Somewhere in my Asian food explorations I stumbled into oden, a simple but yummy Japanese hotpot dish containing a fascinating-to-me assortment of fishcakes of different sizes, shapes, and flavors, plus veggies and other oddments in a dashi-based broth. I've picked up that different Japanese households' takes on what goes into this cold-weather food favorite varies as wildly as different American households' recipes for home-cooking standards. But for those too busy (or clueless, like moi) to pick out individual packages of all the different types of Japanese fish cake, there are pre-packaged oden sets complete with little packets of soup base. I saw in this month's Marukai flyer that they were having a special on such oden sets this week, so I went and got myself one.
This package contains something like a pound and a half of different fish cakes, or surimi. Here in the US, we think of surimi as those so-called "krab" legs with the rubbery texture and screamingly artificial crab flavor, but these nasty things bear no relation to the much more tender and subtly flavored surimi products the Japanese have been making for literally centuries. The Japanese surimi are more like a homey version of a quenelle. I likes 'em lots.
Anyway, so I bought this oden set, and also some ito konnyaku noodles and a kabocha with some vague idea of putting them in the oden too--but I wound up instead using up a chunk of daikon and a couple stalks of bok choy I had languishing in the fridge and saved the kabocha for another day. Oh yeah, and some clear (whitish) ito konnyaku I'd bought in a previous Marukai run instead of the dark ito konnyaku I'd bought today. Just thought it would look prettier.
Following the directions on the wrapper, I put a big soup pot on to boil five cups of water and cut up the fish cakes into bitesized pieces. When the water boiled, I added the cut-up fish cakes, plus half-moon slices of daikon and five dried shiitake broken into bits. After I'd drained my package of ito konnyaku into a sieve and rinsed it well with hot water, I added it to the pot too. Brought the whole thing up just to a boil, then backed it down to a simmer and let it go for the better part of an hour. Near the end I sliced up the bok choy and added it too.
Traditionally this stuff is meant to be eaten with a hot Japanese mustard known as karashi, but since I forgot to buy some I used Dijon mustard instead, which went quite well. I now have a bunch of yummy leftover oden waiting for me in the fridge, and a very full, very warmed tummy.
