When I mentioned my rice donabe to my friend the journalist Keiko Tsuyama, she said she wanted to cook her favorite shiitake gohan in it, shiitake mixed rice. We invited a dozen or so friends for a dinner party-slash-rice tasting, and I carried my donabe on the subway to Keiko's place uptown.

This donabe is an amazing vessel. It has two lids to control the circulation of steam and is made from the remarkable heat-conducting porous clay that Iga has been famous for, for centuries. As a result, cooking rice in this pot is incredibly simple. Here are the steps for two cups of white rice:

-- Wash rice, drain and let it rest for 30 minutes in a colander, covered with a cloth
-- Add the rice and two cups of water to the donabe, and cover with both lids
-- Turn the heat to medium-high and let the rice cook until you see steam escaping from the outer lid, about 15 minutes
-- Let the steam escape for another 3 to 5 minutes. At this point you can smell the rice and a wonderful caramelized aroma coming from the donabe
-- Turn off the donabe and wait 20 minutes, then eat!

That's it. Now that I've gotten the hang of it, it takes about as much time to prepare rice in a donabe as it does in a high-tech rice cooker. The difference is the taste - an electric rice cooker can't possibly match the perfectly flavored rice produced by the donabe, with its delicious veneer of okoge, or caramelized rice crust. And the aroma? No comparison.

Okay, back to Keiko's shiitake rice. Here's how she prepared it in the donabe:

-- Soak dried shiitake overnight in water to create a fragrant shiitake dashi
-- Wash 3 cups of rice, drain and add to the donabe
-- Add 3 cups of shiitake dashi to the donabe
-- Add 2 Tbsp soy sauce, 3 Tbsp sake, and 2 pinches of salt to the donabe
-- Allow the rice and liquid to sit for 30 minutes
-- Add slices of reconstituted dried shiitake, and carrot and abura age if you'd like
-- Turn on the flame beneath the donabe and follow the last three instructions above

It turned out fantastic. Just ask our guests. As Keiko emailed me after, "anything cooked in the donabe will turn out wonderfully." Thank you, Keiko!

Finally, here's the best news of the post: You don't have to travel to Japan to find this donabe. I recently visited Sara Japanese Pottery, my friend Naoki Uemura's pottery shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and was surprised to find out that he's now importing and selling Iga rice donabe! So getting your hands on one is as easy as calling Naoki. (I'm not sure if he ships, but you can ask him.)

Note: If you do buy a donabe, make sure to follow the instructions on tempering the vessel before you steam rice. What you do is slowly prepare a watery rice porridge. This is a very important step to season the pot so it doesn't crack. Once you make the porride, you're ready to cook countless pots of rice!

Second note: I've become hooked on haiga rice, which is fully milled rice that retains the rice germ (which is milled away in white rice). This rice has more nutrition than white rice but doesn't have the strong taste of brown rice, so it compliments foods as well as white rice. A nice balance between white and brown. Give it a try.

When first you meet Mrs. Sachiyo Imai, Miss Kyoto 1953, master of the Japanese high arts of flower arranging, tea ceremony and traditional music, you don't think "savior of obanzai," her city's little-known soul food.

Kyoto, the ancient capital and cultural heart of Japan, is a place known for its rarefied cooking: Emperor's cuisine, aristocrat's cuisine, Buddhist temple cuisine and the ethereal and elegant multi-course kaiseki.

Obanzai is what the other half ate.

"It was the everyday cooking of Kyoto," says Mrs. Imai. "But it's disappearing."

Dressed in an elegant cobalt-blue kimono accented with ruby-colored camellias, hair sprayed and set, face powdered, left pinkie nail painted red, she dispenses with a formal bow and greets me to her home with a firm handshake and a hard look in the eye.

Mrs. Imai has taught obanzai cooking classes for 25 years. She's the author of a 496-page history of the cuisine and goes on TV to help keep obanzai alive.

