Hot Pot with Nerimono: Oden

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Autumn weather means hot food is once again inviting. My daughter and I went shopping for ingredients to make a Japanese hot pot on the evening before she returned to California. The hot-pot dish is called “oden” in which an assortment of fish-cakes and dumplings are cooked in dashi, kombu stock, or chicken stock, with other ingredients including daikon, konyaku, and potatoes. It was great fun to see the variety of fish and seafood cakes or dumplings; we couldn’t resist buying too many because they looked so interesting.Oden restaurants, which apparently are arranged somewhat like buffets in the U.S., keep pots of many kinds of fish cakes and dumplings simmering and ready for customers to choose their favorites. Making oden at home is very simple. The difficult part is limiting yourself to only a few of the many kinds of fish-cakes that are available. Unless you are cooking for a large group, the most convenient way to make oden at home is to buy a refrigerated or frozen package with a nice variety. But the daughter and I had so much fun selecting more than we could eat in one meal!It’s good that oden is just as delicious reheated a few times…

I’ll note that because the ingredients simmer with stock and shoyu, they all become rather brown, almost unidentifiable except for shapes, and unphotogenic.

Hot Stew with Assorted Fish Cakes Oden 4 to 6 servings page 127 1 pound daikon, peeled, halved lenthwise, then cut cross-wise into 1-inch thick half moons 3/4 pound small ptoatoes 1 konnyaku (taro or yam gelatin) cake 8 to 10 satsuma-age (fried fish cakes) the size of ping-pong balls 2 hanpen (simmered fish cakes), quartered into triangular shapes 1 kamaaboku (steamed fish cake), cut into 1/3-inch slices 7 cups kombu dashi 1/4 cup usukochi shoyu (light colored soy sauce) 1/4 cup shoyu (soy sauce) 1/4 cup mirin 1 Tablespoon sugar 4 hardboiled eggs, shelled To Serve: Hot Japanese mustard paste hot plain rice •• Put the daikon into a medium pot, and add water to cover the daikon by 2 inches. Place the pot over moderate heat, bring the water to a boil, and cook for 15 minutes. Drain the daikon and set it aside. •• Put the potatoes into a medium pot, cover them with cold water, and cook them until they are done but still firm. Drain and cut them into halves. •• Put the taro gelatin into a medium pot of boiling water, and boil the gellatin for 1 minite. Drain it and cut into eight triangels. •• To remove the excess oil from the fried fish cakes, put them in a colander and rinse them with boiling water. •• In a large stew pot, bring the kelp stock, usukuchi and shoyu, mirin, and sugar to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to low, and add all the fish cakes and the par-boiled ingredients including the eggs. •• Cook, partially covered for 3 hours. Add water as necessary to keep the broth from reducing to less than half of its original quantity. Taste the broth and add a little more shoyu, mirin, or sugar to your taste. •• Bring the hot pot to the table. If possible, keep the stew hot on a portable stove. Let the diners help themselves, choosing the ingredients they prefer and transferring them to individual bowls along with some broth and mustard paste.

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