Kabocha Nimono - simmered squash

So, one of my Montréal friends sent me this link for Japanese recipes, a blog maintained by a Japanese expat in Montréal . It seems quite nice (but she said to use dashi powder... no no no... it has MSG and all that crap... making dashi stock is super simple, and, your kitchen will smell like a warm sunny beach in Sri Lanka - not like the cheap Febreze ocean mist or whatever it is they call it... so...). It came out quite well. But of course it was a bit affected by my inherent distaste to follow recipes to the letter. Usually, I just read up the ingredients and I know which order things go etc. But since I am new to Japanese cooking I decided to also read up on the method and follow it. This I did, but I didn't pay too much attention to the quantities... Now I think I should have used a bit less dashi stock, so the soy+mirin+sake tastes are more accentuated. It was still pretty good though.

The other is Japanses rice - you r regular sticky white sushi rice. But in Japan it is common (not all always), to add azuki beans and some grains to your rice. You can find little packets of these grain mixtures, right next to the rice in the grocery store. You just toss these with the washed rice and boil them all together. The azukian beans then impart this purplish color to the rice then.