Credit this to her grandmother. As a girl, Mrs. Imai watched her obaasan cook these dishes for an extended family of fifteen living under one roof. Now 71-years old, she can still remember the tastes, smells and colors of those foods, and how the steam felt on her skin as it came off a boiling pot.

"I use these senses to recreate my grandmother's cooking," she says.

Obanzai, as you'd expect of everyday chow, is a simple cuisine. Most dishes are cooked in a homey style called nimono; that is, foods are simmered in a typical Japanese dried-bonito-and-kelp stock, the dashi. In Kyoto, this stock traditionally has a delicate and light taste. So the natural flavors of the ingredients -- say, the sweetness of vegetables -- come through.

This is practical cooking: Like a down-home pot of collard greens, you can whip up a big batch at once. And unlike an exquisite and fleeting finger of sushi, these dishes stay moist and flavorful and hold for a long time. A plus when you're dealing with fifteen hungry pairs of chopsticks. Obanzai is more than a set of humble recipes. This cuisine is about signature ingredients unique to Kyoto -- the product of the city's geography and royal pedigree.

Ringed by mountains and fertile valleys, in the old days inland Kyoto was a two day hike to the ocean and its fresh fish, Japan's main fare. So citizens here got creative. They came up with high-protein artisanal foods like yuba, soy milk skin like ribbons of pappardelle, and fu, wheat gluten pounded from flour. They hunted boar and deer. They foraged for wild mugwort, bamboo shoots and field horsetail. They dried and salted mackerel, herring, tiny anchovies and other fish. And they cultivated distinctive Kyoto heirloom vegetables grown only in this area, called Kyo yasai.

These singular vegetables fed the emperor and the Buddhist abbots. They were used to prepare refined kaiseki dishes. And they made up the bulk of the everyday diet.

"Kyo yasai is the heart of obanzai cooking," Mrs. Imai explains. To understand her soul food you have to understand her vegetables.

Mrs. Imai heads to a nearby farm, a drive that lasts all of five minutes.

She hikes up the bottom of her kimono with one hand, clutches her purse with the other, and makes her way in zori sandals along a rocky path that borders a field. Lines of onions sprout from the neatly plowed brown dirt, giving off a nose-puckering zing. Five rows of crescent-shaped hot houses nearby snake down the field like giant three-foot high caterpillars. Bright greens called mizuna and mibuna grow inside. A compact red Yanmar-brand tractor sits alongside under a tarp.

Gaze up from the field and you'll see houses, three-story apartment buildings, TV aerials, city streets, streetlights, electric poles and a golf driving range with a 100-foot high fence. At one time Kyoto vegetables, meant, literally, Kyoto vegetables. The city itself was an agricultural zone. Today a few farms still exist, wedged like pieces of a pastoral jigsaw puzzle into the urban neighborhoods.

Mrs. Imai finds the farmer, a cheerful 57-year old woman wearing a long white rubber apron and pink rubber boots. Her name is Yuriko Imai, a distant cousin. She and her husband grow vegetables on five acres spread over five urban plots.

Farmer Imai explains that heirloom Kyoto vegetables -- 41 official varieties in all -- are protected by law. Many come from seeds brought as gifts to the emperor and handed down through the generations. She grows eight kinds. Each is a lesson in Kyoto history. Her onions are three-foot long Kujyo leeks, first recorded in 711. The mizuna greens, a spicy leaf like rocket, date back to 1683. Shogoin daikon radish are named after an old Kyoto temple near where they first grew. Farmer Imai brings one over. It's round and fat like a white-colored bowling ball. A plume of green leaves sprout from the top. She sticks it on a scale: Nine pounds of radish.

Back in her house, Mrs. Imai heads to the kitchen and stands behind a twelve-foot long, L-shaped marble counter appointed with two sinks, a four-burner induction stove and Bosch dishwasher. The words "Original Sachiyo" are stenciled in big English letters along a cabinet. She slips over her kimono a custom-made chef's coat of fine, crimson-colored raw silk with elastic cuffs. "My design," she says proudly.

