How to cook "with visual instructions" "using familiar ingredients from your local grocery stores" healthy, traditional and delicious Japanese dishes!!
This is a quick healthy cucumber pickle recipe. It is so simple that you don’t even need to use a knife.
I break a cucumber with a rolling pin and my hands. This is a traditional way. It doesn’t take time to marinate when you follow this way because irregular surfaces can absorb the sauce easily.
Cucumber is high in potassium and water. Therefore it is effective for our health to eat cucumber.
I add ginger to the pickle sauce. Ginger is very nutritious and healthy. It helps our blood flow, helps speed up our metabolism, and blocks the oxidation process in our bodies.
This is not fried rice, but steamed seasoned rice. In Japan a major part of the diet is RICE. Traditionally we eat white rice with every meal. A long time ago Japanese people ate millet.
Today, we sometimes mix the rice with other ingredients to make Mushroom Rice, Bamboo Shoot Rice, Chestnut Rice, Greenbean Rice and so on. These are all steamed. If you have a rice cooker, it is very easy to cook!
Mushroom is low calorie (about 18 kcal per 100 grams). Also high in fiber and high in minerals (especially potassium). I didn’t used dried mushrooms this time, but dried mushrooms are usually high in vitamin D. This dish is cooked in one pot or in a rice cooker so it preserves the nutritions and amazing flavor.
If you want a change in your breakfast, please try this recipe, which is egg and cabbage cooked in the microwave. You can cook it in 5 minutes!
Egg is a great ingredient for breakfast as you know. Egg contains well balanced, essential amino-acids. So egg improves our immune system and promotes the elimination of waste products.
Cabbage is also a great ingredient for breakfast. Cabbage is a good natural stomach reliever because it is high in vitamin C and U. Vitamin U is officially called S-methylmethionine, and it is a good ingredient for stomach problems such as indigestion, upper stomach-ache and so on. In Japan we often eat fresh cabbage in salad and as a garnish. We also have many kinds of stomach medicine (over the counter) and most of those use vitamin U as an ingredient.
If you usually don’t eat a healthy breakfast because you don’t have time, you should try this. It is a very good way to start your day!
This is an EGG-FREE and MILK-FREE healthy, tasty Japanese-style sweet treat. Because of its sweet taste, Japanese use it for desert a lot. Examples are baked sweet potato, caramelized fried sweet potato, sweet potato snacks, dried sweet potato, mushed sweet potato and so on.
Sweet potato is high in fiber, vitamin B, C, E, and potassium. The amount of vitamin C in a sweet potato is 10 times of that in an apple. And the vitamin C in sweet potato does not break easily when heated.
Sweet potatos gain their sweet taste when cooked slowly. So I don’t use the microwave to make them tender so I can get a really sweet taste in the dish.
This recipe uses a small amount of Mirin instead of egg as a brush coat on the dough before baking. So this is also a great sweet for kids!
This “Sushi Canapé” recipe is totally original and great for a potluck. The ingredients are easy and it is a simple finger food.
The manner for making a sushi roll for this dish is not traditional. I came up with an easy way to roll which everybody can do without fail. But the taste is totally like regular sushi! You can top it with whatever you want such as smoke salmon, fish row, vegetables and so on. Once you know this recipe, you can serve Japanese sushi to your family and friends!
Enjoy your sushi roll!!
{Ingredients (15~20 canapés)}
2 pints Steamed Rice
3 beaten eggs
¼ lb. Ground Chicken
1 Avocado
¼ tsp. Wasabi Paste or Organic Wasabi Powder(combine with water to make Wasabi paste)
In the Japanese diet, simmered vegetable dishes are very important to fulfill the terms of the Japanese basic meals rule, which is called “Ichi-juu, San-sai.” This basic meals rule means basic meals should consist of one bowl of cooked rice, one kind of soup and three vegetable or fish side dishes.
Also simmered vegetable dishes are very common in Mahayana Buddhist cuisine for Buddhist monks. These dishes are an important nutritional source for the monks who are forbidden from eating meat and fish.
In the Japanese dish, C. maxima pumpkin is a common ingredient. It is high in vitamins, potassium, fiber and beta-carotene. The taste is very sweet. We also use this pumpkin for sweets. Interestingly the pumpkin is lower in calories and carbohydrates than bananas!
This recipe is incredibly easy. You can put water, Japanese common seasonings and the pumpkin in a pan at the same time and just simmer. We don’t use Dashi stock because the pumpkin has great flavor itself.
