Nikujaga(Niku: Meat and Jaga: Potato) is a dish which main ingredients is as it name suggest, meat and potato. It's kinda stew but more of Japanese style stew with the taste of classic Japanese seasonings such as mirin, soy sauce and sake blended in and cooked slowly.

Nikujaga is said to be a must when you are craving for Japanese home cook dish, its taste is said to be the symbol taste of mother's cooking. Since I'm a potato dish mania myself, I approved this dish and love it so much. Its taste very light yet delicious. If you're not fond of sweet tastes stew, you can reduce the amount of sugar used but I wouldn't recommend it.

Nikujaga recipes must have are potatoes, beef, carrot, shirataki and onion. As for some recipes, snow peas or long beans can be added, but we will not use it in this recipe. If you want to add it, you can just blanch it and add it just before you want to serve.

Prepare all the ingredients of nikujaga, boil a water with 2 tsp of salt for boiling shirataki later on. Peel the potato and carot and soak it in water. Do this to prevent potato from oxidizing. take the potato from water to cut it into cubes, big cut is okay but make sure to trim of the pointy part a bit.

It's done so that it won't break to another ingredient when left simmered. After processing the potato, wash off the starch and proceed to carrot and then the beef. Cut carrot randomly which will result in unique biting texture. For the beef, I used shortplate. Cut it into bite size or aound 6-8cm. Whilst cutting the ingredients, I boiled water for shirataki and boiled it at the same time to reduce time. Shirataki boil time differs according to what brand you are using, so please look at the instruction provided in the package. Whilst waiting for the shirataki we can proceed with the onion and thus all the ingredients are ready.

For nikujaga preparation, some points to be noted are:

• Beef cut to bite size to make it easier to eat.
• Carrot to be cut into random sizes but not to big to provide unique texture.
• Cover the potato with the oild so that it won't crumble easily when cooked.
• Shirataki to be boiled beforehand to remove stench/odor.
• Potato's side are cut into smooth surface to prevent it breaking during simmer.
• Skim foam formed when broth brought to boil.
• Cover the pot with a sheet of aluminium foils to make the seasoning is divided equally.