And home cooked meals is whatever meal you want cooked in your home to be honest. You could probably realistically add rice and soup to any dish and it’s magically a “Japanese” meal. Nothing special. Lot of “Japanese” dishes are just fried food or dishes from other countries but bland.
Most japanese cooking is exceedingly basic – rice, miso soup and vegetables, raw fish, instant / powdered curry, ready-to-eat / frozen meats, there’s not a lot of preparation
Mostly just boiling stuff or heating it up.
No idea why people are downvoting, they must have never seen what people actually eat.
I like the *Peaceful Cuisine,* **YouTube** channel.
It may not be quite what you’re looking for, but they offer some interesting interpretations.
Justonecookbook is a great resource! My go to is Oyakodon. Chicken teriyaki and curry are pretty easy and universally loved food.
Just One Cookbook! Learned some of the most common Japanese dishes from there.
Personally, I’d recommend starting with Donburi (e.g. Oyakodon, Gyuudon) because they are very simple to make.
Curry is surprisingly easy to make completely from scratch.
Miso soup + Rice + saba fish
Not exactly home cooked but a lot of family’s make Mapo tofu, Japanese curry and Yakisoba, they are cheap and will fill up everyone. You buy the Mapo and Curry sauces in boxes in the supermarket. Yakisoba is in the refrigerated section with packets of the sauce kind of like Instant Ramen but in a clear package. They have instructions on the back on how to prepare and what to add. Ground pork and tofu for the Mapo tofu etc.
Cooking with Dog on YouTube or their blog website.
Cookbooks cheap at Book Off
Personally I really like Nikujaga.
You can go find cookbooks at bookstores. A lot of them are affordable and are freely open for you to read at the store. You can buy the books or remember the names of the recipes you’d like to try and look up tutorials on youtube.
In my local Kinokuniya bookstore, the Japanese Study section had dual-language Japanese home cooking cookbook. It’s called ‘Recipes of Basic Japanese Dishes/ 美味しい和食’.
The dual language is extra useful since I can learn the kanji for ingredients I don’t know about (like trefoil), which makes finding them in a store much easier.
It’s only around ¥1600 which might seem like a lot in the age of the internet, but I like having a physical book to work with, plus no ads. As a bonus, it also has instructions on common food preparation techniques (like how to prepare rice, how to filet a fish, etc.).
Lots of recipe sites like Rakuten, delishkitchen, ajinomoto
cooking with dog on youtube, great channel with years of recipies (their channel was what got me into wanting to learn Japanese and expand my knowlege of Japanese culture)
book off has cheep cook books and honestly I like going to book stores and looking at the cooking magazines！
I like recipetineats. Not just washoku but the site is nice, recipes I’ve tried are all good and not loaded to the brim with ads
Cook any cheap cut of meat or piece of fish with shōyu, sake and mirin. Serve it with rice and soup. BOOM! That’s your average home meal.
For more than that, see other folk’s website recommendations.
Sonoko Sakai’s book, *Japanese Home Cooking*, is a great resource. Learning to make soba at home has been very rewarding and is my number one recommendation for a delicious, relatively quick, home-cooked meal that can open a door to more things. If you can make soba, udon and somen are quite simple comparatively. Her pickle recipes are also good – I think it’s worth having a few pickle recipes handy. *Just One* cookbook, as referenced already, is a great one, too.
From personal experience:
Step 1: a good rice cooker and very good rice. I can eat just that all day most days.
Step 100: a cooking class that teaches bhuddist cuisine. Costs, takes time, but really opens up horizons
dashi is really easy to make and is the basis of a lot of japanese cooking. It’s not even particularly necessary to make over buying it but I found it gave me a further appreciation for it
I second the Just One Cookbook recommendations.
I also enjoy watching the Imamu Room YouTube channel. She makes bento and other food and it’s very much home cooking in a Japanese style (even though they are in Canada). It’s really enjoyable to watch and you can learn a lot.
