Making Chikuzen Ni is FUN!! 筑前煮を作るのが楽しいよ！

This is a fun recipe that I got from a DVD that was kindly given to me in Tokyo at a foreigner information helpdesk. I decided to challenge myself with something harder than soba for a change, going for the oishisou Chikuzen-Ni. I hope you enjoy my photographic journey into the cooking of this delicious chicken stew dish!

Ingredients:
300g chicken
1 Burdock root/ Gogo skinned and sliced ~ 3cm columns
1 Carrot
1/2 Renkon/ Lotus root chopped
Bamboo shoot pieces
~8 Shiitake mushrooms
3 large Taro roots
100g Konnyaku /Yam jelly
Snow peas or green capsicum to garnish

Seasonings:
Dashi Broth (home-made)
Cooking Sake
Soy Sauce
Sugar (can be omitted if you use Kirin (sweet) as your cooking sake)

Techniques/Manual Labour:
Use a spoon to scrape/dig out pieces of Konnyaku. Apparently this is preferable to chopping because it will absorb the flavour of the stew better if you use the scraping motion. In any case it is fun to do =)

You have to then flash boil the Konnyaku for 5 seconds to remove 'the unique odour and scum'. I would suggest 10-15 secs as it is kind of recalcitrant.

Dashi Broth Stage 1. After soaking Dashi Konbu kelp for 30mins, put it on low-med heat for 10mins then remove. The picture is not great for showing it, but it has a beautiful green colouration and it has a subtle but nice perfume to it.

 Some of my friends, Mirin, Soy Sauce and Sesame Oil--->

Bring the broth to boil and take off the heat immediately. Add 20g Kezuribushi/Bonito flakes (dried, thinly flaked bonito/skipjack tuna) and soak. Skim off any white bubbly stuff.
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After like a 5 minute soak strain the broth and Ta-Da! here it is
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Put in a generous amount of sesame oil and stir-fry all ingredients until chicken starts to brown.

Transfer to pot and add 600-800ml Dashi, 60ml Sake, 50ml Soy sauce and 35g Sugar. Simmer on low-med until sauce is reduced by a half.

This is what it looks like when it has reduced (thickened).

Towards the end put in some sliced capsicum and cook for a further 5mins. Serve up and enjoy! I suggest drinking fortune milk with this (haha!)