All Family in One Bowl (and all are dead)

I've been eating chicken in the last 3 days since I bought a pack of chicken breast 3 days ago. I cooked almost the same dish two days in a row: Stir fry chicken with curry flavour on basmati rice. Today as I was at home for lunch, I decided to cook Oyako-don.

In fact, I had decided to make Oyako-don for lunch since I told my colleagues yesterday that I would work from home today. Oyako-don means:

親　　　　"oya" - parent
子　　　　"ko" - child
丼　　　　"don" - As in "Donburi", a bowl. A type of dish something on top of rice,
                           served in a bowl.

Basically it's chicken with egg (parent and child) on top of rice served in a bowl.

This is not hard to make but difficult to make it right especially when you don't have right tools.

Oyako Nabe

We have a dedicated "don" making pan, called Oyako Nabe (Oyako-pan). The key of Oyako don is that beaten egg is somewhat dissolved into sauce and getting cooked together. It is  easier to do if the pan is in the right size enough to hold a nice amount of soup for one egg and about the same size as the diameter of Donburi bowl - 16 - 20 cm ish? The pan is shallow like 2cm depth or something so it's also easy to slide the topping onto rice in a bowl without much hassle and mess.

I haven't got this Oyako Nabe. I haven't got a proper size of bowl either. I use my wok just because it happened to have the smallest bottom among all other pans in my kitchen. Bowls I have are for Ra-men (noodle in soup) so it is bigger than normal Donburi bowls.

They are not expensive or hard to get. It's just me being lazy and not bothered to create the space to store all different sizes of bowls and an odd shaped pan in the shelf. As in Japanese proverb, 大は小を兼ねる ("The greater embraces the less."), Ra-men bowl can embrace everything but ra-men is too much for a Donburi bowl. And a wok does a so so job.


Today, for I didn't even try to make a nice Oyako-don, it turned out to be a nice one just going with the flow. As I had been failing before, this time of Oyako-don is not too soupy, not too salty, nicely moist and seasoning was good. mmm, yoku dekita! (well done!)

I know however, above "Oyako-don" picture doesn't look proper. But never mind. As I keep staring at it, it started looking good forgetting how the genuine version looks like.

Oyako-don zoomed in!