Lets Cook Japanese Food Everyday Recipes for Home Cooking
Lets Cook Japanese Food Everyday Recipes for Home Cooking
“Yum!” thought Amy Kaneko when she tasted the Japanese home cooking she’d married into. Even better, turned out it uses easy-to-find ingredients, and she couldn’t believe how simple the techniques are for food this delicious. This terrific cookbook showcases 70 of Amy’s favorite recipes, including Tonkatsu (crispy pork cutlets in a tangy sauce) and Onigiri (cute little rice balls stuffed with salmon). A glossary describes the more unusual ingredients and a source list makes it a snap to find and use Japanese specialties such as daikon, miso, and wasabi. It’s tasty, it’s practical, it’s a wow with family and friends so Let’s Cook Japanese Food!
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars A great intermediate-level book
I just bought a copy of this book because I was so thoroughly pleased with it when I borrowed it from my local library. I spent a school year living in Japan with a host family and a mother that loved to cook. I watched her cook and loved eating her food, and the basics I did not gather from watching her were filled in by this book. The beginning of the book does a GREAT job of explaining how to use and buy ingredients and tools. The photos in the book are really helpful, so much that I wish there were a few more, especially of the finished products. As far as recipes are concerned, I have tried four or five of them and all but one tasted absolutely amazing on the first try. That’s far better luck than I have had with translating recipes and attempting them.
I am not sure I would recommend this book to people with absolutely no knowledge of Japanese food, but if you know Japanese food when you see it and want to learn some easy and good Japanese home cooking, this is a great tool.
5 Stars Finally! A book of Japanese comfort foods!
I checked this book out at the library.
It caught my eye because it is different from the usual traditional Japanese dishes, instead it was all the foods I had grown up with that my Japanese mother had cooked for our family. Many of the recipes, I used the instant-boxed version (eg kare-rice and hayashi rice), so I was delighted to see a homemade version! Some reviewers said that this book isn’t “authentic” because it was written by an American married to a Japanese, but her mother-in-law definitely taught her very well, and many of the recipes, most Japanese are very familiar with and are a classic favorites! ^.^
4 Stars Good direction, but too many ingredients
I got this book from the library with high hopes to become the next great Japanese chef. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed, but at no true fault of the author. Most of the recipes require a lot of ingredients (that is just how Japanese food is) and yes, she does give good examples of how to replace the tricky ingredients with other things, I am just too cheap to spend a lot of money on ingredients I might not use for other recipes. I ended up making only 1 recipe in the book (Tamagoyaki, Sweet Rolled Omelet) and it was really good, tasted just like the egg sushi that I get at the restaurants.
5 Stars Valuable for more than just the recipes
My hubby was born in Tokyo, but came over at 7. He’s a great cook, but his repertoire of from-scratch homecooked Japanese food is pretty limited — miso soup and fried rice. He’s taught me those. Everything else Asian that we eat at home comes partially out of a box/bag from the Asian grocery — curry, mabo tofu, real ramen, and okonomiyake.
I’ve bought several Japanese homecooking cookbooks, but something was missing from the translation on the **method.** The author of this book explains those missing methods in ways I can understand.
For example, the author explains how to cook kabocha squash. Kabocha is probably in everyone of my Japanese cookbooks. Being used to boiling potatoes for American fare, I’ve always put way too much liquid in it. I end up with mush. She says 1/2 inch of liquid at the most. I can’t wait to try this out when the weather gets cooler.
I love the narratives that come with every recipe.
You don’t get a whole lot of recipes in this book, but I think her explanation of *how* to cook Japanese homestyle food is well worth the price.
5 Stars Yay! Yay!
Ms. Kaneko has created something unique — a Japanese cookbook that reads, in its way, like Betty Crocker. These are recipes that she and her family make at home in California, and she has used commonly-available ingredients, with substitutions noted for things like teriyaki sauce and tonkatsu sauce. I have used a couple of recipes (and look forward to trying more as our schedule opens up) and found them to be delicious and no more complex than a good American recipe. The measurements are in English (Imperial) rather than metric (which also makes it friendlier to an American cook). If you are trying Japanese cooking for the first time, this is the cookbook you want.
