Washoku: Japanese home cooking

    I started to eat actual Japanese food around the time I turned 17.  A friend of mine couldn't understand my obsessions with the nation and my lack of taste for the cuisine.  It started by him dragging me to a sushi restaurant and force feeding me tekka maki.  The chef's laughed at me as I had to have my chopsticks converted to gaijin status.  The following year, a few days before my first trip to Tokyo, I had a different friend of mine teach me how to properly use them.  Close to 20 years later Japanese cuisine finds its self on my diner table through out the week (I have been eating miso and rice for breakfast quite a bit lately) and my children are adept at using chopsticks and cheer when diner is nikujaga.

    For the average American the only thing they relate to Japan usually is sushi and instant ramen.  For a long time I also didn't have access to a good deal of recipes and was mostly working off of a simple book for any dishes I was making.  Unless you have access to well stocked Asian grocery stores some ingredients for Japanese cuisine can be hard to come by and/or stupidly expensive.  It took me a while but I eventually found a fantastic resource to fulfill many of my culinary desires when it comes to the recipes.

   Cookpad.com is one of Japanese largest community recipe websites and an effort has been in place for a while to translate many of the recipes into English and host them on a website aimed at English speaking people wishing to cook more Japanese food and to learn ways of cooking non-Japanese food with flair.

   The link to the English version of the website is en.cookpad.com and is easily navigated.  If you're feeling adventurous and trusting in your Japanese language ability jump over to the main site and explore even more recipes.

いただきます!!