Sukiyaki

Note: This is not a picture of our sukiyaki, but is very similar in ingredients. I am linking back to the photo owner.

For our sukiyaki venture, I ended up getting almost the exact same ingredients as I did for shabu shabu. The biggest differences are the use of konnyaku noodles (instead of udon noodles) and the sukiyaki sauce (made with soy sauce, mirin, and sugar, instead of the ponzu and sesame sauces).

With everything cleaned and chopped up, we were able to sit in front of the tv and cook on the electric skillet. The general instructions say to put clusters of the ingredients into the skillet and pour some sukiyaki sauce over it and pull things out to eat as they finish cooking. A lot of pictures seem to indicate that you'd put the entire list of things in at once and simmer in the sauce + liquid from the cooking veggies. We opted to put in a very thin layer of food at a time and cook the meat one piece at a time. It was a nice, leisurely, relatively healthy meal, full of mostly vegetables and a relatively low amount of beef (around 3 oz each?), compared to how we usually eat.

We had this last night and tonight. And there is enough food left over for tomorrow night... if we dare. Heh.

I think this would make for a nice, easy Sunday dinner with a couple of friends.

Shabu Shabu

One of my favorite cool weather dinners is shabu shabu. It's so simple, tasty, inexpensive, and easy to make healthy. Well, it's also very easy to overeat, so be careful there. :D Basically, we just get an assortment of things and add them slowly to the hot pot at the table. For instance, last night, we had the following:

• bunch of different types of mushrooms (e.g. oyster, enoki, shiitake)
• napa cabbage
• spinach
• scallions
• crown daisy (or any other bitter greens, just as contrast)
• tofu
• udon (you can use tofu noodles instead to avoid the empty carbs)
• some thinly sliced rib eye
• a couple of pieces of konbu
  
• two types of sauce (sesame seed based and soy sauce based ones)
  

It would be really good to get lotus root and turnip too, but it's the kind of thing I always forget. You put the konbu in the water and bring it up to a boil. Then you transfer the pot to a portable stove at the table and sit around adding things to the pot and fishing things out of the pot as they cook. The meat should be picked up one piece at a time and swished through the boiling/simmering water to quickly cook, instead of getting dumped in all at once.

We fed 5 people last night for about $3 per person, and we have a bunch leftover for tonight. Yay!