How to cook "with visual instructions" "using familiar ingredients from your local grocery stores" healthy, traditional and delicious Japanese dishes!!
Of the many Japanese winter soup recipes, this Bok Choy Milk Soup is my favorite. It is easy to cook, healthy, and delicious!! I believe this is “The Winter Soup”!
Bok choy was brought to Japan from China around the 1970’s. The season for picking Bok Choy is early winter. So now is a great time to get delicious Bok Choy in many grocery stores in Japan and the US.
Bok Choy has great nutrition such as beta-carotene, vitamin C, potassium, calcium and so on. When we think about nutrition, we shouldn’t cook Bok Choy too long, but my mother always cooked this soup until the Bok Choy would get tender because it is easy for kids to eat. So many of my friends also loved my mother’s “Bok Choy Milk Soup”.
I used unsweetened soy milk in this recipe but you can use any kind of milk. And also I used turkey bacon but you can use regular bacon. I suggest you to taste and adjust the seasoning before serving if you use ingredients that are different from my recipe.
Nabe is a traditional Japanese simmering dish. We simmer sea food or meat with various vegetables in Dashi stock seasoning with cooking Sake and soy sauce.
At home or in restaurants we usually set a cooking pot on a countertop range on the table and share it as cooking the dish. The dish and the cooking warm us and the room up so it is common to have Nabe in winter.
Today I will introduce you to bacon (I use turkey bacon, but you can use any kind) and Napa cabbage millefeuille Nabe, which requires that we set bacon and Napa cabbage leaves alternatively in a pan and simmer in Dashi stock. This time I used Kelp Dashi stock, but you can use any kind of stock you want.
We add many kinds of vegetables to Nabe but Napa cabbage is a must-have vegetable. 95% of Napa cabbage is water so it is easy to eat for everybody because of it’s tender texture. The cabbage water also makes Nabe juicy even when simmering for a long time. Napa cabbage also has great nutrition. It is low calorie and high in vitamin C, potassium, iron, magnesium and so on.
Juicy, tender Napa cabbage and bacon makes your Nabe very delicious! I hope you will like it!!
{Ingredients (servings 2)}
1 head Napa Cabbage
20 slices Bacon
1 cup Kelp Dashi Stock (any kind of stock is okay)
(Recommended instant bonito Dashi powder)Ajinomoto – Hon Dashi
This is an idea for a quick breakfast recipe. It takes about 10 minutes to prepare and it is also delicious and healthy!!
To make the dish healthier, I cook scrambled egg with canned tuna. Also I add steamed edamame to the plate. When you season the edamame with butter and salt, it becomes like a side dish of corn.
Edamame is high is vitamin B1, vitamin C, protein, fiber, iron, potassium, and so on. Because of the protein and the iron, edamame is a great ingredient for breakfast.
As for the tuna, my mother always said “You can be more smart and do great on tests in school if you eat fish”. She stretched a story about DHA to make me eat breakfast but it was not totally a lie. DHA increases blood vessel elasticity and improve the function of red blood cells so people say it helps make your brain more active.
I hope this recipe will be one of your favorite breakfast recipes!!
Japanese “Sweet Pepper” is slightly different from bell pepper. It is smaller, thinner, has a little bit of bitter taste, has fewer seeds, and is always green.
This recipe is similar to other countries’ Stuffed Pepper recipes. But because Japanese sweet pepper has a thinner flesh, we can cook this recipe in a pan easily. I also sprinkle it with some soy sauce when I serve, but you can use any sauce you like.
I use Mini Peppers in this recipe. You can find these at many grocery stores.
Japanese sweet pepper is high in vitamin C and A. You might want to cook this pepper with some cooking oil because the oil helps our bodies get vitamin A more easily. This is a summer vegetable so it is good to eat during the Summer.
The yam has a sticky texture because of Mucin, one of it’s ingredients. Especially when the yam is grated, the texture become more smooth and sticky, and this sticky texture gives our bodies some great benefits, such as protecting our mucous membranes in the stomach, protecting our body from some viruses and so on. Mucin is a soluble fiber and helps keep water in our cells.
Traditionally, people say the grated Japanese yam loosened phlegm, so I used to eat it when I caught a cough. Additionally, the yam is easy to digest so it is good food when you are sick.
It is easy, simple and quick. Nothing difficult. Just grate the yam and mix with some Japanese Dashi stock.
{Ingredients (servings 2)}
5-inch length Japanese Yam
¼ cup Kelp Dashi Stock
(Recommended Dried Kelp for Dashi stock) Dashi Dried Kelp
It is a kind of potato that grows straight into the ground so it has a long shape. (It sometimes grows to more than 3 feet).
In Japan, people have eaten the yam for about 3000 years. Therefore, the yam is very important to the Japanese diet.
We can eat this yam raw because it has a gelatinized starch and some of the nutrition in this type of yam are breaks under heat. The Japanese yam is rich in diastase, a digestive enzyme which helps our digestion and absorption of nutrition into the body. Also the yam is high in vitamin B1, vitamin C, calcium, potassium and mucin.
Mucin is soluble fiber and helps keep water in our cells. Therefore, it protects our mucous membranesin the stomach, and protects our body from some viruses. Some studies say the yam also prevents dry eyes because mucin is an ingredient in tears. Mucin gives the yam a great smooth, sticky texture, especially when it is grated. This is great for our body. It heals our tiredness and helps our digestion, so the yam is great for your diet when you are recovering from being sick, when you have no appetite, and so on.
(The yam has Calcium oxalate, so it can sometimes make you feel itchy on your hands or around your lips when you touch it, but you feel better as soon as you wash the itchy part with acid water (a mixture of vinegar and water). In rare case some people are allergic to the yam, so if it gives you a weird feeling inside your mouth, you have to stop eating it and call a doctor.)
Today, I introduce you to Japanese yam salad. It is very simple and easy. I always use pickled plum sauce because it is extremely healthy and is a fermented food. But you can use any dressing you want, because the yam doesn’t have strong flavor so it won’t change the taste of your favorite dressing taste!
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!
Potato is high in vitamin C. It has about the same amount of vitamin C as spinach or orange. In addition the vitamin C in potato is resistant to heat so we can absorb the vitamin C easily from potato dishes. A raw potato’s calorie count is about the same as pumpkin and lower than sweet potato.
This potato galette recipe is very quick, easy and delicious! My mother always cooked it for a snack. It is also good to bring to potluck parties because the ingredients are just potato and cheese. There is no egg and no flour.
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