I am not much of a cook.  Generally, I avoid it because I hate the kitchen toil that it causes.  But I thought I would try this because it sounded pretty easy, and it would give me an example of Japanese home cooking which I’ve never encountered.  I went looking for recipes and it turns out that this is an every-family-makes-it-different sort of dish.  So I picked one recipe and I improvised quite a bit.

I didn’t have the right sized pot.  And the proportions were all whacky.  And I substituted some of the stuff (though I kept the mirim and the soysauce, of course).  I used carne asada for the meat, because it was the closest thing to Japanese thinly sliced beef that I could find at the store.  It stuck to the pot and probably burned a bit.  And it ended up mushier than it looks in the picture.   But it was really very tasty.  I did not serve it with rice as is traditional, since I think the Japanese are pretty much nuts with all the starches they serve (in this case potatoes + rice).

Back in my dating days, I’d have saved this dish for one of those voila evenings.