As attentive Yosano residents will know, every month, Yosano’s ALTs film a TV show called ‘You Can Do It’. This month’s episode is centred around ‘nabe’(鍋). The word ‘nabe’ refers to both the meal and the clay pot into which ingredients are stewed. (It is said that the older the nabe pot, the more delicious the nabe meal.) Preparing nabe is easy: a nabe pot is placed over a portable stove, and vegetables and meat are combined to form a stew, which is ‘topped up’ with various ingredients over the course of the meal. When all the ingredients have been eaten, ramen or rice is added to the remaining stock for those with a little room left in their stomachs. The idea may be simple, but the dish is a hearty antidote to cold winter evenings. It is also a meal to be shared with friends or family; a nabe pot is designed to last an evening. Nabe might not be well known in the West (perhaps surprisingly given the recent ‘hygge’ trend), but recent years have seen a variety of innovative local nabe recipes come to the fore; Hokkaido, for example, is known for Ishikarinabe (石狩鍋), which features a milk soup-base and salmon. Whatever the recipe, however, the main rule of preparing nabe is that anything goes...a long as you have fun in the process.