my TLS kitchen: saladana wrap

The “saladana” lettuce reminds me the good old days in Japan, when my roommate at that time loved this lettuce so much and she taught me to make sausages or crab sticks wrap with that. Since then we made that simple side dish of lettuce-whatever wrap quite often in our meals. (Note: “Saladana” lettuce is under the lettuce family, and the Japanese call it “saladana”.)

Weekend is for go-green, so here comes the “saladana” lettuce in my fridge this week. I decided to make a special wrap out of that, with inspiration came from the Chinese dish of minced pork veggie wrap.

Ingredients:
1. “saladana” lettuce
2. Baby spinach cut into small pieces
3. Corn
4. sliced okras
5. Cooked quinoa
6. flaxseeds
7. Hokkaido vegetable dip (p.s. I use “North Farm Stock”, which you can find on Rakuten global shopping site)

Mixed the baby spinach, corn and cooked quinoa the superfood with the Hokkaido vegetable dip to look like a mixed salad. Wrap with saladana lettuce and serve.

I ran out of walnuts though you are recommended to add crushed walnuts to make the texture a crunchy one!

Simple, nutritious and yum. 🙂

TLS kitchen: Korean green tea seaweed rice rolls

Back from Seoul and brought back some snacks seaweed and Osulloc green tea. I miss this place with lots of nice cafes and good food,apart from the shopping which has never been on top of my list. Having eaten different types of meals the last few days, I suddenly realized we never have had much rice meals. We did tried the Korean rice rolls though you know there was not really much rice than we usually have for home dinner.

I still remember the last shopping of Korean seaweed (snack type) from the snacks shop downstairs of my place. Storage temperature during the logistics can kill seaweed which tastes wonderful at the beginning, and I end up buying some awfully ruined packs which were not even expired… From then on I never shopped any snacks Korean seaweed as well as those from that shop. The bad experience had made me hesitated in sourcing more Korean seaweed even in Seoul…

Yet with the temptation of the newly shopped, Korean green tea rice rolls was the choice of this week.

White rice is a bit dull. Make it attractive by adding red quinoas.

Add green tea powder (as much as you like) to the cooked rice-quinoa. Mix them.

Place two sheets of the snacks Korean seaweed on the sushi rolling mat. Put them just next to each other to make the sheet bigger for easy rolling. (I know, I should buy the big sheets next time to save the hassle! :D)

Put cooked rice-quinoa on about the middle section of the seaweed sheets with a small spoon. (You may add cucumber and carrot slices if you have.)

Roll the whole thing with the sushi mat.

Repeat the steps and create more one-mouth rolls on a dish~

Serve with kimchi, or dip with mayonnaise or wasabi sauce. 🙂

weekend TLS kitchen: couscous & quinoa

Some spinach left in the fridge. Why not blend them all and make a cream spinach soup?  i seldom blend leaf plants cuz of the weird experience for inventing Choisum soup myself with a blender. Spinach is a right choice though. ^^

I did not have the mood for food shopping (again!!) and therefore just made use of stuff available. Here were the dishes made out of “nothing”: ^^

1/ Couscous served with fried spinach egg roll, swedish meatballs in cream vegetable sauce.
2/ Vegetables & tuna fried rice (couscous + white quinoa)

Tuna was swapped with SPAM one day and that was really good too!

I know what you’ll say: “BORING!”, “weird!”~ Sometimes you just have to bear boring menus if you’re cooking for only yourself while you want to be lazy. Afterall these all tasted great. Be creative and create the best for yourself out of the simpliest. 😉