Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, after our longest hiatus ever! What could have driven your faithful food fop, Jon O’Guin, away? Continual medicinal head trauma! We’ll talk about it briefly, before pushing on to today’s recipe, a vegetarian dish from Japan, as imported to Jon from Britain. That’s right, we’re doing Okonomiyaki again, and this time, my dead dad can’t give me unresolved trauma about it! That’s only half a joke! (Sorry, in my long time in the wilderness, I have forgotten humor.) But if you want to jump all the tasty deets and get to the eats, click this link, and who knows if it will work. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

The Mills of The Gods Grind Exceedingly Fine. As Do My Teeth

Title Jon is already off his rocker, so that’s a good sign. Anyway, HI everyone! Man, remember when I, in a kind of quiet and broken tone said last December that I thought I could MAYBE swing one post a month with everything else that was going on with my schedule? Well, as the old saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

“If you want to make WHO WHAT?”
And that concludes this month’s “Joke just for Jon.”

Here’s the low-down on what happened: I wrote that, then went into January, and tried to plan out a couple months of posts. I even whipped up a double-batch recipe to try and kick the year off with some momentum… before immediately knee-capping myself as I realized that, obviously, if we’re only doing one post in January, that post should be our pre-Super-Bowl post. So I set aside that double recipe, still pretty stoked, since I had a cool idea for a new take on the Super Bowl post format: rather than picking one team’s dish, which in retrospect feels a little one-sided, I would make a weird fusion of two iconic foods, one from each. That way, everyone was equally offended.

So I did several hours of research, picked the dish, and then realized the Super Bowl was delayed by that one player’s horrific injury, so this was actually going to be an early FEBRUARY upload. So February 5th, I popped down, started some preliminary steps to make the recipe (basically just checking to see that one of the ingredients would cook the way I thought it did)…and that night, I got a toothache so bad I went to the emergency room. (Technically what happened was “I had a toothache all day, used all of the daily recommended painkillers, still couldn’t sleep, and went to the emergency room to beg for a solution.”) 

What followed has been grueling in some ways, and frustratingly benign in others: That first week, I was on an alternating schedule of 1000mg acetaminophen and 600mg ibuprofen, delivered at three hour intervals, along with an amoxicillin regime. Over the past 5 months, I have taken 15 trips to the dentist, and the total cost of my treatments SO FAR has been somewhere in the range of $16,000.  (You may recall that, when I left Pullman, it was because of the cost of a dental emergency that I did not have insurance for. Fun fact: writing a blog and working part-time at a comic book shop does not get you dental insurance.)  BUT, luckily, because I am so poor, local support groups were willing to undertake a huge proportion of those costs. Indeed, due to a weird mix of good and bad luck, they covered far more than they usually would…because they aren’t allowed to cover the treatment that was needed for the initial, emergency-room inducing toothache, and they felt super bad about not being able to take care of an issue that, in our first meeting, they had promised to ‘handle completely’. So…yay for more complicated issues than initially assumed, and the horrific state of affairs in my mouth.

I’ve started shedding the ones that have failed me, like a shark.
Nah, this is just the one temporary crown I got to keep when they put in the permanent.

So since February, I have probably consumed somewhere in the range of 250-300 extra-strength Tylenol and Advil, whether because I was waiting for an appointment or my gums were beat up after one, and have spent well over an entire 24 hours in dentist chairs cumulatively.

You might expect that this would kill my appetite, or desire to cook. You would be wrong. Sure, I had difficulty eating some days (one time, I forgot I had a temporary crown on, grabbed some chewy candy on a frustrating trip through the pass, and accidentally “ate” that tooth, crunching it into pieces when the candy pulled it off the post and between two molars) , and had to fight through a kind of omnipresent fog of either pain or painkillers, but looking through my phone, I’ve cooked 9 different recipes with the intention of posting them. And I’ve cooked another 12 or 15 recipes just for food. I think I’m mathematically cooking MORE than usual (or, I did, until I just did the math, and realized “no, you’ve done just under the normal amount) Instead, it did something more insidious: The February Super-Bowl post, which became the March Super-Bowl Post, and then the April Super-Bowl post, is sitting at 895 words right now, because I…didn’t remember how to be funny. Or, more precisely, because walking the line of informative, funny, silly, and helpful that I normally try to strike was just too much effort. To try and contextualize why: Normally, I avoid editing my work (which I often find agonizing) by doing a lot of “pre-editing”: As I write a joke, or really any sentence, I’ll flip it through a couple different possible structures, and edit “on the fly”, as it were. That last sentence, for instance, took about 4 different “paths” before I reached the period: I added “Or any sentence”, added “really” to that, tried two different clauses after “structures” before settling on “I’ll finish with “edit on the fly” and explain in the next sentence”. (Editor’s note: I actually just re-tweaked it one last time, which I don’t mind doing now because the piece isn’t “done” yet.)

