French night :) NatsuRina Kitchen – Vol.1 ♡

I’ve celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary today 🙂

I can’t believe that it’s already been a year passed since our wedding day!! We had really a good meal in the city, and I hope to spend this wedding anniversary filled with love, happiness, laughter and joy for ever with you 😀 ♡

Thank you for being such a wonderful husband to me 🙂

 

A few days ago, I and my good friend cooked together for our husbands. Our theme was to cook something we didn’t cook very often and to make our husbands surprised and impressed 🙂 ♡ We secretly planned our meals, and cooked everything on the day !!!

We cooked al lot!!! This is my friend, steaming the shrimp mousse 🙂 I had so much fun to cook with my friend, but we were a little bit stressed to set up everything by the time our husbands got back home … 😦

 

After cooking everything except for the main beef, we prepared the table 🙂 We also prepared paper fans for guys since it was extremely hot that day!!

 

The place card. Inside the card, I put short “thank you” messages to my partner 🙂

 

This was the menu for the day!!

 

Here we go!! “Mousse of green vegetables and shrimps”. Everyone got amazed how good it tasted!! 🙂
Can you notice that we poured a little bit of love on the plate? Actually the guys didn’t notice… maybe look closely on the plate around the left-top corner? 🙂

 

Bagna cauda dip with assorted vegetables and shrimps. The anchovy did really a good job!!! Yummy 🙂

 

Asparagus soup. There were lots of asparagus, onions and celery in it. Healthy and tasty!!

All those appetizers went really well with a bottle of white wine 🙂

 

Then, for the main dish, we prepared beef steak!! Of course, we had a red wine with the meal 🙂

 

Then, we had a dessert plate 🙂

We prepared mille-feuille!! We placed a little bit of carrot jelly, ice-cream and peach aside. We had a cup of coffee and tea 🙂

 

The night was brilliant!! We, the chefs, enjoyed cooking and tasting all the dishes and the boys looked enjoyed our meals with nice bottles of wines 🙂

We did French dinner, so maybe we’d try some other nationalities’ dinner and make our husbands surprised again 😀 ♡

Congratulations to Germany!!

I’ve got surprised when I checked the World Cup game result… 7 against 1 at the semi-final?! That’s incredible!!

Congratulations to those who are with German team 🙂

I was invited to my friend’s birthday party, so I made a birthday cake today 😀 Can you guess where they are from… ? 😀

 

It’s a German national flag cake ♡ I didn’t think that I would make a national flag cake within a week after I made the first one last Friday!! I think I really enjoy making it, so I’d like to make more countries’ national flag cakes!!

Choosing fruits is also fun 🙂 This time, I used blackberries for the black part, raspberries for the red part and peaches as well as mangos for the yellow part!! They were really refreshing and they matched well with the cheese cake!! 😀

I wanted to make birthday message cookies, so I looked for a chocolate pen at a supermarket, but they didn’t have what I was looking for… so, I decided to make a pen by myself. This is how I did.

 

[1] Prepare some chocolates you like. Cut them small so that they will melt easily.

 

[2] Pour warm water in a bowl and put another bowl onto the water bowl. Put chocolates in the upper bowl. Stir with a spatula until the chocolates fully melt. Make sure you won’t put any water in the chocolate bowl.

 

[3] Roll a parchment paper, making a tiny hole in the end and seal the side with a tape. Pour melted chocolate inside the pen, and use it as a pen! 🙂

 

[4] The message cookies are done 😀 I draw some soccer balls as well 🙂 ♡

 

[5] Place those cookies on the cake as you like 🙂

 

I didn’t want to to put a plastic wrap directly on the cake so that the chocolates would probably stick to the wrap while I drove to my friend’s house. So a little trick here. Use a toothpick 🙂 Just put some toothpicks on the cake and then, wrap the cake with the plastic wrap 🙂

 

This will keep the cake nice!! Please try it 🙂

 

There were many German people at my friend’s party, so I was so glad that I made the German flag cake. Oh, those people were really happy people and so nice !! I’m happy to be there 😀

Again, happy birthday my friend from Germany and congratulations for the soccer game today!!! Fingers crossed for the final game!!

A birthday cake for America

I was invited to my friend’s house for BBQ on Fourth of July and I wanted to prepare something very nice to celebrate the day!! And I made this… TA-DA!!!

A birthday cake for the United States!!! By the way, how old is this country?? It won independence from Grate Britain in 1776, so America is 238 years old now.