Takegomi Gohan! Chuck stuff in with a tare of your choice. Simple and easy. I use Cooking With Dog’s recipe but mostly just for the tare.
If you have Instagram:
Kurashiru;
Tasty Japan;
DelishKitchen TV;
Tastemade Japan.
If you have in the pantry:
Shirodashi, shouyu, mirin, rice wine vinegar, sake, miso paste, you should be able to make 95% of Japanese recipes.
Get that stuff and one of the cookbooks suggested by the others are you are set.
Things I make a lot are okonomiyaki, yakisoba, yakitori, and nabe. If you have a leek and a cabbage the options are endless.
The YouTube channel “cooking with dog” is a great resource.
If you prefer cats, then maybe JunsKitchen could be for you as well.
I’m also interested in this since I live in Japan, out in “the country,” and shopping for myself is a challenge! A lot of the ingredients I’d normally use are missing or hard to find. I need to learn how to shop and cook like a Japanese person.
– Omlettes and stuff (om-rice, tamagoyaki, okonomiyaki…etc)
– BBQ stuff (anything you’d find at a yakiniku joint)
– Korean night (e.g. chijimi, bibimbab…etc)
Due to Japanese eating culture coupled with the average Japanese kitchen and home cooking tends to be rather simple and straight forward opting for easy meals.
It isn’t common that you will encounter something as complicated a shepherds pie, lasagne, burritos, samarle or a full English.
This is good news if you want to learn Japanese homecooking as it will be fairly easy. You can throw any number of small dishes grilled fish, chicken, rice, vegetables, miso soup together and you have somewhat exceeded. You can make some hamburg steak, hayashinstew and curry for something somewhat more complicated.
Google and youtube are the best free resources. Other than that go through some book stores. Or in my experience buy a second hand notebook that happened to have a recipe for custard and choco custard in some middle pages.
Japanese home cooking is actually extremely easy once you realise that pretty much anything is made with a few core ingredients.
It all starts with the core *wa* mix:
* 2 parts *mirin* * 2 parts *sake* * 1 part *soy sauce* * A sprinkle of *dashi*
For *donburi*: Add the mix to stir fried onions with either sliced beef for *gyudon*, sliced pork for *tondon*, or chicken for *oyakodon*. Add an egg at the end for the oyakodon. I also mix in sliced carrots with my onions to get a little more vegetables.
For *shougayaki*: Replace dashi with miso and ginger, and use slightly thicker pork meat.
For *teriyaki*: Replace dashi with *sugar* and pour the mix over some chicken, or *buri* in a fry pan.
For *oden*: Add the mix to plenty of hot water. Boil stuff in it for a good while.
For *nimono*: Add the mix to less hot water. Boil stuff in it for a good while. Adding some *tougarashi* spices things up a little. You can also add miso.
For *soba* or *udon*: Dip your noodles in the mix, it’s basically *tsuyu*.
For *yakiniku*: Replace dashi with garlic and sesame oil to turn the mix into *tare*
For *miso soup*: The simplest of the simple dishes. Add miso to boiling water. Add some *wakame*. I also like to add *tofu*, *daikon*, or *satsumaimo*
That’s 11 staple Japanese dishes that go well with your rice. Extremely simple, but at the same time good enough to excite and impress my wife and her mom with my Japanese cooking skills.
Just make sure to only use 1 fry pan or sauce pan. Have little to zero space to cut/prepare your food. Buy ingredients from your local supermarket.
Kewpie 3 minute cooking is a long running Japanese cooking program. Tons of home style Japanese recipes using seasonal ingredients. There are some translated videos on Youtube.
You’ve got some great suggestions on here already! 🙂 I like to watch Japanese recipe TikToks. Some have English subtitles if you can’t understand the Japanese. Or look up menu inspiration on Instagram then search the recipes online. I usually search おうちごはんfor those.