If it were easy to explain the weird hang-ups in my brain, I wouldn’t be in therapy, man.

Anyway, as you might guess, that ‘normal’ writing process takes a fair amount of free mental space to do in the moment, and the pain/painkillers ate up some of my mental bandwidth, meaning it became as agonizing as ‘normal editing’, grinding out my motivation to start writing something new, or to finish what I’d started. (For technical writing, at least: I became active in a local literary club during this time, and found that for some reason, poetry didn’t take the same struggle, which was nice.)

Luckily, I’m now at a point where I’m no longer popping pills every other day, and I’ve only got like, 2 dentist visits left before I can join the masses in the “check up/ cleaning every 6 months” line-up. Which is great, because I ALSO still have to upload a recipe of my mom’s- I MEAN, AN ANONYMOUS PATREON SUPPORTER’S choice once every six months, so let’s COME IN UNDER THE WIRE AGAIN, BABY. ENOUGH BITCHIN’, LET’S GET IN THE KITCHEN. (Sorry, I put Zhong sauce on my reheated pizza and I’m flying off of that buzz.)

A Spot of Bother

Okay, so, I’m a goph- no, nevermind, there’s no time for that. I wasted a thousand words on my damn dentals. So, we’re revisiting Okonomiyaki, which we first made like, 5 years ago, in a post where I OD’ed on Shakespeare to cover up that A: the dish is one of those “too complicated and too simple to do justice in 2000 words” kind of things, and B: to cover up the searing disappointment of my father spitting it into the trash because the chemo messed up his taste buds, an moment I can remember so vividly, it is one of the few clear memories I have of my father’s face left. (I told you that trauma line was only half a joke.)  Now, my recipe is by no means authentic to…anything, really. I am specifically making alterations to a recipe I got from the UK. Why did I go to the UK for my Japanese recipe? Waste not, Want not, Robin.

“Why are you talking to me, weirdo?”

That was a very oblique reference to the fact that, since about February or March this year, I’ve been using the SortedFood Sidekick App, which I an interesting little food prep app. We’ve talked about Sorted before, but if you don’t trust those links, the basic summary is “they’re a media collective consisting of 4 dudes in London who make food videos on YouTube, and cookbooks.” I mentioned that they were moving into a comfort viewing channel for me during the pandemic, and their upload schedule is a clean combination of consistent and easily digestible at 2 sub-20 minute videos a week, so that even as my dental drama meant that I was being overwhelmed by my YouTube backlog, they didn’t feel imposing.

Anyway, they’d been plugging their app for months, until finally one of them mentioned that an annual subscription is only like, 50 pounds, which some quick math told me was around $62, and I went “well, shit, that’s about $5 a month. What a clean price to support them at. Hell, I only really need to use it like, once a month for that to feel worth it.” And so I got it.

Specifically, what the app does is provide you with a library of recipes, most of which are organized into “meal packs”: groups of 3 different meal recipes sharing a theme that also share ingredients so that, once you’ve cooked all three, you’ll completely use up all the perishable ingredients you bought for the pack, ensuring you don’t have to throw anything away*. It’s a neat little organization trick/piece of pre-built mental labor that I’ve found really helps give a little kick to my motivation to cook.

No points for guessing which 1:34 this pic was taken at.

The app is generally pretty helpful, though my two biggest complaints are that A: the team aren’t large enough to have done much in the way of localization: I can force the grocery list section to give me measurements in imperial units (ounces, pounds, etc), but I CAN’T make the recipes themselves do so while cooking. So every recipe has some added mise en place as I have to find out how much of 12 ounces of milk is 375 ml. (375 ml is about 13 ounces, so “All of it and then some, champ”.) there’s also some frustrating issues of temp and time: a couple recipes are clearly just…wrong when converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. One told me to set my oven to 220C (390F). And…200C is 392F. 220 is 428. I aways just use the lower temp, knowing you can always cook food longer, but you can’t uncook it, and it’s turned out fine. Other times, a recipe will want me to like, thinly slice 4 spring onions in 2 minutes so they’re ready to add when some veggies are done frying, and occasionally I have to tell what feel like optimistic time-estimates “look, I am a big, slow guy.”

