As you wish

One of my favorite foods from my first stint in Japan was okonomiyaki, a thick pancake like concoction with a variety of different add ons. The name itself loosely translates to "as you like grill" and fillings range from pork and seafood to kim-chi, mochi and cheese. It's most popular in the Kansai region of Japan, but you can find okonomiyaki restaurants down here in Fukuoka, and the mix is sold in just about every grocery store.

In an effort to use up the last of the now sort of wilted cabbage, we brought out the table top gas burner and grilled up some okonomiyaki for dinner. I admit that it doesn't look like much in the photos; it's one of those foods you have to eat to understand.

Cooking right at the table! You can sit down and prepare dinner at the same time!

Hot off the grill with all the necessary condiments: okonomiyaki sauce (brown), nori flakes (green) dried fish flakes (light brown) and some mayonaise (do I really need to say what color that is?)

Up close, ready to dig in.

While the mix made four pancakes, Keizo and I were uncharacteristically reserved and only ate one each. This left room for dessert, so we tried a recipe for baked apples from the tajine cooker recipe book. Sliced apples, butter and sugar cooked over medium heat, then topped with ice cream and some cinnamon. An excellent way to end the meal.

Totally terrific tajine!!

Who knows what a tajine cooker is? I must admit I did not, until Keizo was telling me about it over Skype one evening before I moved in with him. He was very excited--he'd just bought it at Lumiere (Japanese store with almost everything at a low prices) and it made cooking for one a breeze! I smiled and nodded, asking what he ate. For the next few days, the answer was always some combination of meat and vegetables that he just put into his cooker raw and ta-da! ate fully cooked only minutes later. Finally I asked him to show me this amazing kitchen addition.

It's a two piece ceramic dish that is brilliantly engineered to steam food to perfection over a gas range or in the microwave. Originally from Morocco, they are a popular in Japan, maybe because a whole meal can be cooked in one dish, over one flame, in your tiny one room apartment. Regardless, our first tajine supper converted me on the spot.

VEGETABLES AND SALMON IN MISO BROTH. Keizo found the recipe in Japanese on the internet. I really hoped he bookmarked it because it was beyond good. The veggies were not overdone and the fish stayed moist. It probably helped that we bought it literally minutes before. Menu planning is not something we practice at the moment. Generally dinner comes about rather last minute, involves a trip to the store for fresh ingredients and the sort of impulse buys one only makes when hungry, with a sit down time much closer to 8PM than 7PM. For now it sort of works, and in this instance, it was great success!

The second tajine dinner was also a result of last minute meal planning and while good, didn't quite match up to the first. SHOGAYAKI and HAKUSAI with PONZU DIPPING SAUCE translated means ginger pork and Chinese cabbage with a soy sauce vinegar sauce. Too many words. This probably would have been a bit more successful had I grated, rather than just chopped the ginger and put it between every layer in the tajine cooker, instead of just over the meat as directed in the recipe.

For the recipe, I only used about 5 leaves from the giant Chinese cabbage we bought from the farm stand in the supermarket for a mere 200 yen. There are probably about 30 more leaves left on that one, and as if we didn't have enough, Keizo's thoughtful parents sent us a huge cooler box of produce from their garden today, which includes another one of even greater size and a regular cabbage the size of a large dinner plate. Time to get creative I guess!