Nabe for the ladies

The Boyfriend is off visiting relatives until Christmas proper and I have to work the day before and after the 25th so I stayed behind. To keep myself from being too sad and lonely (and because she's an amazing person) I invited my good friend Lilian to spend the night.



Before he left, The Boyfriend and I traded presents (I got him a very nice hat). I received the "Thunder Range" gas grill. So before work, I finally got around to re-firing my nabe (fill with water, put in hot oven for an hour to avoid cracking your nabe over the open flame) and looked at my nabe recipe book and found the Fukugawa recipe which traditionally is for two people, which they bumped up to four and I bumped back down to two.



Clams (which I left in the shell), mizuna (which I substituted spinach), tofu, and mushrooms went into a dashi stock with some miso paste smeared on the lip of the pot so it would caramelize and slowly melt into the stock. It was very fun to put a few clams into the broth and eagerly wait for them to open.



Of course, the best part of nabe is spooning the enriched broth over some rice (or noodles) and devouring the essence of your entire meal over the pleasant chewiness of hot rice.

The Boyfriend definitely "did good" with present shopping this year.

Chanko nabe!

So, after watching this video by Runnyrunny999 I decided to try my hand at chanko nabe.

Chanko nabe basically means "sumo wrestler stew" (according to Raani-san), but this recipe isn't loaded with fat or anything. Sumo wrestler fat is actually very interesting, because of the amount they exercise, the fat doesn't penetrate the muscle or anything. The amount of rice they eat is what loads on the calories.



This is most of the ingredients here. I already had some dashi soup stock in the pot. Dashi is made from konbu (a kind of pressed kelp sheet thing, I think) and bonito flakes. You let it all rest in cold water for about twenty minutes and then you simmered it for a couple minutes, and then you strain out all the little fish flakes and such. It's used in a good portion of Japanese soups and dipping sauces.

Here we have tofu, aburage (which is deep fried tofu), enokidake (the white, thin mushrooms), shitaki (you're probably familiar), carrots and cabbage.



This is a small package of ground chicken with grated garlic and ginger, and a shot of soy sauce and sake. You mix this together really well, and make into small balls to drop into the soup.



I put the ingredients that would take a little longer to cook into the pot first. That includes the cabbage, carrots and the chicken balls.



I think I may have put too much into the pot already. I ended up putting most of the super firm tofu into a tupperware container with clean (filtered in my case), cold water. I only made a couple chicken balls, the rest also went into the refrigerator. The mushrooms basically covered everything up.



And here's the money shot. Don't you want to eat this up? We had white rice with this.

Torinabe or chicken soup served with rice in a fancy dish

The lighting wasn't really working with me on this, but in real life it looked pretty good if I say so myself.

Also, still no table top gas burner, so this was just cooked in a pan and then poured into my lovely pot. We both know things just taste better out of pretty dishes.



This was a very basic chicken soup with chicken broth, sliced up chicken thigh, purple carrots (from the farmers market), and onion. Then I served it with my new fancy rice.

Also, a fun thing to note is that my nabe has about a three cup storage capacity. This means if I ever want to throw that nabe party I either need to get the much larger one I saw (which is not a money/space investment I am currently willing to make) or cooking in rounds (meet round, veggie round, repeat) which is not a bad way to do it.



The carrots are more what I imagine "real" carrots ought to be (aside from being purple) in that they have a little bit more of a sweet potato flavor and are shorter but a little fatter towards the top. In fact, these ones reminded me a little of beets from appearances alone.

The interesting thing about these carrots is that only the skin is purple, the rest is a very vivid orange. For the soup, I thoroughly scrubbed them but left the skin on. I mean, what's the point of buying purple carrots if they're not purple when you get to eat them? Plus, I'm sure there's some vital nutrient in it. I mean... it's purple.



Anyway, something that was suggested in my nabe book was when you are finished with all the goodies in the soup (a.k.a. the solids) you just ladle that rich broth on top of some rice.

So good. Will do again. The Boyfriend really liked the new rice by itself and just had the broth after he'd finished it, but I liked the chicken stock and rice combo.

If you have a favorite pan or serving dish, you should write about it in the comments.

Another recent trip to Seattle (for The Boyfriend to look at a school) landed me back at Uwajimaya's.

In the previous visit I had purchased a donabe 土鍋 (literal earth(dirt/earthen) pot). A donabe is an earthenware pot that is unglazed on the bottom of the outside. This allows you to put it over an open flame (or a portable and therefore tabletop gas burner) with no problems. The upsides are that you can cook and eat at the table creating a very nice bonding experience. The downsides are that if the outside gets wet while it is still hot, it will crack and you will have to buy a new pot. According to the internet, the best thing to do with a cracked nabe is to give it to your cat because they like to sleep in them. Seriously, if you like cute pictures of cats, google "neko nabe".



Anyways, I still have not purchased the gas burner and am leaving that up to The Boyfriend.

This trip tricked me into buying the book "Japanese Hot Pots" by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. So far the recipes make sense and the pictures are fabulous. The only problem that I have had with the book so far is that they use the word "umami". Now umami is a new fad word (bolstered by Big MSG) to denote an extra sense of deliciousness having to do with amino acids and such and has been declared "The Fifth Taste". Now, as a partaker in subbed anime, I have heard the word "Umai!" (which would be the adjective form) as just "delicious!" to accept "umami" as anything more than "deliciousness". Also, the way the authors describe this word makes me think of it more as a "wholesomeness" than as a separate taste. Bah fads.

My distaste for fad words aside, the commentaries are fun, there are neat pictures and everything sounds delicious. http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Hot-Pots-Comforting-One-Pot/dp/158008981X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283018315&sr=1-1

I will be showing some hot pots once it gets colder and I have my gas burner.

The Almost Daily Sarah