Japanese Style Eating

We've had a couple of Japanese style
meals lately. When the boys came back from Japan last year they were full of stories about the meals they had enjoyed, especially the ones in the homes of their hosts. The tepanyaki and shabu shabu styles of cooking were the ones they raved about the most. We bought a small camping hotplate that works off a gas canister last year but only tried it out for the first time a few weeks ago. It worked adequately for the shabu shabu but I think a proper steam boat cooker would have been better as the liquid took a long time to heat up. Shabu shabu is a Japanese hotpot where thinly sliced meat and other ingredients are cooked in a boiling soup. The action of swishing the meat in the liquid actually cooks it and is also where the dish gets its' name - from the swishing action. It only needs to be cooked for a few seconds, saying "shabu shabu". We had some paper thin slices of marble score 8 wagyu that a Japanese butcher had cut up. The soup was made from water and chicken stock and we also cooked cabbage, spring onions, carrots, shitake mushrooms and tofu. I cooked a batch of rice and made a sesame seed dipping sauce.

We cooked the other meal on an
electric hotplate, loosely styled on a tepanyaki meal without the food acrobatics. Again, we had highly marbled meat prepared by a Japanese chef and we cooked in the middle of the table. We had bok choy, carrots, zucchini, cauli, broccolini and enormous field mushrooms.

The table was set in a Japanese style and Drew provided ornaments and utensils including a lovely sake jar and shot glasses. The 'shorshu' had another outing - it's a Japanese white spirit that doesn't appear to have any taste or any effect until it suddenly hits you after you think you've finished drinking and escaped unscathed (apparently). We have to ring our friend Tak each time it's offered as we can never remember its' correct pronunciation and I'm sure that's not how you spell it. In fact, for the shabu shabu we rang Tak 3 or 4 times, mostly from the supermarket, while we searched for the necessary ingredients and proper cooking method.

I'm not sure how traditionally Japanese our meals have really been but they've been fun and achieved the desired outcome which is to have some friends over and enjoy their company while we sit, talk, eat and drink. You can't ask for much more than that.