If you can read kanji my coworker recommended first kitchen app. I just watch YouTube vids of cooking with the dog. I tried their nikujaga recipe and it’s really good!
Kurashiru app. It’s in Japanese but they have video recipes. Also Delish Kitchen. Shirogohan is a good website too
Tsukemono, grilled fish, good short grain rice, and good quality miso will get you 99% there
As others have said, Just One Cookbook is fantastic.
If you prefer to buy a beautiful book that you can pick meals from easily, any book by Harumi Kurihara comes highly recommended by me.
I think some of the key elements of relatively traditional Japanese cooking is: seasonal ingredients, variety of flavor (sweet/salty/sour) & color, and number of dishes, in a single meal. 一汁三菜 is the word used: 1 soup + 3 dishes (1 main/2 sides) [https://www.cotogoto.jp/blog/2017/04/kihon_ichizyuusannsai.html](https://www.cotogoto.jp/blog/2017/04/kihon_ichizyuusannsai.html)
That said this is quite an ask for a day-to-day meal, 3 times a day so it’s not as frequent/common in modern times.
Nikujaga, gyudon and karaage is on a rotation for me when I do something remotely washoku.
Find wagyu slices at 40% off in an evening shopping run? The salmon in the fridge can wait a day, its gyudon night baby. (Don’t use American or Oz beef for this its tough and unpleasant).
Edit:
Nitsuke ANYTHING during winter.
Kinki, Mebaru, Karei, Madara w/milt are my faves.
Oyakodon
Katsudon
Tonjiru
Niku jaga
Ginger pork (shougayaki)
Yakiniku don (forgot the proper name)
Kinpira gobou (side dish)
All super easy, mostly using the same base condiments
TKG with natto! Yum! Miso soup (can add potatoes or Nappa cabbage or spinach for variety.
Kimono Mom on YouTube!
I liked to watch the cooking show of the seiyuu rie takahashi that I had they are very happy with that I learned some Japanese and their dishes
42 comments
https://cookpad.com to learn recipes
And home cooked meals is whatever meal you want cooked in your home to be honest. You could probably realistically add rice and soup to any dish and it’s magically a “Japanese” meal. Nothing special. Lot of “Japanese” dishes are just fried food or dishes from other countries but bland.
Most japanese cooking is exceedingly basic – rice, miso soup and vegetables, raw fish, instant / powdered curry, ready-to-eat / frozen meats, there’s not a lot of preparation
Mostly just boiling stuff or heating it up.
No idea why people are downvoting, they must have never seen what people actually eat.
I like the *Peaceful Cuisine,* **YouTube** channel.
It may not be quite what you’re looking for, but they offer some interesting interpretations.
Justonecookbook is a great resource!
My go to is Oyakodon. Chicken teriyaki and curry are pretty easy and universally loved food.
Just One Cookbook! Learned some of the most common Japanese dishes from there.
Personally, I’d recommend starting with Donburi (e.g. Oyakodon, Gyuudon) because they are very simple to make.
Curry is surprisingly easy to make completely from scratch.
Miso soup + Rice + saba fish
Not exactly home cooked but a lot of family’s make Mapo tofu, Japanese curry and Yakisoba, they are cheap and will fill up everyone. You buy the Mapo and Curry sauces in boxes in the supermarket. Yakisoba is in the refrigerated section with packets of the sauce kind of like Instant Ramen but in a clear package. They have instructions on the back on how to prepare and what to add. Ground pork and tofu for the Mapo tofu etc.
Cooking with Dog on YouTube or their blog website.
Cookbooks cheap at Book Off
Personally I really like Nikujaga.
You can go find cookbooks at bookstores. A lot of them are affordable and are freely open for you to read at the store. You can buy the books or remember the names of the recipes you’d like to try and look up tutorials on youtube.
In my local Kinokuniya bookstore, the Japanese Study section had dual-language Japanese home cooking cookbook. It’s called ‘Recipes of Basic Japanese Dishes/ 美味しい和食’.
