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.

Ghost in the Shell

Oden is truely unique. It's a thin soup, based around primarily different forms of what is known as "fishcake" available at virtually every Asian grocery store.

Now, condensing oden into a recipe is extremely difficult, although this blog makes a valiant effort.

Oden requires only a few basic ingredients, like kombu, and in some form fishcake, but here's a list of things you might want to throw in yours:

kombu - a type of seaweed used in the production of dashi. One leaf will do for a pot of oden

various fishcake - sometimes you can find variety packages that contain multiple kinds

carrots

potatoes

konyaku - a bizarre block of non-calorific stuff, that you blanch for several minutes before adding

one hard boiled egg per person. It has an interesting flavor, or lack thereof perhaps, and a strangely firm texture

daikon - peeled and cut into rounds, daikon is a long, white Japanese radish

You soak the kombu in cold water for 20 minutes, then bring to a boil. Then you add the konyaku and vegetables, and simmer until almost tender. Then you add the fishcake, and simmer until done.

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.

Kurigohan

Chestnuts have become a seasonal rarity in America, thanks to the chestnut blight that nearly exterminated them a century before.

This autumn Japanese specialty takes few ingredients, and little more than a rice cooker.

Kurigohan (Chestnut Rice)

Prep Time: 40 minutes

Cooking Time: 40 minutes

Serves: 4 servings

Ingredients:

2 1/4 short grain rice

20 small chestnuts

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sake

2 2/3 cup water

Preparation:

Soak the chestnuts in hot water for about 30 minutes, then carefully peel the outer shell and skin.

Cooking:

Put the rice, chestnuts, soy sauce, mirin, sake, and water into a rice cooker, and start it.

You can also do this on stove top if you don't have a rice cooker. Just cover and cook until liquid is gone.

Seven Samurai

Kabocha is a type of squash known as "Japanese pumpkin". It looks like a buttercup squash, in fact. Almost identical. If they are one and the same, somebody should let me know- I'll be buying buttercup squash by the bushel.

Just calling these dark green squash pumpkin doesn't do it justice. It has a thin shell, easily removed with a vegetable peeler, allowing it to be cooked in ways one simply can';t a normal Pumpkin.

Simmered Sweet Kabocha

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

1 lb kanocha

1 c water

4 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp soy sauce

Preparation:

Peel the kabocha using a vegetable peeler (unlike Western pumpkins, it will peel easily), and then cut it into 1 1/2 inch pieces.

Cooking:

Put water, sugar, soy sauce, and kabocha into a pot. Turn on high heat and bring to a boil, and then lower to a simmer and cover. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the water is almost gone.