Shabu Shabu at Home

The other night we had shabu shabu at home!

We have an induction heat burner which works by using electromagnetic currents. You need to use a special IH pan on an IH stove. Since this electric burner just needs a plug, its very easy to take this into the livingroom for shabu shabu. If we had a table we would have been on that, but for now we're all on the floor.

We had a ¥600 tray of raw pork (thinly sliced for shabu), a carrot, some mushrooms, tofu, kamaboko (fish cake, in pink), eggs, and kabucha (pumpkin, already in the pan). We had noodles but never used them. For the broth we used a shabu shabu flavor cube you just toss into boiling water- our flavor was pork miso, you get a bag of 8 for about ¥300.

So basically, like in any shabu place, we just dropped our food into the boiling broth, let it cook for a while, then pulled it out and dropped it into our boil of rice. We had goma sauce (sesame seed) for dipping. When we got down to the last of the food we cracked an egg onto our remaining rice and added the hot broth on top for a kind of rice soup.

Everything was so good and I can't wait to do it again! For less than $15 we had delicious shabu shabu at home. This was one of the things Kris was really looking forward to doing when we got to Japan, and it really was awesome. And easy. The kabucha was insanely good though, definitely my favorite.

K+K