We like to have home parties, so we had some of our friends over for a Sukiyaki party this weekend.
Usually we don’t get to see our friends often, and home parties are a great excuse to invite a lot of our friends over :)
Sukiyaki is a traditional Japanese dish which is preferably eaten in winter.
This is one of my favorite Japanese foods and I request my mother to cook it whenever I go home.
Sukiyaki consists of thinly sliced beef, tofu, hakusai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cabbage), shungiku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garland_chrysanthemum), Shirataki noodles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirataki_noodles), enoki mushurooms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enokitake), shitake mushrooms, baby Vidalia onions (http://www.sweetonionexpress.com/sweet_onion_catalog/baby-vidalia-onions.htm), and onions that we slowly cook in a shallow pot with a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, and sake.
Ingredients before cooking
Sukiyaki
List of ingredients:
Enoki mushroom
http://www.foodsubs.com/Mushroom.html 
Hakusai
Shirataki noodle
Shungiku
Baby Vidalia onion
Before eating, we dip the cooked ingredients into a small bowl of raw beaten eggs.
You may think it is unpleasant to eat something cooked with raw eggs, but the raw egg enhances the flavor of Sukiyaki!
Japanese people don’t eat raw eggs very often.
However, for Sukiyaki and hot sticky rice, a fresh raw egg is a must item!!!!!
(Picture below is another way of eating raw eggs with sticky rice, called “Tamago kake Gohan”. Add a raw egg on top of a small bowl of hot rice. Add one table spoon of soy sauce and mix them well. Ready to eat! Mmmmmmmm, Yum!!!!)
Japan is a small country, but it has a long history and many traditions.
Each region has a preferred way of cooking for different foods.
There are two different ways to cook Sukiyaki, the eastern Kanto region style and the western Kansai region style.
For the Kanto style, place the ingredients in a shallow pan, add broth (a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and water) and then cook them.
For the Kansai style, first stir-fry beef in a pan. Instead of using oil to stir-fry, fat from the beef is preferable. Once the beef is slightly cooked, place the beef at the side of the pan and add the other ingredients. Next add soy sauce, sugar, and sake in a 1 : 1: 1 ratio directly into the ingredients. Place the lid on a pan and let it cook until the vegetables get soft. While cooking, the water gets extracted from the vegetables and makes a broth in the pan.
As you can see, the Kansai style has stronger flavor than the Kanto style since no additional water is added.
My family cooks Sukiyaki with the Kansai style, and I always thought that was how Sukiyaki was supposed to be cooked.
I didn’t know there was another way of cooking Sukiyaki until my friend from Tokyo cooked Sukiyaki by adding a broth (Kanto style)
This was the first time that I cooked Sukiyaki by myself.
Seasoning Sukiyaki in my family was always my father’s job. He doesn’t know how to cook, but he cooks the best Sukiyaki :)
I was nervous in the beginning, wondering if I could cook it correctly.
But I think it turned out good, especially for the first time.
The only thing that I would want to change next time is the quality of the meat.
Sukiyaki is a luxury food in Japan because people use expensive, pink-marble, fatty beef.
Marble-beef doesn’t get tough after boiling, and it stays soft and juicy.
I couldn’t find any marble-beef around here because American people don’t like fatty meat in general.
So I substituted with a little pricy steak meat, but it still wasn’t a great quality for Sukiyaki either :)
Overall, I had fun with my friends, and they went home with a full stomach. That’s all that matters.
P.S. This is Coco after the party. She was so tired from hosting guests :)
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