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With things in the house quieting down and both of us working from home, we have more opportunity to cook. Things that require a lot of time but do not require constant supervision are ideal to cook during work. Things like proofing and baking bread and boiling down chickpeas for hummus can just be started and either be on a timer or you can just check every once in a while.

And we’re converting more and more things to plant-based alternatives. We’re not fully vegetarian, but if there is a vegan alternative that works well for us, we’ll use it. One of those things is toasted shredded tofu. You shred tofu and marinade it in smoked paprika, onion and garlic powder, plus a dash of MSG and a good splash of soy sauce. Then you spread it out on a oven tin and roast it in the oven, basically drying out the flakes. The result is like shredded ham, except vegan!

And we regularly eat okonomiyaki. One of the ingredients is shredded cabbage. I used to buy pre-shredded, until I realised that a whole cabbage is much cheaper and has a higher yield. We have a shredding attachment for the kitchenaid machine, so it’s not that much of a burden to shred the cabbage myself. But there’s always cabbage left. I’ve taken to pickling it, with whatever vegetable we had leftovers for or which is on sale that week. Usually I add a bit of turmeric to turn it into something resembling atjar. But I also like to bake it down with some sliced onion and other vegetables, with a good dollop of gochujang and soy sauce, and really cook that down into a nice spicy vegetable mix.

It’s a lot of work, and I spend more time cooking than I did before, but it is very nice to have these things just available and having made them ourselves. We’ve always done a lot of cooking, but we’re turning more into an “ingredient household” these days.

Here’s what we typically have for lunch: a thick slice of home-made bread, lightly toasted so the outside is crunchy but the inside is soft. We spread home-made hummus on that (so much tastier than store-bought!) and put some grilled vegetables on top of that with some truffle sea salt flakes and a crush of black pepper on top. (We get the grilled veggies in a bag from the freezer at the supermarket!) To that we add a bowl of lettuce that is topped with the shredded tofu flakes, the spicy vegetable mix and the pickled cabbage. We usually top this with home-made mayonnaise too — store-bought is always so sweet, and I put sufficient white pepper in mine to really make the taste pop. We get a mug of soup too, but that’s from a packet, we don’t eat enough soup in one go to make it worthwhile to make our own.

The day the photo was made, we also had some pickled daikon and some pear compote from the pears we got from our neighbour.

I am aware that it’s a kind of privilege that we have the opportunity to cook and eat like this. It works very well for us, I love having this hearty lunch together with my partner, a little pause in the busy day to recharge and regroup.

I made kakiage. I’ve done it before, but it’s quite a lot of work, so usually we just have a (vegan) katsu with our Japanese curry. But carrots were on offer last week, so I got a huge batch. Some of it was used for the bolognese, some I steamed to go into the karreh itself, but still I had quite some left.

I julienned the carrots, cut two onions into pieces and added two packets of ham strips.

I think I added too much flour and maybe the water I used was not cold enough? It was ‘dough-y’.



I filled a pan with sunflower oil and when that was hot enough, I fried them up.

It was apparent that they were indeed, not crispy — and kakiage is supposed to be crispy, not bouncy like these are. At previous attempts, I did not have enough batter and the kakiage disintegrated — but now I had too much and I had stirred too much and the gluten got activated. So that’s something to keep in mind for next time!

But hey: deep fried dough with veggies and ham? You know it’s delicious.



I made a batch of 18. Two of those we ate fresh (couldn’t help ourselves!) but the rest we divided into two batches of 8 pieces each. One of those is now in the freezer. The other we ate today: we reheated/re-fried them in the airfryer, which worked well. They even crisped up a bit, but of course not enough to make it like a ‘real’ kakiage.

We had them with steamed Japanese-style shortgrain rice and a medium hot Japanese curry with onion, carrots and sweet potato.

My mother-in-law is a great cook, and one of our traditions is that she makes a big, intricate meal on December 25th. This year, I had offered to make dessert — so the pressure was on!

