Sukiyaki!!

Sukiyaki Last week was a real eventful one! I had loads of fun, but also got frozen many times, going out a lot. Now I need a hot, nutritious dish to recharge myself!! No doubt about it!! You know, to be honest, I still need some good reasons to persuade myself to go for Sukiyaki. Beef used to be very expensive in Japan when I was small. Beefsteak and Sukiyaki were the top 2 representatives of luxurious foods. How often your family eat Sukiyaki was the indicator of how wealthy your family was. No, I’m not kidding. It was something to eat on some special occasions only. Now beef isn’t too expensive and no one worships Sukiyaki like we used to do any more, but looks like I still can’t completely get rid of the old thinking pattern… ;P Ingredients (basics only...) What you put in Sukiyaki really depends on each family, but I guess these 4 ingredients are the must: thinly sliced beef, tofu, green onion and shirataki (noodle-like konnyaku). The big controversy (I’m not kidding. I heard about some married couples being separated because of the disagreement on the ingredients of Sukiyaki !) is hakusai (Chinese cabbage). It’s a big NO-NO for me and my family, but some people do put hakusai in Sukiyaki. Mmmmm…. In my personal opinion, hakusai, gobo (burdock) and moyashi (bean sprouts) should not be put in Sukiyaki... Instead, my family loves to put an unusual ingredient in this tasty dish. It’s called ita-fu, which is basically thin strips of dried wheat gluten cakes. You soak them in water until soft, then boil them in Sukiyaki soup with other ingredients. The ita-fu strips absorb the soup more than anything else and get sooooooooo juicy and yummy. Mmmmmm!! My favorite! But this time I couldn’t find them at the supermarket. Sigh. While you wait for this delicious dish to be ready, you have a work to do… you need to beat the raw egg in the serving bowl. The raw egg is an optional thing and I didn’t like it when I was a kid. But later I learned that the raw egg makes the sweet’n salty Sukiyaki soup somewhat milder and the combination is quite good. Now I never eat Sukiyaki without a raw egg. Well, usually I use regular soy sauce, not light soy, and make all the ingredients look pretty dark-brown. Today I was almost running out of the soy sauce, so used this shiradashi (once introduced in this post) + water much more than usual. That’s why I ended up with lighter-colored Sukiyaki this time. (Everything looked browner when in the pan actually, but the color turned out much lighter in the photos.) Anyway, good and hot Sukiyaki, accompanied by warm sake, surely warms you up on a freezing winter day. I feel fully recharged ; )