The dual language is extra useful since I can learn the kanji for ingredients I don’t know about (like trefoil), which makes finding them in a store much easier.
It’s only around ¥1600 which might seem like a lot in the age of the internet, but I like having a physical book to work with, plus no ads. As a bonus, it also has instructions on common food preparation techniques (like how to prepare rice, how to filet a fish, etc.).
Nikujaga. Tonkatsu. Oyakodon. Gyudon. Curry. Soba. Omurice. Potato salad.
Lots of recipe sites like Rakuten, delishkitchen, ajinomoto
cooking with dog on youtube, great channel with years of recipies (their channel was what got me into wanting to learn Japanese and expand my knowlege of Japanese culture)
book off has cheep cook books and honestly I like going to book stores and looking at the cooking magazines！
I like recipetineats. Not just washoku but the site is nice, recipes I’ve tried are all good and not loaded to the brim with ads
I use [Sirogohan](https://www.sirogohan.com/sp/) a lot. Everything I’ve made turned out well.
Cook any cheap cut of meat or piece of fish with shōyu, sake and mirin. Serve it with rice and soup. BOOM! That’s your average home meal.
For more than that, see other folk’s website recommendations.
Sonoko Sakai’s book, *Japanese Home Cooking*, is a great resource. Learning to make soba at home has been very rewarding and is my number one recommendation for a delicious, relatively quick, home-cooked meal that can open a door to more things. If you can make soba, udon and somen are quite simple comparatively. Her pickle recipes are also good – I think it’s worth having a few pickle recipes handy. *Just One* cookbook, as referenced already, is a great one, too.
From personal experience:
Step 1: a good rice cooker and very good rice. I can eat just that all day most days.
Step 100: a cooking class that teaches bhuddist cuisine. Costs, takes time, but really opens up horizons
dashi is really easy to make and is the basis of a lot of japanese cooking. It’s not even particularly necessary to make over buying it but I found it gave me a further appreciation for it
I second the Just One Cookbook recommendations.
I also enjoy watching the Imamu Room YouTube channel. She makes bento and other food and it’s very much home cooking in a Japanese style (even though they are in Canada). It’s really enjoyable to watch and you can learn a lot.
Takegomi Gohan! Chuck stuff in with a tare of your choice. Simple and easy. I use Cooking With Dog’s recipe but mostly just for the tare.
If you have Instagram:
Kurashiru;
Tasty Japan;
DelishKitchen TV;
Tastemade Japan.
If you have in the pantry:
Shirodashi, shouyu, mirin, rice wine vinegar, sake, miso paste, you should be able to make 95% of Japanese recipes.
Get that stuff and one of the cookbooks suggested by the others are you are set.
Things I make a lot are okonomiyaki, yakisoba, yakitori, and nabe. If you have a leek and a cabbage the options are endless.
The YouTube channel “cooking with dog” is a great resource.
If you prefer cats, then maybe JunsKitchen could be for you as well.
I’m also interested in this since I live in Japan, out in “the country,” and shopping for myself is a challenge! A lot of the ingredients I’d normally use are missing or hard to find. I need to learn how to shop and cook like a Japanese person.
This website is great for home cooking recipes.
https://j-simplerecipes.com
There’s places in my town that do courses (quite cheaply actually). I did one the other week because I was simply interested in learning a few dishes.
To me everyday ‘eat at home’ stuff depends on the family but I’d think common items are:
– Hotpots and similar (shabu shabu, oden, sukiyaki…etc)
– Rice with whatever (e.g. gyudon, fish, chicken, veggies, pickles, tenpura, katsudon…etc)
– Noodles (cold soba, hiyashichuka, udon soups…etc)
– Omlettes and stuff (om-rice, tamagoyaki, okonomiyaki…etc)
– BBQ stuff (anything you’d find at a yakiniku joint)
– Korean night (e.g. chijimi, bibimbab…etc)
Due to Japanese eating culture coupled with the average Japanese kitchen and home cooking tends to be rather simple and straight forward opting for easy meals.