With big, slow hands. That’s the line, right?

But yeah, I’ve been paying $5 a month for the last 4-5, and even when things go wrong, it’s fun to be able to blame a failed recipe on someone else, you know? One time, my scale screwed me, and I ended up pouring in like, twice as much water as I was supposed to for a couscous. What was supposed to be a savory, almost fried-rice style mixture was like the weirdest congee I’d ever had. I still powered through eating half the weird dish, and rather than feel ashamed, I got to laugh with people for a week about “yeah, it didn’t click in my head that, obviously, if I’ve filled the 1 liter jug I have, I HAVE to have more than 400 milliliters of water in it!”

Now, legally, I don’t know how great it is to reproduce a recipe from the app, but luckily, I screwed the recipe up so bad, that it almost certainly legally counts as its own distinct thing! Also, I’m not going to include the side elements to the recipe to further distinguish this messed-up heap of a version/incentivize checking them out for the ‘real’ version. So if you want to make the same mess I did, let’s get to mixing.

Yak it Up, Chumps

Editor’s note: Jon finished that last section on Sunday evening, and proceeded to wake up Monday with his first kidney stone in around 2 years, which knocked him out for about 18 hours Monday-Tuesday between the pain itself and the swiftly obtained painkiller, only reaching normalcy at about 2 PM on Tuesday, at which point he pulled himself together, took a half-day off to rebuild his strength…and immediately got an eight hour migraine Wednesday. Which is, undeniably, VERY FUNNY in the context of “I’m so happy to be free of all this pain in my head, and all the drugs I’ve had to take to manage it, and excited to get back to writing.”

YES, I FOUND IT VERY FUNNY INDEED.

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the recipe itself. The thing is super-simple, probably. As we explained with Okonomiyaki the first time, the recipes are very much a “choose your own adventure” situation.  The recipe I’m using has a base of cabbage and green onion, with a top layer of fried mushrooms instead of a more common meat, because I was doing a vegetarian meal pack, because I bought some leeks and mushrooms at the farmer’s market, and needed to justify that choice to myself. So I went to pick up some savoy cabbage, and immediately hit the THIRD little frustration of using the app, which is really just a broader part of the first problem: see, a lack of localization extends to the LOCALE. By which I mean that there are a number of ingredients and ingredient packages that don’t have common substitutes over here. A LOT of recipes from the team call for 8.8 ounces of meat X, because what they’re ASKING for is 250g, but we don’t measure meat that way. Or, in this instance, they call for savoy cabbage, which is not as popular a cabbage here in the PNW, so I had to grab Napa, and hope that “one medium” was roughly the same for both.

And I suspect it wasn’t, which may be the main root of why this recipe turned out as “disastrous” as it was: I was just constantly struggling with size. This is supposed to be a 30 minute recipe, but from the pictures on my phone, from the time I lay out all the ingredients to the time I get the thinly sliced cabbage and green onion into the batter, a process known as “step one” in the recipe, FIFTY MINUTES had elapsed. I don’t know HOW that happened, as all I did was peel off the excess leaves and then run half a napa cabbage through a mandolin (or at least, as much as I could before there was nothing stable holding the leaves together and I had to leaf by leaf push them through, or lay them out and cut them myself).

This is not what almost an hour of effort should look like.

To be fair, it was a new mandolin, I’ve never had to cut cabbage on a mandolin before, so maybe that was all growing pains. Once you’ve got your veggies sliced, you toss them into a neat little batter of flour, egg, soy and sesame oil. Toss everything, and get your mushrooms frying.

Preferably in a pan, but if you can make the box work, I guess go for it.

This was a weird mistake for me: somehow, I was CONVINCED that both recipes wanted 7.5 ounces of mushrooms. They actually wanted 3.5 ounces each, so 7 ounces TOTAL. But in my personal opinion (and this will maybe inform how things go weird later/is connected to the “sizes felt off” problem), the 7 ounces is actually a great amount to fill the oven-safe medium frying pan I had. It was a good, single layer of frying mushrooms. And I specifically got to use cool mushrooms in this recipe of Lion’s mane (the puff ball looking one) and oyster.

Technically, before you do the next bits, you make some sauces, but as noted, in the interest of protecting Sorted’s IP, I won’t give you those exact recipes, though I will tell you that I riffed on them a little, making a Miso-Mustard-Mayo, and a Yakitori Sauce out of a ketchup base. You can try your own versions, or pay the guys $5 to know what they do.

