Okonomiyaki, the famous savory pancake-like dishes of Japan’s Kansai region and the signature food of Osaka, were my second choice. Hanabiratake goes exceptionally well with them. But my basic test for a non-Western dish is: can I find everything I need on Amazon.com/Amazon.eu, Wal-Mart, or expect to find it at a common Asian grocery? With okonomiyaki, I was willing to write off nagaimo (mountain yams), as a loss outside Japan, but I figured I’d at least be able to find the rich, sweet okonomiyaki or takoyaki sauce that goes on it. Nope. No for beni-shoga (julienned ginger pickled in plum vinegar), or aonori (a powdered seaweed). It was already a bit of trouble to make the flour from scratch, mixing in your own dried fish stocks, but the fact that not even the most basic flavorings were available online forced me to continue on to my third choice: stuffed bell peppers, Japanese style.

In Japanese, this dish is called niku-tsume piman, lit. “meat-filled peppers.” The word piman, is in fact the French word for pepper, and despite the name, most Japanese households use relatively little meat in this dish. This dish is a good example of flexitarian dish, as a mere 8 ounces of pork makes an all-you-can-eat meal for the two adults and three eating kids in my household, plus enough leftovers for both myself and my wife to eat for lunch the next day.
My recipe is very typical of Japan, and also the same base that most Japanese people use to make homemade hamburger steak and meatballs (niku-dango). Between 200~250 grams (7~8.8 ounces) of ground pork, with 400 grams (roughly 14 ounces) of firm tofu (pressed to removed water, and one large onion (between 200~300 grams), make the base. The only thing we do differently is that we often add hanabiratake and/or maitake to the mix, typically 100 grams for each batch. That means, for us, about one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of filling contains only about a quarter meat. And it’s more than enough, in fact, I often can’t tell that the result is mostly not-meat.

These two recipes highlight hanabiratake as a good, non-obtrusive blending agent and umami-booster. Clam chowder is also not hard to make vegan; switch heavy cream for a soy milk-based substitute, use a kombu stock for the seafood taste, and then replace clams with cubed eryngii and/or shredded lion’s mane. While it may seem ironic to say, “meat-stuffed peppers” in Japan are already mostly not meat and it’s not too difficult to drop the meat altogether, replacing it with a mixture of maitake and maybe some BeyondMeat plant-based ground beef substitute or something if you really wanted to preserve something of the structure and texture of ground meat.