Okonomiyaki!

I thought I would do a little photo documentary of me making an okonomiyaki. Woo!

Okonomiyaki is Japanese for grilled/cooked stuff you like. Really. It's basically a big pancake where you throw in food you like to eat! Well, and that goes.

You start with the batter which looks like this:

It's just a flour and water mixture. Alot like pancakes! In fact, I think it is pancake mix but with 'okonomiyaki' written on the side. You can see other ingredients spread around (thinly sliced pork, mixed veggies, and soba noodles).

This is just a 'close up' of the veggies and soba noodles. I just sliced some cabbage, carrots, and green onions and mixed them together. The green bag under the noodles is called blue seaweed. The Werther's were NOT included in my meal. I do like them, but they would not really mesh well with the other ingredients.

So I toook the pork and put it in a skillet and let it cook first. Then I put on the soba noodles and then I poured the batter, which I had already mixed with the veggies, on top of the soba and let it cook like a pancake. This is what it looked like in the beginning.


Flipping it was beastly hard. It was really really heavy and thick. I kinda had to just roll it over. I cooked it on each side for about 2 minutes or so. Then I pulled it off onto a plate (thank goodness for teflon pans). I sprinkled the blue seaweed on top and then finished it off with a liberal dose of mayonaise. This is the finished result (ignore the deodorant in the back ground).


And it tasted....AWFUL. Believe it or not, that is what they normally look like. All weird and gross, just usually browner. However, I was making Osaka style okonomiyaki which doesn't normally have soba noodles in it. I like the hiroshima style okonomiyaki but that is hard to make, so I decided to just toss in noodles. That was mistake number one. The batter gets mixed in with the noodles and doesn't really cook. The noodles would start to burn, but the batter wasn't cooking because of it.

Mistake number two came from the veggies. I used too many! It's supposed to be mostly batter I think. There was just way too much veggies in it. That also made it difficult to cook the batter. Between that and the soba, it was just way too thick and heavy to really cook properly. When I took the okonomiyaki off the onto my plate, it wasn't cooked all the way through and it was gooey. This is bad. I know I like pancakes kinda gooey, but it's gross in this instance.

Mistake number three. I used a fry pan. The fry pan is good because its tefloned. It's bad because it's small! Even if it wasn't so thick and heavy, it would have been hard to flip because of the pan. Sad!

So yeah, the okonomiyaki was a disaster and I did end up tossing it out. Boo. Chris says it's ok though since I learned from my mistakes. Less thick batter. Cook it slower (I had the heat on too high). Less veggies. No soba noodles (its just not going to work this way, I will get my soba okonomiyaki from a professional). I have an bigger skillet so I will try to use that from now on.

Hopefully next time I will do better. I am dissappointed. But that's part of learning to cook I think. Making mistakes and learning from them. At least I didn't try to feed it to my husband!

On a lighter note, after I got done at West Izumo, I left the school and went to my bike. I wasn't paying much attention and I unlocked my bike and a tiny little froggy blinked at me. I squeeked loudly and almost dropped my bike in the dirt. Stupid little froggy.

He was very cute. I would have just left him on my bike and driven him home...except I was afraid he would jump on me and I would have driven into a rice field or something. Too dangerous. So I POKED HIM. Eek! And he flipped out and jumped crazily from my bike and fell in the bushes. I screamed and boys snickered a little. Oh well. Im just a weeny.