Mrs. Imai pushes up her elastic cuffs and places three obanzai dishes on the counter: salted herring simmered with dried kelp; julienned daikon radish and bright red heirloom carrots in rice vinegar; and slivers of leek and carrots cooked with okara, soy pulp the consistency of crumbly farmers cheese, the humble byproduct of tofu making.

Obanzai is versatile cooking, she explains. In the spring you simmer the salted herring with bamboo shoots; in the summer with eggplant. Vegetables are always cooked or pickled. Nothing is wasted. She pulls out a dish of pickled radish leaves as proof.

Mrs. Imai looks up and points above her head. Painted on her natural pine ceiling are still lifes of Kyoto vegetables, fish and other traditional ingredients. They're grouped together by the seasons. "The most important thing is the seasons."

There is yet another side to obanzai cooking, she says. "This food was folk medicine." Well-balanced combinations -- like dried sardines boiled with burdock root and sansho pepper -- had health benefits. People also ate certain foods on certain days. "It's pretty deep."

But these traditions are vanishing, says Mrs. Imai. Few people today live with an extended family like she once did. "This kind of cooking is almost gone."

Almost. Walk into a Kyoto restaurant called Menami and along the cypress-wood dining counter you'll see a line of family-sized serving bowls that would make Mrs. Imai proud.

Menami is one of a handful of places here that specialize in obanzai cooking. It's a quiet spot on a side street in the city's busy central district. Eight seats run along the dining counter. 32-year-old chef Ippei Yamamoto and his second, in white tunics, black pants and traditional wooden flip-flops with socks, prep in an open, three-foot wide space behind it. Four tables line the opposite side of the narrow room.

The ceramic and porcelain bowls, seventeen to be exact, might remind you of bygone dinners with your closest dozen relatives. They're filled with traditional Kyoto comfort food: Okara with carrots and shiitake mushrooms; vinegared sardines; boiled ebi imo, "shrimp potatoes," golf ball-sized taro that curves like the crustacean.

Customers linger over the bowls and call out what they like. Chef Yamamoto dishes up delicately sweet, translucent slices of Shogoin diakon, like the one on the farm, simmered with slivers of deep-fried tofu. He serves boiled heirloom burdock root; salted herring with heirloom leeks; heirloom turnips simmered with dried persimmons.

A different kind of crowd lingers around Mrs. Imai's kitchen counter the following day. Nine women in flower-patterned aprons are here for an obanzai cooking class, including a professional from Tokyo, 300 miles away, who "secretly" flies down twice a month -- and who asked for anonymity so her bosses wouldn't find out.

The women work quietly as they chop an heirloom mustard green called hatakena, mash tofu in a salad bowl-sized mortar and pestle and scribble down notes.

Mrs. Imai watches, corrects and instructs. She adds a little soy sauce to a bowl and explains why. She puts a big pot with the greens and dashi stock to boil on her modern stove. It gives off a homey, satisfying aroma.

The group prepares the mustard greens three ways. They pass around tastes on small plates. "These dishes were handed down from generation to generation," says the professional from Tokyo. "Not many people can cook this way anymore."

"All my dishes have meaning," explains Mrs. Imai. Teaching this class is her way of keeping her grandmother's traditions, and spirit, alive.

When the food is ready, the women sit at a long table and eat lunch with bamboo chopsticks. After they're done, Mrs. Imai hands out songbooks. The group gathers around a baby grand piano -- also in Mrs. Imai's repertoire. She sits down to play. They end the class with another sort of classic -- singing "Way Down Upon the Suwannee River," the English words written out in Japanese.

To find Menami, click here and check out "C33."

If you're interested in joining Mrs. Imai's cooking classes -- in Japanese only -- you can contact the NHK Cultural Center in Kyoto and ask them for details. Call 075-343-5522 (also, Japanese only).