Are you not tempted by THE MYSTERY SAUCES?

Sauces made during the 3-4 minutes your mushrooms fry (don’t worry. As I’ve explained before, Mushrooms can’t overcook: as long as you don’t burn them, they’ll be fine.), you tip in the batter and veg mixture, flatten it out to fill the pan, and fry it on top of the mushrooms for 4-5 minutes, before popping it into a hot oven for another 4-5. In theory.

For me, in practice, that was nowhere NEAR long enough to cook. Maybe my medium pan was just smaller than their pan, maybe my extra mushrooms really messed up the cook time, I don’t know. What I do know is that I cooked that okonomiyaki for probably 15 minutes, and while the TOP came out looking good…

I like how the Lion’s Mane cooked faster than the oyster, almost leopard-spotting the dish.

I can tell you that the INSIDE was…functionally like a weird omelet. The cabbage was still firm and a little stringy, the batter was still a fairly goopy mess. But at this point, I was ALREADY LATE to a thing I had scheduled for what I had BELIEVED would be an hour after I ate, but no dice. I slathered on the sauces, crumbled over some nori, and WOULD have sprinkled over some green onion if, in the shifting and moving of pans and cutting boards, I hadn’t dumped them all directly onto the floor/a conveniently placed dust-pan.

The mess practically cleans itself.

But the end result was at least, somewhat surprisingly, photogenic.  And taste-wise, while I was NOT in a happy mood as I scarfed it down, I discovered I wasn’t as mad as it could have been. As I said, I had somehow utterly whiffed on a fritter/pancake texture, but it turns out that the flavors involved WORKED for a weird omelet. I actually ran off to my next appointment kind of excited to re-heat the dish, as I thought that might move it more into what it was supposed to be. Which…didn’t REALLY work: while I definitely liked the re-heated versions more, I feel like they somehow pulled ambient moisture in my fridge into their Tupperware in order to make themselves even wetter, so another 10 minutes of baking wasn’t enough to work things out. But in the same way that I was excited to reheat the dish, I also feel like, having floundered through it the first time, that if I needed to, I could probably do it again in a much shorter amount of time, and probably produce something closer to what it should have been.

It’s simultaneously very vivid, and almost incomprehensible. The top left edges make me feel like I’m looking at those “this is what a Stroke feels like” pictures.

So, that’s one recipe down. Given the powerful suffering worked on me just by trying to get this one out, I make no promises that I can get you another one next month, but I do promise that I’ll try. And as part of that trying, I’m going to push myself to at least get a little more involved with our social media if I can’t get the posts out. Assuming saying that doesn’t lead to me like, breaking my leg, we’ll see each other soon.

NEXT TIME: ASSSUMING JON GETS IT DONE, WE FUSE THE MIDWEST AND THE EAST COAST BY WAY OF…GERMANY? IT’S FRIED GOO THAT’S GOOD IN A SCRAP.

Recipe

Mushroom Okonomiyaki

Ingredients

2 large egg

1.1   ounces of flour

2 tbsps light soy sauce

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 pound of napa (or probably preferably savoy) cabbage

5 green onions

½ ounce ginger

3 tbsp vegetable oil

7 ounces mushrooms

1 sheet nori

Mayonnaise and Barbecue Sauce (or gussied up alternatives) for service.

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 360 degrees Fahrenheit. Whisk together the eggs, flour, soy sauce, and sesame oil until it looks like thin pancake batter. Add a pinch of salt.

2. Thinly slice the cabbage and green onions, reserving ¼ of the onions until later. Add the remaining 3/4s of the onions and all of the cabbage into the batter, and grate in the ginger. Toss everything to coat.

3. Place a medium oven-safe frying pan over medium heat, with the 3 tbsp of vegetable oil. Tear the mushrooms into bite-sized pieces with your hands, and add to the pan, shaking and frying for 3-4 minutes, until mushrooms form a single layer with gaps, and are browned in places. Top with cabbage-stuffed-batter, and fry for about 5 minutes, before placing the pan in the preheated oven.

4. Cook until done. I wish I could tell you how long that is. Test it after 5 minutes, and every 3 or so minutes afterward like you would a cake: if the knife or toothpick is still coming out wet, it’s not done yet.  While baking, crush the nori sheet into flakes.

5. Once baked, remove from the oven, and flip out of the pan, so okonomiyaki is sitting mushroom-side up. Cover with thin spread of barbecue, flecks and daubs of mayo, and  top with flakes of nori and reserved green onions.