Don’t want to wash dishes? No problem.
Japan’s Lawson convenience stores are great for grabbing a quick snack like Zelda-themed chicken or even a filling bento, but did you know you can also shop for ingredients to make a whole meal there? Japanese convenience store Lawson recently published a recipe for making okonomiyaki using mostly ingredients found in Lawson; but the catch is that you don’t need a knife, cutting board, or bowl in the cooking process.
If you’re not familiar with okonomiyaki, its base is essentially a combination of toppings, shredded cabbage, and a pancake-like dough base. You’d naturally need a knife or a shredder for the cabbage and a bowl to mix the ingredients in, but Lawson has ways around that.
Our Japanese-language reporter Yui Imai–who is also a self-professed messy cook–decided to give it a try. To make her mess-free okonomiyaki, Yui purchased three things from Lawson: a bag of shredded cabbage, a can of tuna, and flour.
To this she added ingredients she already had at home: an egg, okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes, and aonori seaweed flakes for topping. Since the cabbage is already shredded, that eliminates the need for a knife and cutting board, and as the recipe states, the fact that it’s in a bag is important.
Yui opened the bag of cabbage carefully and added her base ingredients right in with the cabbage: an egg, flour, and one can of tuna flakes. The flakes were in an oil broth, so that eliminated the need for extra oil in the recipe.
Mixing the base without spraying flour everywhere or tipping the bag over proved to be difficult at first, but Yui got the hang of it quickly.
Once it was mixed well, she poured her mixture into a lightly oiled frying pan.
She waited until it was browned one side, then flipped it like a giant pancake.
After a few more minutes, it was done. She topped it off with okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes, and aonori seaweed.
Yui thought it tasted pretty good! It didn’t differ too much from okonomiyaki she’d made at home before, and the flavor of the tuna really shone through. It was hard to believe she’d made this with so little cooking equipment.
Her favorite part was that all she had to clean up in the end was the frying pan, the plate it was served on, and her chopsticks. Admittedly, Yui did find herself wishing for the stability of a bowl during the mixing process, but it’s the perfect hack if doing dishes isn’t your strong suit!
Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]