My girlfriend and I found two recipes for this dish, one from a contemporary cookbook, the other from a more traditional one. We combined ingredients from both recipes to assemble our hotpot (remember Chef Ono's no rules rule to hotpot cooking). Here are the ingredients we used (buy enough, of course, for the number of people you're feeding):

-- shiitake, shimeji and enoki mushrooms
-- hakusai (Napa cabbage)
-- shungiku (chrysanthemum leaves)
-- naga negi (Japanese leeks)
-- kuzukiri (arrowroot noodles)
-- yaki tofu ("broiled" tofu)
-- gobo (burdock root)
-- daikon
-- dried shiitake mushrooms
-- sakekasu (sake lees)
-- saikyo miso (a style of white miso)
-- wild Coho salmon
-- yuzu kosho (aromatic yuzu citrus rind combined with white pepper)
-- green onions

According to the traditional cookbook, families in Hokkaido sometimes substitute local milk and butter for sakekasu, and often add local potatoes, too. This cookbook also recommends a dashi (stock) prepared by first soaking konbu (kelp) in water for an hour, then simmering salmon bones and head to make a stock (in the fine tradition of wasting nothing in Japanese cooking). Salmon parts are plentiful in Hokkaido (ingredients collectively known as ara), but I guess you'll have to know a fishmonger or buy a whole salmon to find them here.

We decided instead to follow the contemporary cookbook's approach, which structures the hotpot as a progression of flavors that build on each other: First shiitake mushroom broth and sakekasu with green onions, then tangy yuzu kosho, and finally, white miso. This layering of flavors sounded amazing. Here's how we did it:

Several hours before dinner I salted the salmon and put in the refrigerator to cure slightly (overnight would be good, too). An hour before dinner I soaked four dried shiitake mushrooms in a mixing bowl of water, and soaked the kuzikiri in another bowl of water. Then I prepared the ingredients: I portioned the mushrooms, hakusai, shungiku, negi (white part only), yaki tofu and salmon into bite-size pieces. For the gobo, I scraped the skin off with the back of a knife, cut into one-inch or so piece and sliced lengthwise, before placing the slices in a bowl of cold water so they wouldn't discolor. For the daikon, I peeled it, then cut into two-inch rectangles, a half an inch thick. For the green onion, I thinly sliced both the white and green parts. Once cut, I arranged all the ingredients on serving platters, save the gobo, which stayed in the water. I also put the saikyo miso and yuzu kosho into bowls.

The sakekasu had a really special pedigree. It came from the famed Dasai brewery in Yamaguchi Prefecture and was the lees of their highest quality junmai daiginjo. It was a gift to a restaurateur friend who passed some along to me. It had a powerful sake fragrance and a pale sweetness from the rice. What a treat. I diluted three ounces of so in a cup of boiling water (you should adjust for taste, of course). You can find wonderful sakekasu via mail order, by the way, at the Sushi and Japanese Market (see my link to the left).

Now I was ready to start cooking. I filled the donabe a third of the way with liquid from the dried shiitake, poured in the diluted sakekasu and neatly arranged the first round of ingredients. I covered the donabe, and heated it on my stove until I boiled, then transferred to a portable burner at the center of the dining table, where my guests waited, chopsticks in hand.

First round: We ladled bowls of ingredients and broth and sprinkled green onions on top. What a play of flavors between the shiitake mushroom broth and the sakekasu, and the raw green onions.

We added more ingredients and more shiitake broth and diluted sakekasu, covered and cooked.

Second round: This time we flavored our bowls of nabe with yuzu kosho, an extremely aromatic citrusy and peppery condiment. A totally different experience, fantastic.

Once again, we happily added more ingredients and more shiitake broth and diluted sakekasu, covered and cooked.

Third round: For this round, we added a daub of delicious saikyo miso to our bowls of nabe and mixed together. Saikyo miso is a lightly fermented miso with a high concentration of natural sugar and low in salt. Yet another flavor dimension.

You guessed it, more ingredients and more shiitake broth and diluted sakekasu, covered and cooked.

Fourth, fifth, sixth rounds: I can't remember! I think we started mixing and matching at this point.

I guess the moral of this story is that hotpots can be as simple or intricate as you like -- it's up to you. Enjoy!