This was a dish inspired by our latest trip to Japan over Christmas. My Japanese friend Haruko, took us to a nearby yakitori restaurant for dinner one night. This is the Japanese equivalent of the Spanish ‘Tapas’,  where you order exactly how many pieces you wanted and it gets made fresh and delivered to your table. Yakitori means grilled bird. What we had was grilled skewered pieces of chicken and pork bits. The tastiest bit is skewered chicken bum. Seriously…. Yakitori is cooked on open flame bit like BBQ. The charcoal flavor of Yakitori is simply amazing. There is nothing quite like fatty bits of meat struggling with open flame. The taste buds always win. This stuff goes so well with sake and beer .

Anyhow my attempt to recreate the taste

• Hand minced chicken thigh fillets (i.e. chopped up finely with knife)
• dried shiitake mushrooms
• soy sauce
• bonito soy sauce
• scallion
• mirin
• chopped tender ginger
• touch of sugar
• julienned shiso leaves
• lime (or yuzu but these things are impossible to find in Australia – if anyone knows where I can get my hands on yuzu either as a fruit or as a plant PLEASE let me know)

Mix the minced chicken, shiitake mushroom, soy sauce, bonito soy sauce, mirin, chopped ginger and sugar together to form a paste. Unfortunately I do not have a BBQ or open flame so I just pan fried these. I used a blowtorch to add the final bit of charred flavor on. Of course, this was served with some Junmai Ginjo Sake.