The Poor College Student Lifestyle

With barely enough to make the rent plus other bills this month, I'm down to skimping on groceries until payday next week. The sum total of my refrigerator contents when I opened it earlier was 8 things. That's all: 8. My choices for dinner were looking pretty slim. So as a poor college student, I have to get creative. We have some flour and chicken flavor packets from the ramen in one of the cabinets, so makeshift okonomiyaki it is.

For those in the know okonomiyaki is a Japanese favorite, for those who have read translators' notes in online manga: it is not a cabbage pancake, nor is it some strange kind of fried pizza. (I have seen translators call it both.)

1 egg
6 T spoon flour
1/3 cup chicken broth (made with part of a ramen flavor pack)
mix it all up well so it looks like pancake batter
thin cut strips of cabbage
2 T spoon minced onion
add veg to the batter

Put it in a greased frying pan (I used bacon grease because yum and also the recipe calls for bacon but I don't have any and used chicken instead)

I layered it with thin slices of chicken breast because I had one left in my freezer (this is where you're supposed to put the bacon that I have none of, as well as shrimp or other things you want in it), and put shredded cheese on top. Thanks roommate for letting me borrow without asking your cheese!

It looked pretty until I tried to flip it! Then the cheese on the frying pan gave me some trouble. I needed more grease so it wouldn't stick. Oh well, lesson learned.

Here's the mixture for sauces I used to make it taste like  oknomiyaki sauce that can be bought in any supermarket in Japan.
3T ketchup
1T each soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, honey

Put the sauce and some mayo on top for flavor! Yay! Dinner I didn't have to go grocery shopping for! Thanks to my friend from Kobe who showed me how to do this several months ago.