Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Chickpea salad


Another one in the series 'damn quick and easy'.
Heat olive oil in a pan, add one sliced red onion and cook, stirring, over a medium heat for 6-8 minutes until soft. Add 2 garlic cloves, one chili and fry for another minute. Tip in one can of chickpeas and stir. Squeeze over lemon juice and add plenty of flat leaf parsley.

Remove from heat, crumble over Greek feta cheese and toss well.

... from Gordon Ramsay's 'Healthy Appetite'. I don't own this book, which was apparantly written by Ramsey's side-kick Sarge. Ramsey only wrote the intro and branded the book with his name.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Stewed hijiki seaweed with carrots and soy beans


Preparation:
1) Soak 200 gram of soy beans overnight. Cook the soy beans until soft and rub the skins off, this can be pretty time consuming. Instead of soy beans you can also use fried tofu.

2) Reconstitute some dried hijiki sea weed

3) Cut 2 large carrots in thin strips.

Cooking:
Fry and simmer the soy beans, hijiki and carrots in sesame oil for 5 to 10 minutes.

Add: 250 ml dashi stock, 3 tbsp dark soy sauce and 3 tbsp of mirin. If you have, add 3 tbsp of sake as well. Many recipes call for sugar, I omitted the sugar (and sake).

Simmer until the liquid has reduced.

This dish is nice with Japanese rice and miso soup. The taste was a little bland, use more soy sauce for a saltier taste.