Okonomiyaki, As You Like It

When I got back from Paris in January, I moved into a beautiful old Victorian replete with welcoming housemates, an overgrown garden, and two of the best cats in the universe. My attic room was tiny, but I scoured Craigslist for tiny furniture to make it work. I thought I was done, through with boxes and contorting long dressers through narrow doorframes--except last week's heatwave and some domestic musical chairs have sent me packing down a flight of stairs. As I sit in two sweaters in my unfinished new room, snacking on sugar snap peas scooped up in a sweltering daze, those ninety degrees seem a distant memory.

this mustard green has never seen a pesticide.

and these pink oyster mushrooms are so sensuous

Through my two enormous windows I can see into the garden, whose overgrowth is slowly being battled with hoe and rake. On the south side of the garden, I've made four little half-moons of a farm: four different kinds of tomato plants, strawberries, rampant sage, and half a dozen more herbs that are more well-behaved, for now (we'll see about that mint). Sifting through the scads of pots at the farmers market, I was elated to find Vietnamese coriander and Thai basil. I've been reading about Vietnamese coriander in Hot Sour Salty Sweet, just about the most amazing cookbook covering Southeast Asian cuisine. I read it through from cover to cover over the course of my family's three-day bicycle excursion in the Willamette Valley, and it's just made me want to travel down the Mekong River even more. The couple that wrote the book lead the most enviable lives: they met in Vietnam, and have spent the years ever since raising a family on travel from Chiang Mai to Vientiane to Phnom Penh. They've written a few more cookbooks, all of which I'm slavering to get my hands on, but in the meantime I'm going to content myself with cooking my way down the Mekong River until I float down it myself.

I've made an enormous reading list of Asian cookbooks, starting with this one, because I'm applying for a grant that would allow me to spend the year after graduation traveling. My proposal involves tracing the influence of French cuisine on wildly different styles of cooking. The legacy is obvious in former colonies like Vietnam, where banh mi and vinaigrette dressed salads have become staples; less so in places like Thailand in Laos, where the trickle-over effect from their Eastern neighbor has happened more slowly (but it has happened, and we can see it in certain kinds of salads). Then we have the mutual love affair between Tokyo and Paris that has been spiraling further and further into miso-drenched lust for the past few decades, what with both cultures' emphasis on elaborate styles of haute cuisine. There's even an influence in countries like the Philippines, which was never home to a strong French colonial presence but whose gentry would go to Paris and bring their wives, who would proceed to enroll in culinary school to keep busy (and yet none of them wrote a two-volume book about it).

One of the things that I love so much about this style of cooking is the polar contrast between the amount of involvement these recipes call for. Some curries will have you simmering stocks down for hours, leaving ample time between stirs to prepare the various additions to the pot. Others require prepping a complete mise en place, cutting board covered with little piles of sliced mushrooms, picked garnishes, cooked noodles, which get thrown in a wok and emerge mere minutes later. And yet, no matter which recipe I flip open to on a given day, there's an abundance of succulent vegetables to sink my teeth into. So I've been flirting with both. I don't see myself committing any time soon. Everything I've looked at so far just makes me want to drop everything and bike to the farmers market, stuffing the racks to the gills with leafy greens and rhubarb (it is sobigrightnowohmygod). Also, currently accepting suggestions for ridiculous names for my golden bicycle (The Golden Ass? Fightin' Phaeton?).

This recipe is one that I've made several times over the course of the last semester, since it's definitely on the latter end of things. I've made it both Osaka-style and with a multigrain twist. But as I've yet to visit Japan, I have no anecdotes to share about watching grizzled men flipping these babies streetside, you'll have to make due with a story about how George, my feline sous-chef, climbed into the corner cupboard where the pots are kept and decided that he was fluffy orange pasta.

The greatest thing about okonomiyaki is that, true to their name, you fry them as you like it. My rudimentary Japanese, culled from sushi menus and Miyazaki films, has taught me that okonomi [as you like it] + yaki [prepared on the griddle] = delicious, endlessly adaptable lazy dinners. Okonomiyaki also go by 'Japanese pizza,' possibly because the base serves as a kind of platter for whatever you want to put on top. From what I've read, it's super popular street food all over Japan, served with ridiculous quantities of mayonnaise. I'm more for the mustard, which I used to generously top every bite. Pictured in this version are spicy mustard greens and these gorgeous pink oyster mushrooms (which twisted and curled in on themselves like sultry, fungal acrobats); sauteed into a warm salad and dusted with toasted black sesame seeds, it was heaven.

This recipe makes one pancake, but you can easily double it to make two. Use whatever ratio of cabbage to leek that you prefer; I'm leek-crazy in the late springtime so I used almost double the amount of leek. Same thing goes for the flour: since the egg acts as a binder, you hardly need the gluten. I love teff for its nuttiness; I'd imagine buckwehat would also be delicious, but there's no way you could choose a flour that would taste bad in this. Just about the only fixed thing in this recipe is the egg.

Okonomiyaki

2 cups of finely shredded cabbage and chopped leeks, okonomi
1/3 cup flour of choice
1 egg, beaten
a pinch of salt and any other spices you'd like
olive oil, for frying

toppings: chopped scallions, chives, mayonnaise, warm spicy mustard greens, mushrooms

In a medium bowl, toss the leeks and cabbage together with flour to coat. Stir in the egg and your spices. It might not look like it'll hold together, but it will once you get it in the pan--if too liquid, add some more flour until you have a consistency in the range of cake batter.

Heat up a medium skillet and then add enough oil to coat the pan (like for frying an egg). Test to make sure it's hot enough with a little water--it should start splattering. Scoop out the contents of the bowl and flatten it into the pan, all the way to the edges. Cook on this side for about five minutes, until golden brown on the bottom.

To flip it, you've got a couple options. If you're not using a cast iron skillet and you're a professional line cook, you can probably flip it one handed in the pan. Or you can put a plate on top of the pan and (using oven mitts) flip them together, and then slide the okonomiyaki back into the pan, otherside down. Or, the safest way: use a metal spatula to transfer it to another plate, and slide it back into the pan from the plate. Regardless of how you flipped it, flatten the okonomiyaki with the spatula and cook for another five minutes or so.

Reverse onto a plate, garnish with the toppings of your choice, and dig in. If you're feeling generous, you can even slice it and share. But I don't.