Winter is here in sunny New Mexico. Yes, the sun is shining and snow vaporizes rapidly, but temperatures slide into the teens at night and wind adds to the chill. This calls for fires to be blazing in the living room fireplace and in the bedroom kiva. Adding to the warmth is BSK’s emphasis on comfort food. One night, there was a a saute of chicken thighs with a sauce of wine, lemon juice, garlic (much) and hardy rosemary from the herb garden. BSK accompanied this with a smashed potato and cauliflower mix enriched with chicken stock, sour cream, butter and chopped scallions. On the next night there was a platter of shakshuka, the Israeli dish of poached eggs (from neighbor/pal Karen K’s noble chickens) atop a mix of sauteed peppers, onions, tomatoes. Heat was applied with Trader Joe’s fiery harissa. HG made a big bowl of Greek yogurt mixed with garlic,olive oil, Aleppo pepper, sumac, cumin. Slices of ciabatta soaked up the sauces. Much red wine was drunk and HG fortified his body and soul with after dinner grappa. Jack Frost was defeated soundly.
SJ here, back in NYC after a lovely winter holiday in New Mexico. Greeted by bone chillingly cold weather and to add insult to injury, a dead battery and a flat tire. If you have ever changed a tire while the eagle claws of a NYC winter wind clamp down on the tiniest patch of exposed flesh, then you can well imagine my sorry state when I arrived home for dinner.
Well, I have made one very, very smart choice and that was joining forces for life with the great Exquisite Maiko. For she, among her many many talents, knows how rejuvenate with a meal. And if anything can rejuvenate in the winter, it is what she welcomed me with, Onabe or Hot Pot. This is a simple dish really. You take stock — take the time to make homemade stock please as it makes an enormous difference — and kombu and boil it in a clay pot over an open flame (we use a portable gas grill). And then you just add stuff. Napa Cabbage, bean sprouts, marinated chicken, fish balls, shitake mushrooms, tofu, watercress, noodles and really any vegetable (except cucumbers and a few others!). Spoon out the steaming hot broth, add some ponzu sauce, some chili paste and pick out your favorite vegetables and proteins and dig in. The various vegetables and meat flavor the soup and the pure heat of the boiling broth could warm up one of those frozen Siberian mammoths in a matter of moments.
Onabe is the essence of Japanese home cooking – simple, delicious, healthy; a virtual translation of the concept of hearth and familial warmth into something edible. It is a bed rock favorite of the Sumo cuisine known as Chanko. And the best part is all that delicious broth does not go to waste. Tomorrow night the soup gets added to rice to make Ojiya, a sort of Japanese congee that is as heartwarming as it sounds. Normally Ojiya is made at the end of an Onabe meal — just add rice, a beaten egg and scallion and cover!
So, while the frost may fall in layers about my ears and the winds may whistle, I have the pleasures of Japanese Winter foods to look forward to — and that may just be worth whatever cold I have to face.
Onabe
