Monjayaki, or more widely known as ‘monja’, is a delicious Japanese dish with an even more interesting history to tell. While some say this dish was invented by kids who would make food out of whatever they could buy from convenient stores, others have said it was invented around the time of World War II, when resources like rice were scarce. Making good use of what was available to them, the Japanese people began to incorporate more flour into their diet. Since teppan grills are a rather simple tool for cooking, creative cooks would take whatever ingredients they had, and mix it with the water and flour base, allowing for a variety of ways to make dish. Monja is usually eaten directly off the grill with an adorably small spatula, and some say that children would use the grill like a chalkboard to practice writing in the flour mixture, thus why they call the teeny tiny spatula moji-bera, meaning “word spatula”, how interesting is that?
