Best Japanese Comfort Food: Nabe

No matter where we come from around the world, we all have our favorite comfort foods.  Whether it's fried chicken and mashed potatoes from the US; crispy tempura from Japan; Tom Yum Goong from Thailand;  Pão de Queijo (Brazilian Cheese Bread); Akoho sy Voanio (Chicken in Coconut Milk) from the Southern African island of Madagascar or Ukrainian Filled Dumplings (Perogies); we all remember a favorite dish from our childhood that comforts us to this day.

My good friend, Ritsu, who spent her early years in Fukuoka, Japan, has more than one comfort food, as we all probably do.  One of her favorites is tempura; but the one dish she says she still loves to make from her mother's kitchen is Nabe, a one-pot or one-dish meal.  To hear her tell it; you can throw just about anything edible into it.

This one-dish meal is great for winter, you can add any kind of fish, shellfish or meat, including octopus, oysters, beef, pork, chicken, vegetables, tofu and mushrooms.  I even saw one recipe with sweet potatoes in it. Ritsu likes kimchi in hers.  And she makes it with a traditional Japanese Ponzu sauce.
It reminds me of a winter stew where you can put all kinds of ingredients.  The Japanese, of course, put everything into one pot and cook it at the table. This is also a fabulous comfort food because you don't have to worry about exact measurements. In fact, my friend could not give me the exact quantities, because she literally pits in whatever proportion or kind of ingredients she likes.  She makes it hearty and makes a lot of it for her family.
Here are some of the other foods she puts in this delicious one pot dish.  Chinese or Napa cabbage, salmon, cod, clams, salmon, shiitake and enoki mushrooms, shrimp, scallions, sesame oil and cellophane noodles.

I did look up a recipe on the About Food site.  I have put it here:

Yosenabe is a kind of Japanese nabe (one-pot) dish. It literally means putting everything together in a pot. You can put various ingredients, such as fish, seafood, meats, and vegetables in yosenabe. Like other nabe dishes, yosenabe is cooked at the dining table as people eat it.

Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cup dashi soup
• 4 Tbsp sake
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp mirin
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 or 8 hard shell clams, cleaned and sand expelled
• 2 salmon steaks, or salmon fillets, cut into 2 inch lengths and bones removed
• 1/4 head hakusai (Chinese cabbage), chopped into 2-3 inch lengths
• 1 negi, leek, rinsed and cut diagonally
• 1 carrot, peeled and cut into 1/4 inch thick rounds
• 8 shiitake mushrooms, stemed removed
• 1 enoki mushrooms, stems trimmed
• 1 shungiku (chrysanthemum greens) *if available

Preparation:

Put dashi soup stock in a donabe pot or an electric skillet. Heat the soup and bring to a boil. Season with sake, soy sauce, mirin, and salt. Turn down the heat to low. Add salmon and clams in the pot at first. Place other ingredients and simmer until softened. Have diners take cooked ingredients into individual serving bowls to eat.
*makes 4 servings