A Japanese Traditional Dish "Chawanmushi"

I'm going to introduce one of my favourite traditional Japanese dishes called "chawanmushi". It looks like a custard pudding, but it has totally different taste. We eat it as a part of side dish in a meal and sometimes it comes with sushi. The ‘custard’ consists of an egg mixture flavoured with soy sauce, fish stock or mirin along with numerous other ingredients such as shiitake mushrooms, crab sticks, chicken kamaboko, ginkgo, nuts, spinach, boiled prawns and so on. However, a container has a limit, so you need to choose which ingredients you're going to use!

Then, I'm going to tell you how to cook this dish. It may seem to take lots of time, but it's not as complicated as its looks!

The ingredients are below: (for 2~3 people)

*2 eggs *400cc fish stock with water *1 teaspoon soy sauce *1 teaspoon mirin *a pinch of salt ◎ingredients which you may want to add (I usually put boiled prawns, crab sticks and shiitake mushrooms. In particular, shiitake mushrooms are important to help make the dashi.

Firstly, you crack 2 eggs in a bowl and mix them well and add the *ingredients to the bowl. Then, put some ◎ingredients into a cup (look at the picture below) and pour the mixture that you have in the bowl into the cup. You prepare a pot with about 5ish cms of water (from the bottom) and heat it up until the water boils. Then you place the cup into the pot and put a lid on the pot. And reduce the heat and wait for about 10 minutes until the ‘custard’ is stiff. Done!!! It's easy, isn't it?

The only the thing that you need to be careful of is the heat. If you don't reduce it, the mixture will have many holes in the end and this makes it taste different.