Sukiyaki, Japanese big dinner

As Christmas is approaching, I wish you a nice holiday season. So let’s have a sukiyaki party !
It’s a party meal designed to showcase delicious premium Japanese beef and season produce. A hot pot to cook and share on the table.

The ingredients are cut, cleaned, prepared and presented on big trays on the table.
First tray : fungi, konnyaku noodles and grilled tofu.
There were 4 types of mushrooms : shimeji, enoki, dry and soaked maitake and fresh kikurage.

Second tray : negi leeks, onions, soaked yakifu (gluten croutons) and kikuna (chrysanthemum greens).

Third tray : the beef. Wagyu, Japanese traditionally raised cows. Beside you can see cubes of beef fat.

Each eater is given a bowl with a good fresh egg. Whisk your egg with the chopsticks and get ready to dip you ingredients in this sauce.

First step : greasing the pot with fat and roasting the first slices. They can be enjoyed this way as the beef is delicious, just on its own.

That’s the technique : melt some fat, add some meat, pour a little sugar, then a little shoyu (sauce sauce), a little sake. Mix and cook.

All the other ingredients are added in small batches…

For dessert… well, there are no desserts for Japanese meal. So that’s a French tarte Tatin, made with Japanese apples.

Last golds of November, deconstructed fried rice

Full bloom of orange fruits, on the trees : kaki, mikan, karin…

That could have been rice stir-fried with meat, egg and vegetables, all mixed in. But I have let them apart.
The big paradox is I lack appetite these days, I eat little and at the same time I crave for rich food. So overall, it’s the same.

In a pan, let’s roast sesame seed, add oil, fry garlic, chili and ginger. Then add slices of beef marinated in sweet chili sauce. Reserve.

In the same pan, lots of veggies. Carrot and mizuna stalks.

Then, brown rice, fried with carrot, turmeric and egg yolk. Plus a fresh egg yolk on top.

To dip in the meat. Mmm….

Miso gold yolks

ran-ou no misozuke (卵黄の味噌漬).
They are egg yolks, pickled in miso. It’s a popular delicacy to enjoy as a salty snack with sake, or on your hot rice.

I have used eggs from the butcher’s… Well, they sell the eggs found inside the hens, that have no shell yet. They are excellent. Whenever my grandma would kill a hen, I was volunteering for the job (everything but the fatal stroke) and in exchange, the eggs were my lunch. In some places in Italy, they use them to make premium pasta. These are covered with a skin, which makes them easier to smear with miso, they don’t break. Also, I don’t need the whites.
The recipe can be done with standard yolks. For instance, see Shizuoka Gourmet’s technique for tamago misozuke.