Benten's diary

Sorry, it has been such a long time I did not post anything here... (O_o) 
Today I was in a seminary that talked about tôfu. It was really instructive. For people who do not know what it is, here is a short description: "Tôfu, sometimes also called doufu (often in Chinese recipes) or bean curd (literal translation), is a food  of Chinese origin, made by coagulating soy milk, and then pressing the resulting curds into blocks. The making of tofu from soy milk is similar to the technique of making cheese from milk". The seminary described the history of Tôfu and its processing. Then there was a small buffet after it, where we tasted some recipes with Tôfu and it was delicious! The tôfu had been made by the lecturer of the seminary who is also a specialist in the processing of tôfu. I had never tasted such a fresh and delicate tôfu! It was delightful!
Here are some picture of tôfu. The left one is silken tôfu with soy sauce and a decorative carrot slice. The right one is seasoned tôfu cube in a Chinese dish... ^_^

It has been such a long time since I posted something in this blog... sorry....
Right now, in Paris it is the beginning of Easter break. I love Easter with its chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies and chocolate chickens. I fear I have become a chocolate addict...
Easter is the end of the Carême (a diet when you must eat very little meat and little sweet food). Therefore a traditional Easter meal is composed of roasted lamb and a chocolate dessert.  ^_^
I really like the Easter break...
I am going to spend the 2 weeks in Beaujolais... :)

Today I bought this book, and I find it really fascinating! Japanese people are amazing, so is their way of cooking! ^_^ 
This book is interesting because there is an american preface (written by M. F. K. Fisher), it gives an american point of view of Japan and there is also a preface written by the very famous japanese chef: Shizuo Tsuji. He gives his point of view of Japanese food as a native.
Anyway, I will talk a bit more about this book when I read it... :)

My christmas break was great! It snowed a lot! The big hills, the roads and the vineyards were all snow-covered... ^_^
Usually for christmas it is gloomy, therefore I really did enjoy this break. :)
Even though the house, when we got there, was really cold ... (0_o)

Today, I did some "truffles", it is a chocolate rolled in powder. I don't know if American people eat it. The most traditional truffles are the dark-brown ones. Those are rolled in chocolate powder, the white ones are rolled in coconut powder and the light-brown ones are rolled in nut powder. Those are really good, French people use to eat it with coffee.

To make it, you have to prepare the chocolate balls with really dark chocolate, eggs, powdered sugar and butter.

Then you roll it in the powder

It is delicious... ^_^

This is the gift of the german student staying with us this year: It is a stollen, a german christmas cake. It is really good. Here is what I found about stollen on internet:

The old name Striezel was from strüzel or stroczel, "awaken" (Old Prussian: troskeilis), which came to mean "loaf of bread". The shape of the cake was originally meant to represent the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, and was one of a number of baked goods created to represent aspects of the Crucifixion. 

When Stollen was first baked, the ingredients were very different. The Advent season was a time of fasting, and bakers were not allowed to use butter, only oil, so the cake was tasteless and hard. In 1647 , Prince Elector Ernst and his brother Duke Albrecht  decided to remedy this by writing to the then Pope . They explained that Saxon bakers needed to use butter as oil was so expensive and hard to come by, and had to be made from turnips, which was unhealthy. The Pope granted the use of butter without having to pay a fine - but only for the Prince-Elector and his family and household. In 1691 others were also permitted to use butter, but with the condition of having to pay annually 1/20th of a gold Gulden to support the building of the Freiberg Cathedral. The ban on butter was removed when Saxony became Protestant.

Over the centuries the cake changed from being a simple, fairly tasteless "bread" to a sweeter cake with richer ingredients such as marzipan , although the traditional Stollen is today still not as sweet as the copies made around the world.

Today the cake is available in many parts of the world. The true Dresden Stollen, however, is produced in the city and distinguished by a special seal depicting the city's famous king, August the Strong. This "official" Stollen is produced by only 150 bakers.

Every year in Dresden a Stollenfest takes place. This recent tradition has taken place only since 1994, but the idea comes from the days of August the Strong in the 18th century : the king loved pomp and feasts, and in 1730  impressed his subjects with a giant 1.7-tonne Stollen big enough for everyone to have a portion. Today the festival takes place on the Saturday before the second Advent Sunday, and the cake weighs between three and four tonnes. A carriage takes it in a parade through the streets of Dresden to the Christmas market, where it is ceremoniously cut into pieces and distributed among the crowd, for a small sum which goes to charity. The largest Stollen was baked in 2000: it weighed 4.2 tonnes and is in the Guiseness Book of World Record.

My mom bought a christmas tree and we decorated it... ^_^ I loved it because some ornaments were made by me and my brothers when we were little kids...

I got "Compliments" at my teacher-student-parent progress meeting. ^_^ I wasn't sure at all to have it this trimester... A lot of people in my class did not have anything. My teachers said that I was a good linguist. :) :)
So my father has bought a sea bream to celebrate it. It was really good... :)

I did a marble cake, it was half "macha" and half "kinako" (green tea and soya). The recipe is from Clea Cuisine, I really liked it! I had already done before a macha cake and a kinako cake, but a marble cake of this two ingredients is way better. ^_^  unfortunately, my family (especially my brothers and my father) are a bit reluctant to eat japanese food. But my mother did like the cake, and she found the marble cake better than the other two cakes separate. :) :) :)

I recently tried a japanese dish called natto. Some japanese eat it for breakfast, while other have a more european breakfast (with cereales, slices of bread...). I heard a lot of this dish, either you love it or you hate it. Therefore I wanted to try... ^_^ First of all I loved the way it looked (I know, I am weird...). It is fermented soy beans that you put on rice. I tried and I loved it! :)