Years ago, when we were living in Christchurch, one of The Old Girl's associates, Lindsay who's wife and he has become good friends of ours and she would once a month meet up for a meal and a glass of wine in the city. They discovered a great Japanese restaurant - the name of which I can't remember and it probably ended up under tonnes of rubble seeing that it was in the 'danger zone' - which we used to go to. It was one of those interesting Japanese eateries where you can sit at a 'bar' and have drinks while the chef, in front of you, cooked on tremendously hot and large griddles producing fantastic dishes amidst shooting flames, steam and sizzling sounds.
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One of our favourite dishes at this restaurant and one that was new to us was okonomiyake, which is a Japanese 'street food' type of pancake made with vegetables, rice flour, eggs and seafood - usually prawns. Every time we went there, as well as sampling other delectable dishes we would default to okonomiyake.
After leaving Christchurch in about 2000 we went to many other Japanese restaurants in Auckland, Wellington, Australia, NYC, Toronto, York and London but never again discovered okonomiyake or at least not anything like the dish that enthralled us in Christchurch. We did come across variants in cafes but they were pale imitations.
We tried to make it ourself at home on occasions but without a recipe (we did search) it was a bit hit or miss.
On Monday The Old Girl had to go down to Auckland and stayed overnight with the lovely Ilse and Lindsay who - surprise surprise had discovered a recipe for okonomiyake. Obviously Lindsay had been going through withdrawal as well. The recipe that she discovered is by the outstanding and favourite of mine ,Annabel Langbein whose recipes I follow with relish. Well, not with relish unless that was one of her recipes ( a pedantic old schoolteacher joke there).
Ilse cooked the pancakes for Lynn, them and their son on Monday night but also made two extra pancakes for Lynn to bring home with her. We warned these up and had with salad last night. Outstanding and very reminiscent of the pancakes we had in that Christchurch restaurant nearly 30 years ago. I'll be cooking these in the near future - that's for damned sure.
I hope that you can read the recipe and recommend trying it out. We used Hoisin sauce on top with some Japanese mayonnaise.
