Aubergines are very popular in Japan and there are many different ways of cooking them. Japanese aubergines are much smaller than the ones you can buy here, so I pick the smallest I can find. You need several typically Japanese ingredients for this but I bought everything in the local supermarket except the wakame, which I bought in a local Chinese supermarket.
Japanese-style vegan gluten-free one-pot 20-minutes • 700 kcal per person 
Ingredients
For two people:
- Fresh ingredients & groceries
- about 300 g sweet potatoes
- 1 small aubergine (if you have real Japanese aubergines you’ll need three of them)
- half a packet of silken tofu (150 g)
- 1 cm fresh ginger
- From the store cupboard
- 1 cup of Japanese rice
- 1 tablespoon miso paste
- 2 tablespoon mirin
- a tablespoon of dried wakame
- shichimi togarashi and golden sesame seeds for seasoning (optional)
Preparation
- Cook the rice (see basics for how to cook Japanese rice).
- While the rice is cooking:
- Soak the wakame in about half a liter of water. It will increase in volume by up to 6 times.
- Wash and clean the sweet potatoes and aubergines.
- Cut the aubergines in round slices of about 3-5 mm thick.
- Cut the sweet potatoes in pieces of about 2 by 3 cm and about 3 mm thick.
- Slice the ginger as thin as you can.
- Put the aubergines, sweet potatoes and ginger in a microwave pot and add the mirin. Cook for 8 minutes at full power (900 W).
- After 10 minutes, take the pot out of the microwave and pour about 100 ml of the cooking liquid into a bowl. Put the miso into the bowl and mix until it is dissolved.
- Drain the wakame and add it to microwave pot.
- Cut the tofu into small cubes (about 1 cm on the side) and add it to microwave pot.
- Pour the miso mixture over it and mix the ingredients taking care not to mash the tofu pieces.
- Cook for 3 minutes at full power (900 W).
- Serve with the rice and season to taste with shichimi togarashi and golden sesame seeds.