Lunch and Dinner of Champions!

Wheaties may be billed as the “Breakfast of Champions” and that maybe true or not, but in the world of sumo and in our house Chanko nabe is the meal of champions.

First I must say that nabe mono is one of the few endearing benefits of winter. In my heart, good hearty comfort food is the ONLY good thing about winter. But for the uninitiated nabe simply means pot.(I’ll not tell you what it means in street Japanese). In the case of nabe mono it means an earthenware pot. Often translated as “hot pot”, the translation fails to express the richness and warming qualities of nabe mono.

There are many blogs, photos, and recipes of hot pot cooking on the web so I’ll let your fingers do the browsing. We enjoy chanko nabe as it is the famed food eaten twice daily by sumo wrestlers. I have seen them belly up for breakfast at the McDonalds in Ryokoku since they generally don’t get breakfast at their stable.(If they win their bout of the day they can get free burgers after the match at this shop) Suffice it to say there are as many different varieties of nabe mono as there are cooks in Japan. I am sure that there will be more pictures of vegetables and meat bubbling in broth on my food blog and Flickr before the winter is over.

Going out for a nabe mono dinner can be quite expensive and the best shops are often run by former sumo athletes thus driving up the prices. For a family night out a trip to a chanko shop is hard to beat.