Pumpkin Rolls

From Tedo’s Kitchen

Tutorial YouTube videos are fascinating especially in the food genre…a black hole of video after video, you could spend hours until your brain is overflowing with information like how to make tiger sushi roll (which I will probably never attempt)…nonetheless mesmerizing, entertaining with catchy music.

My favorites are Chef Devaux, a sushi guy, his technique is amazing! With an English speaking dog (really?) host Cooking with dog is kind of silly but she has I mean they have many followers. I recently discovered Tedo’s Kitchen by accident. I really like his low key closed-caption presentations.

I was busy getting ready to leave for Hawaii, so my husband stepped up to this task of making the rolls. He revised Mr. Tedo’s recipe just slightly. See above link for original YouTube recipe version. There is no English subtitle but it’s not difficult to follow instruction and his dog is darling!

Ingredients and Instruction for 6 rolls (Print Recipe Here)

For dough -

• 300g Bread flour
  
• 5g salt
• 25g dark brown sugar
• 20g white sesame oil
• 150g soy milk
• 20g live natural yeast or dry yeast
• Vegetable oil or butter for greasing muffin tin

For Pumpkin paste -

• 150g pumpkin (kabocha variety) Note: buy smallest kabocha you could find.
• 20g butter
• 20g Kibi sugar (きび砂糖) or other sugar of your choice

For syrup - 

• About 4 Tablespoons powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon water

Black sesame seeds for topping

1. Mix bread flour, salt and brown sugar in a large bowl. Set aside.
2. Heat soy milk to 86F(lukewarm) in a small sauce pan, add yeast and stir, add to the flour mixture then add sesame oil. Mix well and knead until it comes together by hand. Cover with plastic or large lid. Raise to double in size. 1-2 hours.
   
3. While the dough is rising, make the pumpkin paste – put whole pumpkin in a microwave. Microwave for 5-6 minutes on 60% power or until soft. Insert skewer to check doneness. Quarter the pumpkin and remove seeds, skin and reserve about 150g. Mush the pumpkin while it’s hot, add butter, kibi sugar, mix until creamy. If you like smoother paste, strain through fine mesh. Set aside. Note: Mr. Tedo steams the kabocha pumpkin (see the video for more detail).
   
4. When the dough has doubled, roll out to approximately 13x9. Spread the kabocha pumpkin on top leaving about 1/2 inch space on one long end. Roll the dough from opposite long end. Now you have a log.
5. Grease the muffin tin, cut the log in 6ths. Insert each piece in a muffin tin and let raise again.
   
6. Heat oven to 356F. Put in the oven to bake for 25 to 30 minutes.
7. On the center of about a 10x10 sheet of plastic wrap, mix powdered sugar and water. Gather the edges together and twist the top to secure. Poke a hole with toothpick and glaze the just baked rolls.  Sprinkle the sesame seeds on top while the syrup is still wet.

 

Heee! the pic is awful! but I wanted show you my version of pumpkin (left over from above recipe) ‘œuf pudding’ of Quatre. #todayssweets, instagram post.

Killer Kalbi recipe from Jalna’s blog. Her blog is full of charm, laughter and sincerity. My husband and I loved this recipe…tender, juicy and flavor packed (#todaystapas).

The 20 foot tall golden chain tree in our back yard fell taking the roots with it. Our kind neighbor and his son came to help clear the tree limbs. We appreciated their help.

Surprised to find strawberries in the chilly rainy weather…not expecting it to get ripe though, I can’t help cheering them.

The reason that I’m going to Hawaii is to meet this fellow. My daughter delivered him two weeks ago.

 

I’m deeply saddened by an another terrorist attack in Paris. Sorry for your pain and my prayers are with you. Dieu soit avec vous.

