Okonomiyaki!

I've blogged about okonomiyaki before - when we went to Japan. We ate as much as we could. ;) It's a savoury pancake with cabbage and pretty much any other vegetable under the sun in it. Okonomi means "what you like" (roughly) and yaki means fried. When you're at an okonomiyaki restaurant in Japan, you can choose from a vast list of ingredients. In its normal form, okonomiyaki is neither clean nor allergy friendly. It is made with eggs, fatty cuts of meat and it's fried in copious amounts of oil. Then you smother it in a sweet vegetable/worcester sauce and mayonnaise. MMMM!


I love okonomiyaki. But, with an allergic kid and a waistline that has expanded just writing about it, okonomiyaki is not a wise choice in our house. So, I came up with an alternative that is probably a bit sacrilegious, but yummy enough to be a good alternative. 

As I said, it's a savoury pancake, so I started with my egg-free standard pancake, with some modifications to make it savoury:

1 cup flour (I used whole wheat - that is so not standard!) 

2 tsp baking powder (As I wrote this I realized that we've been using 2 tablespoons all along! Oops!)

1 cup dashi*

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp milk or water (in our house, we use hemp milk for K)

Vegetables:

- cabbage (a must - a usually buy the coleslaw kits as the cabbage is already chopped to the perfect size. You can always chop your own cabbage too!)

- corn

- zucchini (I shredded it)

- carrots (also shredded)

- tuna (ok, that's not technically a vegetable)

- pork (hmm...maybe I should have called this section "ingredients"; no pork this time, but it's a common ingredient, usually in thin strips)

*Dashi is a Japanese soup stock. It can be made from a number of things, including fish and seaweed. It gives the pancake a more authentic taste. Chicken stock or water can be used as well. 

As with a typical pancake recipe, combine the dry stuff first, then add the wet stuff, being sure not to overstir. 

Add the chopped/shredded veggies (and tuna) to the batter and stir only long enough to coat the vegetables. There should be more veggies than batter - although, there are no hard and fast rules. Spoon about 3/4 cup of batter onto frying pan and cook as you would a pancake - wait until it begins to be cooked on the sides, and flip. If using pork, it is placed on the top of the batter and fried. 

Serve immediately! Usually, it is topped with Japanese worcester sauce (Otafuku and Bull dog are the main brands)  and mayo, but we left that off of K's. We gave him some ketchup instead. :) It's also good topped with powdered seaweed and bonito flakes. 

Mmmm....okonomiyaki!

So there you go - a healthier, allergy friendly okonomiyaki!