I’m an Canadian American living in Kyoto for a few years. I went from meal prepping and cooking every meal for myself back home to almost never cooking at all here. Although I have an MG just down the street, I find myself buying premade meals or eating out nearly all the time. I mostly cook Mexican food, salads with different cheeses or a lot of turkey/chicken based meals at home, and I just can’t seem to find the same ingredients here so I haven’t really gotten back into the habit.
I would love to hear if you guys have had a similar experience or if you just have some personal favorites you like to cook! It doesn’t have to be Japanese specific recipes, just something that you’ve found easy, good or alternatives to something you used to eat at home.
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I’m the chef in our house, the big game changer was actually buying a small oven instead of relying on just a gas stove back when I lived on my own in a 1k.
Baked chicken and baked fish are staples for me. For fish, I make a bed of vegetables (cabbage, broccoli, asparagus, carrots, peppers, whatever I have), bake them for 15 minutes, puts some pieces of fish on top, and bake for another 15 minutes. For chicken, my favorite is probably seasoning with salt, pepper, paprika, garlic, and chili powder and baking on top of a sliced up onion and chick peas. Goes great with either rice or couscous. These aren’t really “things” and is just food baked in an over, but it feeds two then leaves leftovers or nice bento fillers.
For spices, if you use them a lot its worth it to go on Amazon etc. and buy the big ones, the little dinky bottles at the normal supermarket are *horrendous* value for money. For vegetables, the staples are cheap and readily available, and then I try to buy whatever looks fresh or in season and then figure out how to use it.
One of my favorite things I’ve picked up recently is curry from scratch. Cook up some diced onion and eggplant (and other vegetables as desired), then add some garlic then spices (I use a premixed curry powder for convenience but you can customize). Add a can of chickpeas, a can of diced tomatoes, and a can of coconut milk, mix and simmer for a bit and it’s done. Not “traditional” or anything, but it comes out great.
I also love cooking Korean food, as I used to live there. It can seems daunting but the stews can be quite simple, and you can customize. I also like baking pork belly using Korean ingredients to marinade. Salt, pepper, garlic, sesame oil etc are all readily available, and gochujang and gochugaru are also in most supermarkets nowadays, and if not you should be able to find a decent Korean spot. Budae jjigae is one of my all time favorite foods, so I make my own variation of that quite often.
The Japanese style curry rice. Super simple and they have all kinds of different flavours which you can blend together if you like. Can get very spicy if you like as well. The next level was getting a pressure cooker to make it even easier and tastier.
Buri Teriyaki, if you properly soak the fish in the sauce for 30 minutes, is an amazingly effective dish that tastes super good given the effort level.
I use the recipe on sirogohan.com but i also add some shiitake to the dish that get a bit caramelized in the sauce. That with white rice and some miso soup, you got yourself a good teishoku
EDIT: for people learning how to cook, there’s this very good book. おいしい１０分おかず. It has a lot of very simple dishes and was my starting kit for figuring out how to cook things with easy to access ingredients. Live alone? Make for 2, and leftovers (if you’re like me and am fine repeating meals or the like)
Sous vide steaks. I like to get the thick cuts of steak from Costco but was never happy with how they turn out just frying them in a pan. Despite my best efforts to use a cooking thermometer to try and get a medium rare finish they always were a bit too tough for my liking.
Using a sous vide heater to get the steaks “cooked” throughout before finishing with a torch was a game changer for me, saves so much time and effort, and gets a perfect result every time. Interestingly it was an episode of NHK’s すイエんサー that put me on the path.
Waffles.
Italian food is pretty easy to make here, I think. You have to make your own sauce, but that’s just canned tomatoes, garlic, onion and olive oil with some oregano and basil. There’s good pasta around and such. The star dinner in my house is chicken parm.
I suggest getting into Japanese cooking quick. Far easier and cheaper in the long run. Soy sauce, mirin, cooking sake, dashi, miso, sesame oil, hon-dashi, tubes of garlic and ginger, and a few others are cheap and the ‘salt and pepper’ of Japan. With those, you can make like 90% of the dishes around.
Oyakodon is quick and simple. Curry can be good, but find your recipe. I like half spicy, half sweet curry blocks with lots of canned tomatoes and a touch of sugar and spice and olive oil instead of butter. Freezes well. Nikujaga is something I’d kill for. Imoni might be hard if you can’t find imoni potatoes either due to location or seasonal availability, but tonjiru is easy enough. Nabe as well, and it has a million styles like kimchi or goma. In summer, my house goes for cold somen or soba with watered down hon-dashi and a side salad. All this can be super cheap and easy to make. More splurging dishes can be okanomiyaki, sukiyaki, tempura, any katsu, etc..