Okayodon

Very often, we tend to eat out just for convenience to save the hassle of prepping ingredients, cooking and even cleaning up. However, we sacrifice all of that for msg-laden food as well as fast food which is unhealthy to eat often. 

Recently, I have eaten this long-forgotten comfort food that makes me think of home :) This dish is perfect for people who just want to cook something simple but yet have a nutritious meal. 

Oyakodon is literally translated from 親子丼 which also means "parent-and-child" donburi. The usual ingredients for these would be chicken which is the "parent" and egg which is the "child" and onions. All of these ingredients are cooked and simmered into a sauce which would then be served on top of a bowl of rice. 

The simmering sauce used to make this can vary according to the season, ingredients, region in Japan and taste. Typically, it would consist of dashi stock flavoured with soy sauce and mirin. Tsuji (1980)'s version recommends dashi flavoured with light soy sauce, dark soy sauce and sugar.

This fairly easy recipe is from Bill Granger's "Feed Me Now!". Incidentally, this dish is also one of Bill's all-time favourite dishes.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

400ml ready-made dashi stock

125ml soy sauce

4 tbsp mirin

2 tbsp sugar

1 onion, halves and thinly sliced

4 chicken thighs, boned, skinned and diced (or use 2-3 skinless chicken breast fillets)

4 medium eggs, lightly beaten

Method:

1. Pour the dashi into a medium saucepan and bring almost to the boil. 
2. Add the soy sauce, mirin and sugar and stir to combine.
3. Add the onion and chicken and simmer gently for 5 minutes.
4. Increase the heat, bring to the boil and gently pour in the beaten eggs. Cover the pan, reduce the heat to low and cook for 2 minutes.

To serve, divide the rice between 4 deep serving bowls. Spoon the chicken, broth and egg over evenly until the rice is moistened (you may have some broth left over).

Serve sprinkled with finely sliced spring onions or shredded nori.

It took quite a while to cook the chicken drumsticks thoroughly as they were pretty big in size. Hence, 1 big drumstick is big enough for each of us :) I love the meaning behind this donburi. It's so sweet that we are all having it together as family as well. Simple but yet meaningful and yummy :) I will definitely make this for my kid in future when I have one and hopefully, the tradition carries on ;) We all love this simple and flavourful dish for dinner.

I'm submitting this post to Asian Food Fest #1 Oct 2013: Japan, hosted by Alan from travelling foodies.

I'm also submitting this post to Cook-Your-Books#5 organised by Joyce of kitchenflavours.

I am submitting this post to AlphaBakes hosted by Ros of The more than occasional baker and Caroline from Caroline Makes.