When I left my (previous) job in June, my colleagues had, very generously, collected quite a chunk of cash to spend on baking tools. One of the things I bought was the Kit Tarte Ring Fleur — a set of six 8cm tartlet rings and a silicon mold for six flower shapes. I decided that I would use this: a tartlet filled with ganache and topped with strawberry mousse!

In advance, I made the strawberry mousse. I used this recipe, mainly because it is one of the few that doesn’t use gelatin. I dislike gelatin — it is often the only ingredient in a mousse that makes it non-vegetarian, and there is a vegan alternative in the form of agar-agar. But reading the recipe made me angry: why do American recipes use those terrible volumetric measurements? “1 cup of strawberries” — well, how large are your strawberries!? If they’re large, you might be able to fit three in a cup, but if they’re smaller, you’ll pack a lot more in a cup — and thus the amount of strawberry will vary a lot. And I’m used to precise measurements with precise instructions (pastry baking, after all).

And I get it: Americans are burdened with that horrible weight system that is completely un-intuitive. But putting a completely un-intuitive volumetric system on top of that is not going to make things better. You all should just switch to metric and weigh your ingredients. Please. Get with the program.

(The first time I made this recipe, I had too much, so I used these amounts for the second time around: 200 grams of (frozen) strawberries; 40 gr sugar; 190 ml cream, 20 gr powdered sugar; 4 gr agar-agar; 160 gr white chocolate and 35 gr cream.)



Piping the mousse into the mold, shaking vigorously to release all air bubbles. Then it went into the freezer!

The cool thing about these tartlet rings is that they are perforated, and if you use them in combination with one of Sililomart’s air mats, which are perforated as well, you don’t have to bake the tartlet shells “blind”! I used this recipe for the tartlet shells — they use the same tartlet rings in the instructions, so that was certainly convenient. The dough is finnicky though: if it’s too cold, it breaks. But if it’s too warm, it’s sticky. I haven’t gotten the right procedure down yet, but I have some new insights every time I try, to make the next time better.



But overall, I was satisfied with these four.

I whipped up a ganache with bitter-sweet chocolate. It was nice and shiny, but too warm to pipe it into the shells. So I put it into the fridge, and then it was too stiff…



The solution was to pipe the stiff ganache into the shells. Then stick a spoon into a mug of hot water, wipe it off carefully (chocolate and water don’t mix!) and press the back of the hot spoon down on the stiff ganache to soften it and spread it out.



Then it was a question of carefully unmolding the mousse and putting them on top of the ganache.



It looks really nice! I might experiment with those shiny glazes to kick it up a notch, but that’s something for another round.

We had thought it would be really heavy (there is a lot of cream and chocolate in there!) but the crunchy cookie of the shell, the slight bitterness of the ganache and the sweetness of the mousse made for a balanced dessert. I’m going to be making this more often, and maybe experiment with other fruits in the mousse (once I get through the bag of frozen strawberries we have in the freezer right now).

I eat salads for lunch, but just straight lettuce is kinda boring. So I add things to it: tomato, cucumber and grilled bell peppers. I also have a pot of home-pickled red onions in the fridge to add to it. To expand my repertoire, I thought it would be fun to add sprouts to that.

We had a little dish for that, but it was very inconvenient to use. A little search through webshops turned up a set of two glass bottles with caps with a sieve. It comes with a little dish on which they can be placed so that any water can fall out (on the dish) while keeping the seeds in.



The big problem with sprouting is that the sprouts can get mouldy if they stay too moist — but they do need water in order to sprout at all. Using these bottles, I can swish some water around and put ’em downward in order to let the excess water leak out.

You also need to let the sprouts dry out before putting them in a container in the fridge, for the same reason.

It works quite well, and I have established a routine for the watering. I ordered an assortment of sprouting seeds along with the set, and I’m slowly working my way through that.