Mizore Nabe

 

Two of our adult kids and their families spent the Christmas to New Years holiday with us, so with 10 of us at our house and my siblings and their kids at my mom's house, we were 19 of us together in 2021, mostly vaccinated and boostered. 

That was a lot of cooking! So the next Sunday dinner in January with just 4 of us was an intimate affair so we decided on Mizore nabe or Japanese hot pot with grated daikon. It is hard to tell from the picture, I really have a horrible phone camera, but the white blob in the middle is grated daikon that melts into the boiling broth and adds a thickness like "snow" into the broth. We served this with  house made ponzu sauce and a lot more daikon suri or grated daikon. The original recipe is from Just One Cookbook which we use for her beautiful pictures. I make my own dashi and ponzu but we used the linked recipe for ideas on what to put in the nabe.

This is a good new year's nabe because there is still some mizuna in our market. I also fried our leftover mochi and put it in the soup. While there was no fresh shiitake, we used rehydrated sliced sheetake, as well as fresh shimeiji. Japanese food is not so much about the recipe for the broth (as long as you have a good dashi recipe and access to kombu and katsuoboshi). It is more about the preparation and cutting technique for the ingredients. That being said, we grated the carrots like she did in the recipe and it cooked to fast and turned to mush so we would cut it thicker in diagonal coins next time. 

Broth:

8 cups of dashi broth plus

6 T sake

2 T mirin

2 T shoyu

2 tsp salt

Add ins prepped and added to the boiling broth on the table:

1/2 won bok, sliced

1 bunch mizuna, cut with stems separated from greens

1 carrot

green onion 

1 package shimeji mushrooms, cut the bottom root ball off

shiitake mushrooms

mochi (or or two per person), pan fried ahead of time

1 daikon, grated and gently squeezed out 

1 lb. thin pork belly

Individual serving bowls of 

Ponzu and

Daikon suri (grated daikon)