We eat onabe (hot pot) so much during winter because it warms you up, can eat so much vegetable and if you make light soup base first day and if you have left over, you can change flavor by adding different things like miso, spice or even curry!  I needed to make onabe today because I had left over home made white miso that I marinated fish for osechi (New Year dish) and I wanted to use it up.  So miso paste that I had already had some umami from fish that was marinated, so I made fish hot pot.  You can add any protein you like, but in our household, we LOVE seafood.

Ingredients

• Odashi (Japanese soup-base)
• White fish like cod
• White miso paste (or miso of your choice)
• Carrots
• Napa
• Any vegetable of your choice actually...
• Daikon radish
• Enoki mushrooms
• Shimeiji mushrooms
• Sake (rice wine)
• Soy sauce to taste

Directions (these are very loose directions I rarely measure and cook)

1. Chop vegetables and fish to bite-sized pieces.  If cooking root vegetable like carrots and daikon radish, want to parboil or microwave it so it won't take forever to cook.
2. Add tofu, daikon, carrots, hard part of napa and mushrooms (add harder veggies at first).  Basically trying to cook hard things, things that needs to absorb flavor and also put ingredients that would give flavor first.  Add odashi.
3. Bring everything to a boil. If bubble-foam start to form, skim the top and remove the majority of foam.
4. Add soft part of napa. Boil until it wilts a little.
5. Add fish because you don't want to over cook fish, but also get umami out of protein before adjusting the taste of soup.
6. Reduce heat then add miso paste - you don't want to boil miso too much. Boiling it will kill the good bacteria in the paste and lose flavor.
7. Add a dash or two of osake to taste.  This removes stink from fish or any protein.  Also add soy sauce to taste if needed.
8. Remove onabe from heat or if you have pot on heat, then lower heat to warm only, serve hot.

To spice it up a little, add a dash of shichimi or togarashi!  You may also put carb like rice, noodle, rice cake a the end!