Try Okonomiyaki, a Savory Japanese Pancake

By Sandy Hu

I’m still reliving my trip to Japan and the wonderful meals we had. Whether an o-bento from the fabulous Japanese department stores that devote their basements to prepared foods and food gifts, to portable eki-ben meals from the train station, to ramen shops and izakaya, to more formal restaurants, our meals in Tokyo and Kyoto were uniformly artfully presented and well-prepared.

In Tokyo’s Asakusa district, after a temple festival, we wandered into an okonomiyaki restaurant. Often called Japanese pancake or Japanese pizza, okonomiyaki more accurately describes a savory, dense pancake filled with such ingredients as chopped cabbage and sliced pork, beef or seafood, then topped with okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise and a generous sprinkling of katsuobushi, shaved bonito flakes. The bonito (skipjack mackerel) fillets are steamed, aged, dried and shaved so thinly they look like wood shavings.

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How to Make Great Food Fast? Try an Ethnic Market!

By Sandy Hu

When I worked on a national campaign to promote potatoes years ago, we did extensive research to learn how moms felt about the dinner hour. In focus groups, one woman drew a time bomb about to explode. Another sketched a stick figure of herself backed into a corner with the dog barking and kids clamoring…you get the picture.

So I started to pay attention to people in the supermarket. They were pushing their carts aimlessly past the meat counter, obviously in a dilemma about what to cook. Then I happened to be in a Japanese grocery store and overheard an older woman wheeling her cart, muttering under her breath in Japanese, “What to cook…what to cook.…”

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