Steaming is a simple and healthy way to cook. And you can steam in the oven so it is very easy! Steamed dishes are very flavorful, the ingredients are tender, and steaming helps keep all of the ingredient’s nutrition!!
Steamed fish in aluminum foil is a traditional Japanese dish; although Japanese used to use paper instead of aluminum foil. Steaming this way has many practical benefits such as not keeping a fish smell inside the house from cooking, using fewer dishes, great preservation of each ingredient’s nutrition, condensation of amazing flavor and so on. I used Tilapia, onion, carrot and green onion. You can also use a variety of different vegetables, most kinds of fish and shellfish, a variety of meats and so on. You can taste each ingredient’s great flavor, which makes this approach different from other cooking methods.
Tilapia is high in potassium and vitamin D, E and of course omega-3. And also it is bland-tasting so you can cook it in many ways, like frying, steaming, sauté, baking and so on.
Japanese eat fish a lot so I highly recommend eating fish at least occasionally to stay healthy.
Nikujaga (Japanese style Beef-Potato Stew) is a Japanese simmered dish with a sweet-salty seasoning. It is very popular and everybody likes it.
This dish is one of the “Homemade taste” dishes, and in old Japanese traditions women who can cook this kind of simmered dish were considered full-fledged wives.
Interestingly, in 1878, a person who had beef stew when visiting England explained to a Japanese chef how the beef stew tasted, and the chef cooked it using his imagination. Eventually that’s where Nikujaga came from. That’s why the ingredients are similar to beef stew.
In Japanese simmered dishes, Dashi stock is the most important thing to add Umami to the dish. I used Kelp Dashi stock this time because I wanted to bring out the flavor of the ingredients. Please see the post on Kelp Dashi stock as a reference.
{Ingredients (servings 2)} *Click BLUE TEXT to link to the product on Amazon*
½ lb. Beef (sliced meet)
1 Potato
1 Carrot
1 Onion
1 ½ cups Kelp Dashi stock
(Recommended Dried Kelp for Dashi stock) Dashi Dried Kelp
This Ginger Soup is my mother’s original recipe. The ingredients are ginger, garlic, soy milk, onion, carrot and so on. Because of this, the dish makes you warm, helps your digestion, improves immunity, and speeds up your metabolism. I used to have the dish when I didn’t feel well. The dish has great flavor and incredible taste.
The nutrition in Napa cabbage is similar to that in regular cabbage, but it is lower in carbohydrate and calories than cabbage. Napa cabbage has Isothiocyanate, so it is good for digestion.
Importantly, Napa cabbage is an ingredient essential for Buddhist cuisine. Buddhist cuisine is a dish for Buddhist monks who are forbidden from eating meat and fish (Mahayana Buddhism). There are several detailed rules for cooking Buddhist cuisine.
For example:
Using the following in one meal.
5 cooking methods : Raw, Simmer, Bake, Fry, Steam
5 seasonings: Sweet, Acid, Salty, Gingery, Bitter
5 colors: Red, White, Green, Yellow, Black
In Buddhist cuisine the focus is on the minimum nutrition necessary for a human being. The goal is to not take too much energy and nutrition, and to be grateful for all life on earth. Recently, people on a diet or who have been fasting tend to eat Buddhist cuisine after finishing the diet or fast, because it is easy on the stomach and healthy. We can have real Buddhist cuisine in some temples so it is popular with foreigners too.
Japanese healthy diets are based on Buddhist cuisine. On my site, there are some dishes that reflect Buddhist cuisine.
Enjoy this healthy ginger vegetable soy milk soup!
Japanese Sweet Ginger Beef is popular around my hometown area, the Kansai region, which is in the west part of Japan. It is also popular in the Kyushu region.
The seasonings are soy sauce and sugar, and I also use ginger to get rid of the beef smell and to make the dish flavorful so it is salty-sweet. It is a typical traditional, but incredible tasty, Japanese dish like Teriyaki!!
We use fibrous beef meat for the dish which is called beef shank in English (Number 12 in the picture). Shank meat is high in good protein, vitamin B12, and vitamin K. it is also low in fat and cholesterol. The meat is hard by itself, but when it is simmered slowly, it becomes very tender and flavorful, and it makes great beef broth too!
This dish takes a little bit of time to prepare, but it is easy and simple. You can use this sweet ginger beef as an ingredient in salad, pizza, hamburger, and so on.
(5 square inches each)
(combine with water to make Wasabi paste)
for rolling sushi
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