Persimmon and Chicken Teriyaki

Recipe adapted from Today’s Cooking

My husband’s co-worker gave us persimmons harvested from her own tree…my favorite, Fuyu variety with no seeds. As child, I would climb on a stone fence and snatch one…maybe two from neighbors. Some persimmon varieties are very astringent and inedible yet I knew the way to remedy the problem – peel the fruit leaving the stem intact then string it to dry in the sun. They turned very sweet…where did you get those? I don’t know why my mother bothered asking the question when she already knew the answer? I’m sure the neighbors would have gladly gave us of the abundance of the fruits since they can’t eat them all but perhaps pretending to be a shinobi (忍び /incognito) girl was thrilling…occasional scratches and bruises were part of the occupational hazard.

I like to eat these like an apple, maybe with cream cheese though,  I would like to venture out for savory dish. Again I’m on the internet, search for savory persimmon recipe. Today’s Cooking caught my interest. Luckily, I have almost everything to make it happen and it seemed very easy. I also love the speedy clean-up at the end of the meal!

Ingredients and Instruction for two servings (Print Recipe Here)

Sauce

• 4 Tablespoons soy sauce or tamari soy sauce
• 4 Tablespoons mirin
• 4 Tablespoons sake
• 2  teaspoons sugar

Other ingredients

• 10-12 green beans, cut both ends off, then cut in half
• 300g boneless chicken thigh (about 2 chicken thighs), cut in one inch cubes.
• 1 Tablespoon flour or cornstarch for gluten free version
• 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 fairly firm persimmons (Fuyu variety recommended), cut in 4ths, peel skin (remove seeds if they have) then slice in 1/2 inch slices so that it will be a triangular shape.
• 1/4 cup shelled walnuts, roughly chopped if they are whole
• Juice from 1 kabosu (かぼす)  Note: I was not able to find this type of citrus, I substituted lime and satsuma orange.

1. Mix sauce ingredients in a measuring cup or small bowl. Set aside
2. Ready ice cold water in a bowl. Blanch green beans in salted (approximately 1 Tablespoon salt to 3 cups of water) boiling water about 1 minute. Drain water then quickly submerge the green beans into the prepared cold water bowl. When the green beans get cold, remove the beans. Set aside.
   
3. Lightly coat chicken with flour or corn starch. Heat oil in large non-stick frying pan at medium heat. Brown chicken until golden in color.
4. Push the chicken to the side of the pan and spread persimmons in the rest of the pan. When browned, flip over to brown the other side, about 3-4 minutes per side.
   
5. Add blanched green beans and walnuts to the pan and stir.
6. Pour in the prepared sauce, simmer at low heat until sauce thickens. It takes only 1-2 minutes so keep an eye on it so as to not let it burn.
7. Squeeze lime and orange juice in. Stir. Serve warm.Voila!

 Other persimmon recipes we tried and  I posted on Instagram(#todaystapas,#todayssweets) are great I think.

Caramel persimmon and banana bread…next time I have to double the recipe and would like to share with neighbors…I follow the Japanese recipe and barely filled 3x5 pan. No-wonder Japanese people are skinny (me not included).

Persimmon Bread by my husband….so many persimmons so little time. Next stop - Angie’s Persimmon Streusel

We like persimmons yet a change of pace was inevitable….oven baked cheesy meatloaf in a kabocha bowl.

My mischievous Shinobi girl days are long gone…I can’t climb any fence over 3 feet tall now.

Crunchy Yakisoba/かた焼きそば

With Seafood

Dishes like this make me homesick…quite resemble to Nagasaki’s sara (pronunce sa-ra)-udon (皿うどん), seafood plus thick sauce over crunchy noodles. Nagasaki Japan’s food scene was influenced by Dutch, Portuguese and Chinese because import business thrived there in the mid 1500s.

