It is particularly apt, I feel, that we had this winter warmer dish on a day that I woke up to a flurry of snow and a landscape of white roofs. The snow had melted by the time I had got out of bed however, and by lunchtime I was enjoying a ginger and lemongrass sparkling cordial in the sun at Iidabashi’s Canal Café. It was still cold enough though to warrant a nabe, or literally ‘pot’. It is a dish very much like a hotpot, although having said that I’m not sure exactly what constitutes a hotpot. It brings to mind bubbling dark liquid filled with sausage, potato and all sorts. Well, this is the Japanese equivalent. Basically you have a big ceramic pot (got it by now? A pot!), fill it with some sort of boiling stock into which you add at various stages your vegetables, tofu, meat, fish and udon noodles.
Being in the chilly months, my husband and I bought our first nabe pot a few weeks ago. Our first stocks were made by boiling the humble, all-purpose konbu seaweed. This does not leave much flavour, so when we fished out our bits of simmered food we plopped them into ponzu, a sort of citrus vinegar affair often poured on cold tofu. Delicious!
Nabe meals usually go on for a while and are often used for parties where food is added throughout the evening. This means that if you want to keep the pot bubbling, and if you don’t want to go to the stove every time you’d like a scrumptious morsel of tofu, you need some way to keep it hot on the table. Most households solve this by having a portable gas stove that as far as I can tell is another of those paraphernalia like the tamagoyaki pan from Week 2 that is used for one dish and otherwise is pretty redundant (it’s not so portable that you can take it camping). I heard an electric takoyaki maker where you could exchange the plate with the round holes for a nabe warming plate. I tried to make-do by putting our ceramic nabe on top of our electric takoyaki plate, which kept it warm-ish but was by no means ideal. So in time for the next nabe we bought what claimed to be an ‘eco-stove’ and a couple of gas canisters.
This week I was spoilt by having my Week 1 friend G show me her nabe technique. Arriving burdened with an armful of vegetables - carrot, spring onion, cabbage, daikon, potato and nanohana (rapeseed, a lovely herby strong flavour) – she cut them up, laid them in pretty pattern in the pot, and then added the stock. This was a ready made spicy Korean kimchi stock (Tesco brand! Yes, they have reached even Japan), so there was no need for another sauce to dip the food in. After a little bubbling we added bean sprouts and grilled tofu. It was delish, filling, warming and super healthy (there is a ‘nabe diet’ in fact). A remedial follow-up to last week’s fat-fest! We didn’t even need to add noodles to the stock at the end. Gochisousama deshita! Thanks G!
No comments:
Post a Comment