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The most satisfying recipe for that simple and hearty Manchego farmer treat, the pisto.
- Sautee crushed garlic in olive oil.
- Add chopped onions, red bell peppers and tomatoes.
- Season with salt, black and red pepper.
- Serve on top of slices rustic bread, topped with fried bacon dices and fried egg.
ussians eat a lot of cereals: some kind of porridge is a common breakfast. Proso millet is one of those. It is reckoned to one of the oldest cultivated grain in Eurasia due to it drought-resistance.
Eaten for breakfast proso, or pshyonka in colloquial Russian, is boiled in water or milk and eaten with milk or butter. It can also be made into a savoury dish. The best way to make it is to fry it first in butter until it starts giving out a characteristic nutty smell and then boil it in water and add stir-fried mushrooms and vegetables: onions, carrots, pumpkin.
As has been the case with many poor man's staples, proso has recently been rediscovered as health food. It turns out that it is gluten-free and rich in microelements. It contains as much protein as wheat, about 11% by weight.
Proso flakes are sold in Russian supermarkets for busy people. You can only use them as breakfast cereal because in savoury dishes proso needs to retain its grainy texture.
t is amazing how many ways there are to start a day. And of course I'm talking food, not sex or meditation. I am forever indebted to the French: coffee and croissant provide both kick and indulgence. Once in a blue moon I allow myself a guilty pleasure of full English. Quite often I get a craving for natto, misoshiru or or ochazuke. When I have enough time, I fix myself a heart-warming congee with mushrooms and seaweed. When I get in the rut with muesli and yoghurt, it is time to try something new. After all breakfast means "breaking the fast", returning from slumberful abstinence to the world of palate pleasures.
This time I was inspired by a blog about Syrian food. Mamouniyeh or mamounia (مامونية) is a breakfast cereal common in Aleppo in the North of the country. It is very easy to cook.
- Melt a knob of butter in a pan, scoop out the froth. This is how you get ghee that this recipe calls for but may be hard to come by in our area.
- Gently roast 2 tbsp pine nuts until golden brown. Scoop them out and put on a plate.
- In the same butter fry half a cup of coarse semolina on small fire for about 3-5 minutes.
- Add four cups of water and 4-6 tbsp sugar. Let boil until thickens constantly stirring.
- Serve with the roasted pine nuts, grilled Halloumi cheese and, if so wish, a sprinkle of cinnamon.
ice with seaweed and egg?" Marina flinches back, half in astonishment, half in politely hidden disgust. This lovely Russian girl is displaying surefire symptoms of an early gastritis, so I have made her congee or okayu （おかゆ） - a watery rice gruel reinforced with a beaten egg and some shredded kelp for nutrition. This is what is given to children and sick people in Pacific Rim Asia from Japan to Indonesia. But for Marina this is a sacrilege. The Russian rice kasha she is more used to is made with milk, sugar and butter, a far cry from my low-calorie savoury concoction.
Variations of this breakfast gruel are encountered wherever rice is a dietary staple. It is more on the watery side in China, flavoured with fish sauce in Thailand, rather bland in Korea, made with coconut milk in South India. In Singapore I had it with frog meat, in Hong Kong with a thousand-year egg. The recipe below features in my breakfast at least a couple of times every week.
So here how it goes.
- Rinse a handful of rice in running water. Add half a handful of shredded kombu, whatever dried mushrooms you have (torn in small pieces) and 6-8 cups of water. If you have some cooked rice leftovers, use those without rinsing.
- Bring the pot to a boil, reduce fire and simmer until it reaches the porridge texture.
- Add a beaten egg and a handful of green leafy vegetables.
- Once cooked, flavour with fish sauce or shoyu, garlic powder and finely chopped ginger.
atto is the food that the Japanese give foreigners to have fun seeing their disgusted faces. "Wa-ha-ha-ha, you canto eato Japanizu foodo!" Smelly, sticky and stringy, it looks like half-rotten eggs of an alien spider. In fact, natto (pronounced nut-toe) is half-rotten soya beans and is only popular with about half the population of Japan. The other half hate it just as much as most foreigners.
My first encounter with it was when I saw my Argentinian Nisei friend Patricia having it for breakfast. She opened a small styrofoam pack, squeezed mustard and tare sauce from the attached weeny bags, mixed it all in and tipped it on top of a bowl of rice. That and green tea started her day. I had only heard that natto is gross stuff (that's accepted public opinion in Osaka where we were at the time) so I made fun of Patricia.
However, when I tried natto myself, it turned out quite nice: nutty and somewhat reminiscent of strong cheese. With the extra zing of mustard or negi it actually tastes great.
Later I found out that natto is packed with scientifically proven health-promoting substances preventing a range of medical conditions from thrombosis, baldness and obesity to cancer, osteoporosis and Altzheimer's.
Natto is cheap and available from most Japanese food shops abroad. In London it costs me £1.19 for a pack of four.
here is no going about it: the base ingredient for this soup, miso paste, looks dodgy. Real dodgy. It is made from fermented beans and ground rice and it only takes a tablespoonful for a bowl of delicately aromatic broth.
A Japanese staple on par with European toasted bread, miso shiru is soup that can be served with any meal.
It is hard to call this cooking but here is the recipe anyway:
- Put a 5-6 cm piece of kombu into a pot with cold water and put the pot on medium fire.
- When the water is close to boiling take out the kombu. Let the water boil and reduce the heat.
- You can also skip steps 1 and 2 by simply adding katsuobushi extract to boiling water. Alternatively, use water wherein dried shiitake mushrooms were soaking overnight.
- Scoop miso paste (about 1 tbsp per cup of water) and mix it with a cup of hot stock. Make sure there are no clumps left.
- Pour the mix back into the pot. Turn off the heat.
- When you add make sure there is not more one strong-tasting (negi) and one mild-tasting (tofu, daikon, wakame) ingredient. Also one should be sinking and the other should be floating. Cluttering your miso soup with too many is against Japanese aesthetics.
Well, this is entirely my own enhanced version of the highly popular huevos rancheros. First I sauté smoked bacon and chopped red onions in olive oil. This is followed by a dash of aceto balsamico bianco, a glug of oyster sauce and a generous grind of black pepper - these tastes should be incorporated into the oils and juices that later will spread across the dish.
Then I add chopped bell pepper, garden eggs, okra and tomatoes. When all the veggies are still crunchy there go 3 free-range eggs. It comes out smoky, peppery, filled with the flavours of all the veggies.
For a complete breakfast: a cup of hot coffee, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice (spremuta) and some whole grain bread with sunflower seeds.
very national cuisine has great ways to deal with yesterday's leftovers. In Italy they top pizza, the British "devil" them, in Japan cold rice is made into a flavourful breakfast called chazuke, or to sound daintier, o-chazuke.
esterday I was rummaging the shelves of an ethnic grocer in West Norwood. Some object to using the word 'ethnic' but how else can you describe a store that carries Indian, Middle Eastern, African and Caribbean food. I call this kind of shops "serendipity outlets": they always have something amazing in store for you.
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