Cultural Dinner 101: Teppanyaki

Mom and I decided to organise a little dinner at home to celebrate the Gameboy's birthday, but sadly it turned out that majority of the family members were out and about. Dad was still working, attempting damage control by floods, Ms DT was out with her friends and Kim had a badminton game. We had wanted to invite my grandmother to the house for dinner but unfortunately she too couldn't make it. So yeah... it turned out to be one quiet evening. Until we decided to organise a teppanyaki dinner. oh yeah, everyone came home!

.Teppanyaki at home.

For those of you unfamiliar with teppanyaki: it's a japanese form of cooking where food of various sorts are cooked, usually self-cooked, upon a hot iron plate. The word itself is japanese, derived from two concepts: teppan (鉄板), which means iron plate, and yaki (焼き), which means fried or broiled. Teppanyaki - definition according to wikipedia.

.Before: marinating whilst cooking.

.After the lid was lifted.

Normally you'd see teppanyaki restaurants, particularly in Japan and Asian corners in some western countries. There in these restaurants, people would seat themselves along a table facing a huge flat iron surface where a chef would cook customer's dinner to order and occasionally play some fancy tricks, such as juggling their knife-like scrappers or create a fire performance.


.Preparing my dipping sauce.

.Other food awaiting to be cooked.
Unfortunately at home, we don't have that huge iron surface to play with.. Good call mom and dad, wouldn't want your kids to play with fire and sharp objects, now do we? And besides, where on earth would you place a huge iron plate in your house, right? Instead, we have a large teppanyaki plate which mom and dad had bought from Japan way back.

.Mom lifting the lid: ready to eat?.

Occasionally at home as family we organise a little teppanyaki session for dinner, usually accompanied with steamboat, however in this occasion we opted for the first. You can pretty much cook anything and almost everything in teppanyaki. In our case, we have an assortment of vegetables, meat, seafood and whatnots... complimented by an array of condiments. I usually just have a dipping sauce: a mixture of soya sauce, lemon juice and a dash of chilli sauce or nando's peri-peri. To check out what other things you can cook on with a teppanyaki grill plate, click here.

.Some of the food for teppanyaki.
I always look forward to our family steamboats and teppanyaki nights: each person gets to call dibs on their own pieces of food, and cook it themselves. And besides, it's also an opportunity for me to show my family some of my mad chopstick skills... oh yeah baby!