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Okra Salad

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fresh okra dressed with a simple soy and yuzu sauce for breakfast.This okra salad is so simple, it doesn’t even count as a recipe. I wanted to use up the handful of okra we got from our CSA box last week and I didn’t want to do a whole lot of cooking. For breakfast, I washed the okra, dropped it into a pan of water, brought it up to a boil, and let it boil for 1-2 minutes. Then I rinsed and drained the okra in cold water and cut it into rough 1/4 inch slices.

I ran out of ponzu, so I just made my own with some rice vinegar, bottled yuzu juice, and splash of soy sauce. To give the dressing a little more of a kick, I mixed in a small dab of yuzu kusho (pepper paste). I poured the dressing onto the chopped okra, gave it a little toss and that was it.

The yuzu flavor really gave the okra a citrusy, refreshing taste without masking the sweet flavor of the fresh okra.

Mother’s Day Dinner

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Mothers Day Dinner

My mom always cooks dinner for us when I visit home, so on Mother’s Day, I told her to take it easy because we would be the ones cooking for her.

I found some baby broccolini at the Farmer’s Market that day. I had never cooked it before, but regular broccolini is usually cooked with some olive oil, salt, garlic, and chili pepper, so why not just cook the baby version like that too? Even though I par-boiled them for a few minutes before throwing them in a hot pan to saute, they were still really tough. Maybe I was supposed to snap off the tough ends? The weird thing is, some of the smaller pieces that I thought would be tender, were tougher than the larger pieces.

I don’t know if my mom was just being nice, but she said this was her favorite dish. I was surprised, since it’s something new to both of us, but she does like vegetables.

Mothers Day Dinner

Along with the baby broccolini, we also made a baked ziti (vegan and not shown), a warm carrot salad (by the BF), mixed greens salad with tangerines (my grampa’s favorite), and scrambled eggs with fresh morels. Even though it’s not the type of food my parents usually eat for dinner, I think they liked it judging by how little was leftover.

A quick almost-no-cook dinner

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Dinner ingredients

I was already starving while driving on the way home from work, so I wanted to make a quick dinner. I stopped by Mitsuwa and picked up some rice vinegar (we had run out at home), baby cucumbers, natto (with grated radish and braised enoki mushrooms), kimchi, and marinated mackerel.

I thinly sliced the baby cucumbers and mixed them with a bit of rice vinegar and salt. I learned from one of the sushi chefs at my usual lunch spot to use my hand to slightly squeeze the slices of cucumber while mixing it around to have it absorb more flavor.

The mackerel was easy and tasty. I think Mitsuwa used a miso marinade for the fish. I just plopped it onto a pan and seared for about a minute and a half on each side. I think I may have had the heat on too high because the outside was a bit charred, but it still tasted fine.

Dinner

The whole dinner took me less than half an hour to make and clean-up was minimal. I even have some fish and cucumber salad leftover for lunch tomorrow.