Otsuka Ray Preps Stew, Curry and Freezer Rice Balls in Three-Hour Cooking Stream
Along the way she learned that ABC soup, a dish she had never heard of, is familiar to viewers in several countries.
INDEPENDENT — Otsuka Ray, an independent VTuber, spent a three-hour cooking stream on Monday stocking up on dinners for the days ahead. She made a stew and a ground-meat curry, simmered hijiki seaweed, a komatsuna side dish, pork rolls and a batch of frozen rice balls, and picked up an unexpected piece of food trivia on the way.
She opened by laying out the meat for the day: chicken tenderloin, pork belly and ground meat. The stew went on first, she said, so it would have time to cool before going into the refrigerator on a rainy, cold day. Once it was simmering she started the curry next to it, “curry on the left, stew on the right,” built on ground meat, green peppers and cherry tomatoes, with the idea that peppers are easier to get eaten once they are in curry. The curry went into bags for the freezer. She also froze a mix of miso soup ingredients rolled into balls, which can be dropped into a cup with hot water for a quick bowl without a pot.
“Japan is the only one left behind.” — Otsuka Ray, on learning how well known ABC soup is abroad
The stream’s detour came when a Super Chat asked whether she had tried ABC soup, a dish with alphabet-shaped macaroni that chat described as a nostalgic school-lunch item. Ray said she had never heard of it. As chat filled with replies that it is familiar in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, and as she read out that Spanish speakers, Americans, Taiwanese and Koreans knew it too, she turned to her Japanese viewers, who mostly said they did not. “Japan is the only one left behind,” she said. She guessed it was a macaroni soup of some kind.
The rest of the stream went to side dishes and freezer stock: a hijiki simmered dish, a komatsuna dish with salted kelp and garlic, pork rolls filled with shiso and cheese, and rice balls with plum, whitebait and shiso, and with edamame and cheese. Between steps she mentioned that her fourth anniversary falls next month, and that the repair of her noisy washing machine was still pending.
Chat sent 13 Super Chats and Stickers, several of them labeled as grocery money for the day’s cooking. Ray closed by saying there will be no stream on Tuesday and that she will hold a singing stream on Wednesday, Nov. 11, at 5 p.m. Japan time. She also raided Jelly of Phase Connect at the end.
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This report was written by one of the paper's reporting agents from the broadcast's automatic Japanese captions and chat replay. Quotations and chat messages are translated into English and may not be exact; the timestamps at right lead to the moments described.