Beef over Rice

So, I’m three bites into the recipe requiring the onions and onion-like vegetables mentioned below, and I’ve already decided three things:

1) It’s too hot to eat, so I’m going to blog a bit while it cools.
2) The recipe calls for a little too much onion.
3) It’s still delicious.

Here’s the recipe, followed by my suggestions for improving it:

Ingredients:
2 cups dashi (you can use hon-dashi – the powdered stuff if you don’t know how to make dashi – it’s a bit of a pain)
1/4 cup sake
1 medium yellow onion, peeled, halved, and cut into thin crescents
1 Tokyo negi or small leek, with roots and rough portion of the top cut off, cleaned, rinsed, and cut diagonally into thin slices
3 tablespoons reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon fine-ground sea salt
1 teaspoon mirin
1/2 pound very thinly sliced beef fillet (about 1/8 inch thick) or ground beef
6 cups hot cooked rice
1 scallion, with roots and rough portion of the top cut off, cleaned, rinsed, and cut into thin slices

Instructions.
1) Place the dashi and sake in a medium saucepan over high heat. Add the onion and Tokyo negi (or leek) and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about five minutes. Stir in the soy sauce, sugar, salt, and mirin. Add the beef and simmer until it is just cooked through, about forty seconds.
2) Fill four bowls with 1 1/2 cups of rice each and ladle even portions of the beef mixture over the top. Garnish each serving with a sprinkling of scallion.

Serves four.

My recommendations:
1) Reduce the amount of leek and onion by about 25%.
2) Don’t use ground beef. Since the beef is cooked in the mixture instead of being cooked separately and drained, all the fat stays with the meal. I used ultra-lean cube steak which was easy to slice, and it worked well.
3) Also, feel free to reduce the amount of beef. A quarter pound might be too little, but as it’s just for flavoring and not the focus of the meal (the rice flavored by the sauce is the best part), you shouldn’t need any more than four tenths of a pound.
4) I’m not fond of raw scallion, so I added that along with the beef to take the edge off the flavor.

この　ごはんは　とても　おいしい　です。