It’s easiest to think about Japanese cooking as having a handful of basic cooking styles with individual recipes as simply variations on a theme. Depending on what is locally and seasonally available, home-cooks apply one of the basic cooking styles to suit the food and their mood. (Exception to this pattern are the Yoshoku [Western food] and Desserts categories, because they weren’t a part of the traditional, everyday diet.)
This set of 19 recipes, with some imagination and a little skill, can easily be the basis to 100 or more dishes. Change a vegetable, substitute a meat, add that tomato from the farmer’s market or a herb from your garden – these recipes are meant to get you comfortable with a basic preparation for each cooking style, so you can grow your own set (of Japanese recipes) with inspiration from locally and seasonally available foods.
Aemono・和え物 and Sunomono・酢の物: Salads
Nice recipe list, read through the recipes and the recipes are very detailed. Would suggest to have a “tip list” which you see students have had problems on and how would you suggest to solve the problems in the “tip list”
Nice overview. I was a little confused when reading your description – you’ve titled the columns as “Cooking Styles” and “Recipes” but in the description talk about “categories” and “variations.”
Also, I want to read as little as possible when using a cook book. Is there a way visually or in practice that you could demonstrate the way you categorize Japanese food?
Thanks, Aaron, I’ll definitely make changes on the wording for categories/variations, etc. I did struggle a bit with the right wording. (Any suggestions?) As for reading… this is something I struggled with a lot! My dilemma – I think that with the right amount of context and knowledge about the food and techniques, the learner will understand why and how they are doing certain things in the recipes, and therefore will be able to improvise and make the recipe their own more readily. That means extra reading. BUT… when there’s a lot of text, people turn away or don’t try the recipe at all. Do you think there’s a way to present context and still have people “hang in” there until the recipe? You suggest a visual representation – I do like that…
Oh, one other point: I was expecting the list of recipes to be linked on this page and had to do some searching to find the drop-down list of recipes at the top. Now I just need to decide which recipe I’ll cook first this weekend!