Ranma

Okonomiyaki is a common Japanese street food, sometimes called "Japanese pizza", although the description is misleading at best. While similarly customizeable, it's more of a savory pancakes, full of onions and cabbage, topped with okonomiyaki sauce.

Okonomiyaki

Prep time: 30 minutes

Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Serves: 1-2

Ingredients:

1 cup flour

3/4 cups dashi

1 egg

1/6 head of cabbage

1/4 onion

Fillings (all optional):

Chicken

Beef

Squid

Octopus

Mushrooms

Cooking:

Mix flour, dashi, and egg into a batter, and then add cabbage and onions. Then add whatever "fillings" you like, and fry it on a large skillet, carefully turning it once.

Absolutely delicious, cheap, and you could feed an army with it.

Miso

Miso soup: if you've ever gone out for sushi you've probably had it. You might have thought it was good. Well think again: restaurant miso is a fraction as good as you can make it at home, with barely more work than it takes to heat up some Cambell's soup.

Miso

Prep Time: Negligible (20 minutes to make dashi, if you have to)

Cooking Time: 5 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

1/3 - 1/2 cup miso paste

4 cups dashi

a pinch of wakame strips

cubed tofu

Preparation:

Soak wakame in warm water.

Cooking:

Heat dashi. Once hot, remove from heat and add wakame, tofu, and miso.

Now hold on, there's a little more to this than it sounds. Firstly, you're probably wondering what wakame is. Well, it's another kind of seaweed found at your local japanese/asian market.

As for miso, that's a little more complex. Miso comes in hundreds of varieties. The most basic is with or without dashi. Since dashi takes virtually no work, I recommend going without. Beyond that, I'll direct you over to this article, which covers miso paste better than I could.

Mushroom Soup

This wonderful dash based soup a great way to use up spare mushrooms. It takes little effort

and tastes wonderful.

Mushroom Soup

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

1 bunch enoki mushrooms4 shiitake mushrooms

2 oz cellophane noodles

1 scallion

3 1/2 cup dashi

2 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp sake

1/2 tsp sea salt

1 tbsp oil

Preparation:

Slice the shiitake and cut enoki into 2 inch pieces, removing the bottom portion. Slice scallion diagonally. Soak cellophane noodles in warm water for five minutes.

Cooking:

Heat oil in a pan, and sautee the mushrooms until soft. Pour dashi over the mushrooms and bring to boil. Skim off impurities. Add cellophane noodles and scallion and heat until hot.

Remove from heat and season with soy sauce, sake, and salt.

Dashi

Dashi is essential to Japanese cooking. It can be made from instant dashi, or substituted with beef stock or base, but those products are entirely inferior in flavor and feel. Moreover, unlike traditional western stocks, which can be made with little effort inch takes hours of slaving over to produce, dashi minutes.

Ingredients:

1 piece kombu (seaweed)

a handful of bontio flakes

4 cups water

Place the kombu in a pot, cover it with water and let it soak, cold, for twenty minutes. Turn heat to high, bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add bonito flakes. Soak for five minutes. And you're done!

Alternately, you can place a kombu oiece, handful of bonito flakes, and 4 cups of cold water into a pitcher and place it in the refridgerator for 6 hours, and you'll get... the same thing. Dashi's that simple.