Are you ready for the holiday? It's getting chilly out, For a lot of us, Japanese, (or Asian), it's time to enjoy Nabe. We cook vegetable and meat, fish on a table and dip on a favorite sauce.
Once you prepare ingredients, you can cook as you eat, sitting around the table, we would take turn to cook, serve, and eat with favorite drink such as sake. I recently enjoyed Thai style nabe. The recipe is for about 4 people.
Ingredients are simple. You'll need half of a whole Chinese cabbage, green onion, next to Chinese cabbage is called "Shungiku" (garland chrysanthemum) You can find those vegetable at Asian market, but you can skip some ingredients if you can't find them.
On this Thai Nabe, I used Cilantro, if you have Asian market near you, you can buy Shirataki (konnyaku noodles), Enoki mushroom, and Tofu (may be you can get all over nowadays).
Chop all vegetables/tofu into bitable size, boil over konnyaku noodles and chop.
For meat and fishes, thin sliced meet (beef in pic and shrimp devined and peeled or any kind of fish or meat as you like. I added fish ball, and made some shrimp wan ton.
Make dipping sauce. For Thai dip sauce, you'll need
6 table spoon lemon juice
6 table spoon fish sauce
2 tea spoon sugar
1 or 2 clove of garlic, chopped
5 stems of cilantro, chopped
Just mix them.
For Japanese nabe, you can use ponzu (soy sauce plus some lemon juice) for the dipping sauce.
You can add chopped cilantro, garlic, and Chinese chili sauce on your dipping sauce as you like.
On a portable stove on the table you are gathering at, put a pot, you can use usual pot.
The soup is one litter of chicken broth, chopped lemon grass stem, and cilantro stems.
For usual Japanese nabe, we would use kelp broth (a 1 inch square dry kelp with about an litter of water) with a few table spoon of soy sauce, sake, and so on.
You don't need to make it salty since you'll dip the food to your dipping sauce later.
Put a lid and wait for boiling soup..
Once the broth is boiled, put tofu, shirataki, Chinese cabbage, green onions, fish ball, but not the meat or fish.You don't have to put all the meat, or vegetable at once. cook as you eat.
Add some meat and fish to the boiling pot. put lid and wait for a while.
It's cooked! Add soup on nabe when it seems little low later on before you add more vegetable or meat. you can add some water since it's already flavorful.
Serve on individual bowl and eat with dipping sauce and topping.
After you scoop up all the meat and vegetable, add some cooked Udon noodle or cooked rice and boil and serve. This is called Shime in Japanese. (means finishing up)
This burner is handy for camping too!
This is similar to what I have.
More recipes!