Nagasaki’s local cuisine, champon(ちゃんぽん)…don’t call it champion though sometime I feel like champon is champion…I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar!…(oops, some words trigger me to burst out singing and dancing)…anyway, other popular noodle dish sara-udon is not really udon. One source says that a noodle shop owner had trouble home delivering champon because of spilling of soup (mind you, this is pre-Tupperware era), and Nagasaki is famous for having hundreds of slopes everywhere… so that the jelly like, sauce was invented…this is more like urban legend to me but…. I see it all, I see it now…

This revised recipe is from Miki Fujiwara, a mega blogger whose blog ‘Fujiwara family’s everyday home cooking’ has a neighborhood of 120.000 people (mind boggling, right?) who access her blog every day.

Ingredients and Instructions for Crunchy Yakisoba - 4 servings (Print Recipe Here)

For sauce

• 4 cups of water
• 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger root  Note: I used fresh but you could use tubed grated ginger.
• 5 Tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 Tablespoons sugar
• 2 Tablespoons oyster sauce
• 1 Tablespoon Chinese chicken soup base (granule)
• 4 Tablespoons potato starch (片栗粉)

Mix sauce ingredients except potato starch in a 4 cup glass measuring cup for easy pouring or in a medium bowl. Whisk to combine well. Put potato starch in a small bowl and add about 1/4 cup of just mixed sauce and dissolve starch with fork or chopstick. Put the whole thing back in the sauce mixture and stir well. Set aside.

• 8-10 cut dried shiitake, if the shiitake comes in whole then you need only 3 (cut in 4-6)
• 4-5 dried kikurage (black fungus/黒木耳) optional, tear in small pieces…skip it if you don’t like this stuff.
• 10 Tablespoons vegetable oil divided.
• 450g (roughly) fresh yakisoba noodle, divided in three bundles 
• 1 carrot peeled and cut in 2 inch lengths about 1/8 inch thick
• 1/4 of small cabbage roughly chopped
• 1/2 of onion thinly sliced
• Seafood of your choice or approximately 2 cups of frozen seafood mix, available at Korean market for reasonable price, defrosted if frozen.  I used shrimp, octopus, baby scallop
• 4 young corn from can, drain and rinsed, cut in half…I don’t care for it but I included it for the sake of my blog.
• 12 hard boiled quail eggs from can, drained and rinsed…next time I will hard boil them myself.
• White pepper, salt
• 1-2 teaspoons sesame oil 

1. Soak dried shitake and kikurage (if using) in a prepared sauce. Set aside.
2. Heat 3 Tablespoons  of oil in a large non-stick frying pan at medium heat. Loosen –up the first bundle of yakisoba noodles and spread onto the pan. When the bottom turns light brown, flip over and cook the other side until brown. Using tongs, lift and turn the noodle several times until the noodles get crunchy and golden brown. Place onto a plate with paper towel to absorb oil. Do the same for other two bundles. Set aside.
3. Quickly clean the same pan with a paper towel. Add the last Tablespoon of oil and heat at medium heat. Sauté the onion and carrot until soft. Add cabbage, continue to sauté until cabbage is limp, then add seafood.
4. Mix one more time (make sure that sauce is not separated) the prepared sauce before adding to the pan (step# 3). Cook until it thickens.
5. Add young corn and quail eggs, pepper and salt to taste. cook for 1-2 minutes stirring often. Pour sesame oil around the edge and stir to combine.
6. Place the yakisoba noodle on a large platter and pour the sauce over the noodles. Serve immediately to enjoy the crunchiness of the noodles.

I bought a large can of quail eggs, then put the leftovers in the dill pickle jar…this would be nice snack.

Guess what I found? My husband brought a yellow rose still alive in all the rain we had in our tiny rose garden. He made a olive bread, cleaned the gutters, carved the pumpkin and got ready for Trick-or-Treaters, it was busy day…thanks honey!

Last Saturday was very gloomy due to heavy rain. There was no good light to take the Today’s Tapas (#todaystapas) picture. This is just a ham and cheese sandwich but Halloween style. I made the face with pickled grapes and avocado.

I made this Mango and Avocado salad with Pomegranate and Dukkah from Angie’s Recipe. Guilt free and refreshing!

Can you believe it’s November already?  Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh…don’t you love this song by Katy Perry?