Crunchy salad with yogurt-tahine sauce

(Em Português)

Since Flávia left me a comment yesterday asking where have I been, I thought I'd better show up.

It will take years and years for me to become a constant person as I would like to be, but then - well... we need to start somewhere, right?

I am now back to São Paulo, honey, dealing with bureaucracy while the rain pours outside.

I have great reasons to have disappeared on the last week. Pretty ones really, which include seeing very dear people who I hadn't seen in ages and to celebrate a beautiful beginning (all of my love to the newly-weds!). 

Now that I am back home, I started eating more nicely again. So, here I come with another salad.

Lemon and poppy seed cake, and absolute truths.

(Em português)

There are some things we learn as small kids, often times through observation, and they end up becoming absolute truths for us.

One of such things I have learned from my grandmother Nelci: everytime we receive a visit at home, or every time someone from home is coming back from a trip, we make something special to wait for that person. Every time.

It happened that 98% of the time the special thing was to bake a cake.

So in my head, receiving a visit is associated to baking cakes.

A few days ago, I received two very dear people (hi Ire, hi mom), so there it is, lemon and poppy seeds cake.

Of course I got this recipe at technicolor kitchen, the kingdom of sweets made with citrus fruit, and for me, the perfect place to find something good to do with my recently-acquired seeds.

Bifum with shitake. What?

(Em português)

Maybe I haven't mentioned this before on the blog, but I have a fascination for Japan and Japanese people. I think the foods are pretty, the absurd clothes are pretty, those many colorful things I don't understand, the martial arts movies, the incredibly specific stationary items, the design, the architecture solutions, I find it all pretty.

But I never enjoyed Japanese food, because I think the textures are weird.

Recently I ate at a ramen restaurant with my boyfriend, and I really liked it. Then I went to a place at Liberdade with a couple friends and had yakimeshi, then I went somewhere else in Liberdade with other friends, so forth and so on...

I continue not having interest in seafood and raw fish, but Japanese cuisine has so much more than that.

This was my lunch today, and look how nice: I did it without any recipe, just from the ingredients I had at home.

Bifum is this very thin noodle made from rice, and shitake is the kind of mushroom.

You can improvise something similar substituting the ingredients with what you have around.