 

It’s an unbaked cheesecake because it won’t be too heavy after the BBQ and also refreshing with lots of fruits on top! The unbaked cheesecake is normally made from cream cheese, heavy cream, sugar, and gelatin. This time, I added some lemon juice and also sour cream, so that it would be a little bit tart. The cake got harder after keeping it in the fridge overnight with the power of the gelatin.

 

In the morning of the Independence Day, I did all the decoration on the cake. Do you know how many stars and stripes the American flag has on it? The answer is… please count the number of the blueberries I put on the cake and the number of red and white lines I made on the cake!!! 😀 I faithfully imitated the flag 🙂

 

I like the picture taken from this angle… 🙂

 

The fruits are set now. But the decoration is not quite done yet. Since I just put the fruits on the cake, they might move when I carry to my friend’s house. So, I poured a sauce made from white wine, sugar, lemon juice and gelatin powder on top.

 

As you probably guessed it, I had to keep it in the fridge for an extra few hours for the sauce to be harder until it’s actually turned out to be a jelly. This is finally done!!! Now the fruits won’t move while I’m carrying it, and also the cake has additional refreshing tastes 🙂 I like this cake♪♪

 

My friends prepared nice BBQ for us and we had nice time there ♡ Then, we enjoyed this cake after eating lots of meat 🙂

At night, I walked to the park in my neighborhood to watch the fireworks!! It was really nice although I couldn’t take nice pictures… I found that the fireworks we could watch in Japan is probably much bigger than what we watched here. If you have a chance to visit Japan, please watch the beautiful fireworks!!! Anyway, watching the beautiful fireworks without thinking anything was really nice thing to do.

Thanks to my friends, I am happy with my first Fourth of July experience 🙂

Happy birthday, America ♡

RECIPE: Healthy Sweets For Summer ♡

I guess carrots may be one of the vegetables which lots of children find it difficult to eat. I often go grocery shopping on the weekend with my husband, and there, I try to buy lots of vegetables. I almost always ask him if he would like to eat them, and carrots are the thing he usually says “no”…

Carrots are really healthy food though!! Carrots contain lots of β-carotene, and this is where the name “carrot” actually came from. This β-carotene will be converted into active Vitamin A in human body and this brings us lots of good effects.  I would summarize the good effects of  β-carotene as follows:

• to improve skin color and may reduce wrinkles (if you do not eat too much)
• to boost the effectiveness of sunscreen
• to protect the mucous membrane, which results in reducing allergies

There are a few things you have to be careful when you eat carrots since they contain an enzyme which destroys Vitamin C. This enzyme has a low tolerance for “heat” or “citric acid”, so it is better to heat carrots or to have them with lemon or vinegar. Heating carrots will also increase the amount of β-carotene we absorb in our body.

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Now, we know more or less about carrots 🙂 As a child, I also didn’t like carrots and my mom sometimes made jelly with carrots so that I could eat them. So, I decided to prepare some for us. I got the recipe from my mom and converted it to my way 🙂 My husband liked it, so here, I will share the recipe!! I hope you will enjoy it ♡

◆Ingredients◆ (serving size: about 10)

• Carrots (7 oz) *about 2 whole carrots
• Lemon juice (2/3 cup) *about 2 large lemon
• Sugar (7 Tbs)
• Gelatin powder (1 Tbs)
• Water (1 1/3 cup + 2 Tbs)
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◆Notes◆

If you have some organic lemons, you may use the skin as a container 🙂

◆Directions◆

1. Wash lemons and cut them in half (if you use them as a container) and squeeze lemon juice. You may take off all the thin skins inside the lemon.

2. Wash carrots well and grate them.

• To shred them fine, I recommend to use this grater (the picture below). You may use a cheese grater as a substitute for this.
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• I like the fiber texture in the jelly, so I like to grate the carrots. But if you don’t like the texture, you may boil carrots with a little water until they get soften and puree them with a blender.

3. Put gelatin powder into a bowl and add 2 Tbs of water. Leave them for a few min to let the gelatin powder absorb the water.

4. Put “1”, “2” and 1 1/3 cup of water in a sauce pan, and add sugar. Cook them over low heat for about 5 min and stir well to dissolve sugar.

• You will check the taste here. If you like sweeter, you may add another 1 or 2 Tbs of sugar.

5. Turn off the heat. Add “3” into “4” and stir them very well.

6. Pour “5” into a container and keep them in a fridge until they get harder for about 3 hours.

• I also like to keep them in the freezer and eat them frozen!! This would become similar to a sorbet.

♡ DONE ♡

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Hmmm… yummy!! I think this is really refreshing and thus, good for summer 🙂 I also like this orange color!!

Oh, I wish I had a lemon tree at home likewise lots of other people who have houses here… One day when we get our own house, I would love to have the tree!! 😀