Read an Excerpt
Introduction
If I told my seventeen-year-old self that I would be writing a cookbook, developing recipes, and making YouTube videos for a living, she would be very surprised. I think she would say: “Wait, why are you not a flight attendant?!”
And yet here I am, writing a book that reflects my journey as a Japanese woman living abroad for many years. No matter where I was during those years, whether West Virginia or New York, Orlando or Los Angeles, I sought to re-create the flavors of my Japanese upbringing using the ingredients I had available to me—first as a cure for my own homesickness, and now as part of raising my son, nourishing him with the foods my own mother cooked for me.
This book is proof that the tastes from home can be yours, no matter where you are. And for me, home began in Hiroshima, where the threads of inspiration for these Japanese recipes originated, then twisted and turned as I moved away and found my own culinary path, “making it Japanese” wherever I went, and now stretching out to your home with this book.
I come from a small seaside city in the Hiroshima prefecture, in the southwestern part of Japan. My parents’ house is surrounded by agricultural land, with the mountains on one side and the Seto Inland Sea on the other. We lived next door to my paternal grandfather, a retired police officer who grew tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables in our shared garden. Every day, I rode my bicycle to school along the coast, breathing in the strong scent of oyster farms. We had access to an abundance of fresh seafood, and on weekends we would go clam digging.
My maternal grandmother ran a kissaten (Japanese tearoom and café) with my mom’s help. She served simple, comforting meals, such as yakisoba in a sizzling cast-iron pan, fried rice, coffee jelly, and shaved ice in the summer. I spent much of my childhood at the kissaten, pouring water for customers and chitchatting with them. Because my mom was a talented cook, I didn’t feel the need to learn. Instead, I watched her for hours on end as she folded gyoza faster than my eyes could follow and never measured ingredients—one circular pour of soy sauce, a handful of bonito flakes, a dash of sake. In my spare time, I read cookbooks and food magazines and daydreamed of flavor combinations.
I also dreamed of living abroad. We didn’t travel outside the country as a family, so my only exposure to English was a conversation class I took after school. I’m the eldest of three children, and my dad didn’t want me to move far away, but I was determined to study abroad. Encouraged by my mom, I found several opportunities to travel: first a homestay of two weeks in Brisbane, Australia, followed by a month-long exchange program in Melbourne.
However, according to my uncle, the best way to see the world was as a flight attendant. He suggested I study at a junior college where many of the graduates go on to become flight attendants. I embarked on this path, although deep down I knew it was an excuse to leave Japan and not my true passion. I didn’t get any of the flight attendant jobs, and eventually I transferred to a four-year college where I majored in English.
My first time traveling to the United States was for a year-abroad program through my university in Osaka. They chose a city in West Virginia, which seemed close to New York on a map. Imagine my surprise when I arrived! In some ways, the rural area reminded me of my hometown, although I missed being by the sea. I lived in a house with several other exchange students. Being away from Japan for such a long stretch made me more aware of my heritage.
There was only one Asian supermarket close by—a tiny grocery store with a mishmash of ingredients from all over Asia—but I found sake, mirin, and soy sauce. I realized that with those three ingredients, and if I was creative in adapting my mom’s recipes, I could appease my homesickness.
After college, I moved to Orlando for thirteen months to work at Disney World’s Japan Pavilion. There were about thirty of us, all women aged twenty to thirty-five. We formed a tight-knit group. Like during my year abroad in West Virginia, we cooked to satiate our childhood cravings, but we had to compromise with the ingredients we found at the local grocery stores, often searching for substitutes to conjure those flavors we so missed.
By then, I think my parents realized I might never permanently move back to Japan, though I did return for a few years. I worked for a company in Tokyo that helped exchange students. One of our clients was a Japanese culinary school, and they asked me to organize a tour of culinary schools in New York. Within a few months, I was hired to be the school’s translator and event coordinator.
We invited famous French chefs for demos, and I would translate from English to Japanese. (Most of the chefs spoke very good English.) I loved how passionate and demanding the students were, often coming in on weekends or when the school was closed. As I listened to the chefs, I absorbed their knowledge without quite understanding what they were saying. It was like translating someone’s words without grasping their exact meaning. I was drawn to this world and yet afraid to dive in. I knew culinary school was expensive, and I wasn’t sure I could shoulder the pressure.
In 2007, the culinary school asked me to open their pâtisserie café in New York. During that time, I met my husband and decided to make the US my home. So began my real immersion in food, first at the café, then at a Japanese restaurant in Midtown specializing in sake, and finally at Korin, a Japanese knife and kitchenware store in Tribeca. Although I enjoyed my work, something wasn’t quite right. I was surrounded by ambitious people who were following their dreams, but what about my own ambitions? For years, I had been thinking about culinary school without taking the plunge. I decided it was time—after all, I had enough savings and had found a program that allowed me to continue working full-time at Korin. So, at the age of thirty-three, I finally enrolled at the French Culinary Institute.
When I wasn’t in class, I perused issues of Gourmet and dreamed of becoming a food stylist, but first I wanted to gain real kitchen experience. After culinary school, I moved to Los Angeles with my husband and worked in the kitchens of Jeremy Fox at Rustic Canyon and Suzanne Goin at AOC. These two chefs had a profound impact on my cooking: They stretched my skills and taught me to see ingredients in entirely new ways. Thanks to them, I started to incorporate French techniques in my Japanese cooking and used local, seasonal produce from the farmers’ market.
One day, after an especially grueling shift of working more than three hundred covers, I came across a job posting at BuzzFeed for a recipe developer who spoke Japanese, had a culinary degree and professional kitchen experience, and lived in LA. The position seemed too good to be true. I applied, and a few weeks later, I started working at Tasty Japan, the Japanese edition of BuzzFeed’s food media brand, Tasty, while continuing my restaurant job. In the mornings, I developed recipes, and from 3:30 p.m. to midnight, I cooked at AOC. Despite the long days, it was exhilarating to finally pursue what I loved.
When I first moved to the US, I didn’t have many friends and I was nervous going to dinner parties because I wasn’t completely comfortable speaking in English. I was afraid of not knowing what to talk about with strangers. Food became a survival skill, a way to find common ground. As an icebreaker, I would ask: “What is your favorite restaurant?” I liked how animated people became when describing food they loved. One woman told me about a French pastry shop that also made Armenian pastries on the side. She ordered me to not get any of the French pastries and instead try the Armenian cream-filled doughnuts called ponchiks. Her descriptions were so detailed and her enthusiasm so palpable that I had to find out for myself! Another person told me about the birthday cake his mom would make for him, and how the floor of her kitchen was slanted so the cake always came out of the oven uneven with one side more raised than the other. His mother would even out the cake with frosting, and he’d always eat a slice from the “lower” side as it had a thicker layer of frosting. Everyone had strong opinions and stories about food, and I never tired of hearing them.
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