I really enjoyed this piece, Addison! When I lived in New Mexico I had time to cook these elaborate Japanese washoku meals and it made life feel exactly as you say--bigger, cozier, more intentional. Time due to the pandemic but also more mental space to think about and plan for meals like this, and then many delicious leftovers. Your piece reminds me that much of the structure of daily life is founded on intention, and habit. And that it’s within our power to shape our days, even with the simple intention of making our homes more homelike... in space but also in time.
If you’re interested, a really excellent cookbook that explains ingredients and offers a lot of great traditional Japanese home-cooked dishes (versus more elaborate restaurant dishes like ramen, sushi, or tempura) is Elizabeth Andoh’s “Washoku”. She also has a cookbook based on Buddhist monastic food called “Kansha.” I found these great introductions and reference books as a Westerner. They help contextualize a lot of the underlying meaning and intention in Japanese cuisine, which to my mind enriches the experience further.
Thank you! Yes, that sounds interesting - I've always thought it was interesting how what we think of as a cuisine, based on a typical restaurant menu in the U.S., is such a tiny fraction of the real thing. I wrote once "history is very different from the past," and I guess you could say restaurant menus are very different from the cuisines they represent.
That was the silver lining of the pandemic and something I hope we can keep. The sense that we really inhabit our homes and really live in the immediate neighborhood, and not in all the places we visit or commute to in normal times.
Totally agree about how restaurant menus tend to hide the scope of cuisines, no matter how ample the menu. I think collectively we also tend to forget the fact that there’s an infrastructure required for restaurant cooking (I.e. ample deep fryers, 24 hours to make an unctuous bone broth, the labor and refrigeration to make croissants, etc.). In the case of Japanese (and other craft-focused) cuisine as well, there’s the highly specialized knowledge/experience of the shokunin who make it. One can approximate it at home, but the infrastructure is harder to replicate.
Yes! So much restaurant-style cooking at home is just kind of underwhelming. The vast majority of copycat recipes don't capture the tricks involved, or they try to be "healthy" or something. I've figured out a handful of real restaurant-style dishes. My product is probably my simplest: green leafy veggies. (Very hot wok, too much oil, salt/sugar/MSG mix, 2-3 minutes with constant stir-frying motion, done.)
As I teach my kids to cook, this is something I am learning all over again: Recipes are only “easy” if you have all the prerequisite skills and knowledge.
Even a salad is laborious and time-consuming if you aren’t practiced at chopping veggies. And most cooks and recipe-writers don’t realize how many little bits of knowledge they leave out.
I really enjoyed this piece, Addison! When I lived in New Mexico I had time to cook these elaborate Japanese washoku meals and it made life feel exactly as you say--bigger, cozier, more intentional. Time due to the pandemic but also more mental space to think about and plan for meals like this, and then many delicious leftovers. Your piece reminds me that much of the structure of daily life is founded on intention, and habit. And that it’s within our power to shape our days, even with the simple intention of making our homes more homelike... in space but also in time.
If you’re interested, a really excellent cookbook that explains ingredients and offers a lot of great traditional Japanese home-cooked dishes (versus more elaborate restaurant dishes like ramen, sushi, or tempura) is Elizabeth Andoh’s “Washoku”. She also has a cookbook based on Buddhist monastic food called “Kansha.” I found these great introductions and reference books as a Westerner. They help contextualize a lot of the underlying meaning and intention in Japanese cuisine, which to my mind enriches the experience further.
Thank you! Yes, that sounds interesting - I've always thought it was interesting how what we think of as a cuisine, based on a typical restaurant menu in the U.S., is such a tiny fraction of the real thing. I wrote once "history is very different from the past," and I guess you could say restaurant menus are very different from the cuisines they represent.
That was the silver lining of the pandemic and something I hope we can keep. The sense that we really inhabit our homes and really live in the immediate neighborhood, and not in all the places we visit or commute to in normal times.
Totally agree about how restaurant menus tend to hide the scope of cuisines, no matter how ample the menu. I think collectively we also tend to forget the fact that there’s an infrastructure required for restaurant cooking (I.e. ample deep fryers, 24 hours to make an unctuous bone broth, the labor and refrigeration to make croissants, etc.). In the case of Japanese (and other craft-focused) cuisine as well, there’s the highly specialized knowledge/experience of the shokunin who make it. One can approximate it at home, but the infrastructure is harder to replicate.
Yes! So much restaurant-style cooking at home is just kind of underwhelming. The vast majority of copycat recipes don't capture the tricks involved, or they try to be "healthy" or something. I've figured out a handful of real restaurant-style dishes. My product is probably my simplest: green leafy veggies. (Very hot wok, too much oil, salt/sugar/MSG mix, 2-3 minutes with constant stir-frying motion, done.)
As I teach my kids to cook, this is something I am learning all over again: Recipes are only “easy” if you have all the prerequisite skills and knowledge.
Even a salad is laborious and time-consuming if you aren’t practiced at chopping veggies. And most cooks and recipe-writers don’t realize how many little bits of knowledge they leave out.