in literally. Packed to the rim with herbs and spices. Here is the recipe I used. If you’re vegetarian or vegan all you have to do is swap the mince for lentils and you’re all set. Enjoy!

2015 ended on a BANG: chickpea chocolate cake

I spent New Year’s eve and day at the Charles residence and it was magical. Seriously. Never in a trillion years would I have ever imagined that I’d be in Japan, not skyrise-Tokyo-Japan but the tiniest village in the middle of nowhere Japan where there are bears, snakes and BOARS celebrating the New Year by eating legit FRENCH food from the best French chef in the world. Never. How do these things happen?! God, from the bottom of my heart, thank you!

First, cheese souffle. Next, French onion soup with homemade bread. Then, salad, two kinds. After, goat’s cheese, broccoli, pine-nut and raisin tart. Last but not least, Chef Olivier ended on a BANG with chickpea and chocolate cake; super délicieux!

Chickpea salad:
Chickpeas from a can (drained and rinsed)
Cherry tomatoes (quartered)
Italian parsley (torn)
Dressed in a little olive oil, salt and pepper.

Green salad:
Lettuce (cut med-small with scissors)
Avocado (diced)
Raw walnuts
Dressed in a little olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Chickpea chocolate cake (From Nigella Lawson)
1 tin garbanzo beans
0.6 cups orange juice
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sugar (or honey)
0.6 cups unsweetened cocoa
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda

Blend the garbanzo beans until smooth in a blender or food processor, and mix in all the rest of the ingredients until blended.

Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.

On NY day, we ate fresh eggs on fresh bread, walked in snow, had Japanese nabe for lunch and more cake.

New Year’s Resolution nombre un: eat more French food.

Food News (unintentional discoveries and Japanese Nabe)

Are you tired of cooking the same shizz everyday?

Are you dying to spice up (excuse the culinary pun) your boring dishes?

(This is not an advertisement)

Because Chef Anisa has accidently (no relation to blog name) discovered the resolution.

Are you ready?

Simply continue putting off your grocery shopping until your fridge and pantry are not far from vacant. Then, you’ve no choice but to improvise flavors and… TADA! Hello new tastes.

This morning, I had peanut butter and KIWIFRUIT (not banana) on defrosted toast for breakfast. Is this a thing? Have you already tried it? Or have I, in first-world-problems food shortage, unintentionally stumbled across genius? Kiwi-fruit and peanut-butter is INSANE.

Anywho, I wanted to talk about Nabe or Nabemono.

Nabemono (鍋物, なべ物, nabe “cooking pot” + mono “thing or things, object, matter”) or simply called nabe, refers to a variety of Japanese hot pot dishes, also known as one pot dishes and “things in a pot.”

Thanks, Wikipedia.

After hearing my students increasingly talk of having a “nabe party” (apparently the thing to do during a Japanese winter), I was itching (or should I say, shivering hahoehah, I know I’m hilarious) to try nabe, myself. So, last night, I kind of invited myself to Kaori’s for dinner – I’m good like that. She made kimchi nabe which is basically a kimchi-flavoured soup stuffed with loads of ingredients, ingredients which continue to be stuffed into the soup while the already cooked ones are hunted and eaten. It’s a glorious cycle really.

The nabe or pot is placed on a portable stove which is placed on a kotatsu (a low, wooden table frame covered by a futon, or heavy blanket, upon which a table top sits. Underneath is a heat source, often built into the table itself) around which the dinner guests are seated. In other words, as the night progresses, you heat up in every possible way.

After eating for what seems forever, the left-over nabe is mixed with rice and egg and turned into a porridge – often eaten for breakfast the next day.

Are you salivating yet? I’m hungry all over again and I just ate that magical kiwi-fruit and peanut-butter concoction.

The secret ingredient is TIME

To me, the tastiest foods are those prepared by hand with love and TIME.

This green salad with the pretty edible flowers was prepared by Gergely, a Hungarian organic farmer now living in my very rural village of Higashiawakura (Japan) with his beautiful Japanese wife Ryoko and their sweet sweet girl Viola. Everything in it is natural and organic.

Two types of curry (and handmade naan) prepared by two very cool parents Taka and Kaori (Tokyoites now residing in the countryside). One, a traditional Khmer curry called amok – the spices for which I brought back as omiyage (souvenir) from Cambodia and the other, butter chicken.

Minako said she’d prepare a “light” meal for us but she ended up serving pumpkin soup (just pumpkin and herbs), sautéed mix veg, sautéed potatoes, organic bread, brown rice, home-made salsa, cheese and crackers. I hope her husband goes away more often so I can be invited over for more “light” dinners.

There is something so cosy and welcoming about a picnic. Here, it was the crumbed carrots and courgettes calling my name. “Anisa, Anisa, eat me,” they said. If you look to the left,  you can see half of an upside down apple and sweet potato frying pan cake and to the top of the photograph, a variety of onigiri (triangular rice balls) invented for picnicking. And of course, salad. That day we harvested organic rice by hand. It was incredible.

We (Kaori, her baby Emma and I) stayed at Kaori’s parents house in Nara (photos 2 posts back) over the weekend. Her mother lovingly prepared this delicious make-your-own temaki sushi bar for us. Kind of like a Mexican taco bar but with seaweed and seafood. She also served clam miso soup. Oishikata! 

Breakfast was just as adorable. We had fresh persimmons with yoghurt and raisins, boiled broccoli and edamame beans (from the local farmers market), egg, cherry tomatoes (from Kaori’s garden back in Higashiawakura) and typical Japanese bakery bread.

Another salad by Gergely. This time, topped with boiled quail eggs, carrots and walnuts. Again, all organic.

japanese people peel everything

Fun fact (Jap edition): Japanese people peel everything. Seriously; apples, pears, peaches, FIGS, GRAPES. ALL THE FRUITS.

Do you know how hard peeling grapes is? Borderline impossible.

So, as you can imagine, things didn’t go down too well when I told my Japanese friends I can eat an entire apple, stalk and all. Tehehe I accidently….

Okay, but in their defense, most Japanese fruit are gigantic. For example, the apples are the size of my dad’s head and their grapes the size of golf balls. And, I hear they have massive pears, too (I’m holding out for those). Oh, and since this post is all over the place and I’ve already gone on a tangent, let me quickly just say, I’ve literally been spotting hundreds of premature figs, persimmons and kiwi-fruits everywhere – the anticipation is killing me!

Anyways, since I don’t have any relevant fruity snaps for this post, please visually feast on the following photographs of my recent dinner parties, instead:

PS: if you’d like the recipe for anything just ask meeee