It isn’t common that you will encounter something as complicated a shepherds pie, lasagne, burritos, samarle or a full English.
This is good news if you want to learn Japanese homecooking as it will be fairly easy. You can throw any number of small dishes grilled fish, chicken, rice, vegetables, miso soup together and you have somewhat exceeded. You can make some hamburg steak, hayashinstew and curry for something somewhat more complicated.
Google and youtube are the best free resources. Other than that go through some book stores. Or in my experience buy a second hand notebook that happened to have a recipe for custard and choco custard in some middle pages.
Japanese home cooking is actually extremely easy once you realise that pretty much anything is made with a few core ingredients.
It all starts with the core *wa* mix:
* 2 parts *mirin*
* 2 parts *sake*
* 1 part *soy sauce*
* A sprinkle of *dashi*
For *donburi*:
Add the mix to stir fried onions with either sliced beef for *gyudon*, sliced pork for *tondon*, or chicken for *oyakodon*. Add an egg at the end for the oyakodon. I also mix in sliced carrots with my onions to get a little more vegetables.
For *shougayaki*:
Replace dashi with miso and ginger, and use slightly thicker pork meat.
For *teriyaki*:
Replace dashi with *sugar* and pour the mix over some chicken, or *buri* in a fry pan.
For *oden*:
Add the mix to plenty of hot water. Boil stuff in it for a good while.
For *nimono*:
Add the mix to less hot water. Boil stuff in it for a good while. Adding some *tougarashi* spices things up a little. You can also add miso.
For *soba* or *udon*:
Dip your noodles in the mix, it’s basically *tsuyu*.
For *yakiniku*:
Replace dashi with garlic and sesame oil to turn the mix into *tare*
For *miso soup*:
The simplest of the simple dishes. Add miso to boiling water. Add some *wakame*. I also like to add *tofu*, *daikon*, or *satsumaimo*
That’s 11 staple Japanese dishes that go well with your rice. Extremely simple, but at the same time good enough to excite and impress my wife and her mom with my Japanese cooking skills.
FTW
https://www.sirogohan.com/
https://www.kikkoman.co.jp/homecook/
Just make sure to only use 1 fry pan or sauce pan.
Have little to zero space to cut/prepare your food.
Buy ingredients from your local supermarket.
Kewpie 3 minute cooking is a long running Japanese cooking program. Tons of home style Japanese recipes using seasonal ingredients. There are some translated videos on Youtube.
https://www.ntv.co.jp/3min/
You’ve got some great suggestions on here already! 🙂 I like to watch Japanese recipe TikToks. Some have English subtitles if you can’t understand the Japanese. Or look up menu inspiration on Instagram then search the recipes online. I usually search おうちごはんfor those.
If you can read kanji my coworker recommended first kitchen app. I just watch YouTube vids of cooking with the dog. I tried their nikujaga recipe and it’s really good!
Kurashiru app. It’s in Japanese but they have video recipes. Also Delish Kitchen.
Shirogohan is a good website too
Tsukemono, grilled fish, good short grain rice, and good quality miso will get you 99% there
As others have said, Just One Cookbook is fantastic.
If you prefer to buy a beautiful book that you can pick meals from easily, any book by Harumi Kurihara comes highly recommended by me.
[Everyday Harumi](https://amzn.eu/d/37ikK7l) – My favourite one.
[Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking](https://amzn.eu/d/2g1bl7f) – Another good one.
I think some of the key elements of relatively traditional Japanese cooking is: seasonal ingredients, variety of flavor (sweet/salty/sour) & color, and number of dishes, in a single meal. 一汁三菜 is the word used: 1 soup + 3 dishes (1 main/2 sides) [https://www.cotogoto.jp/blog/2017/04/kihon_ichizyuusannsai.html](https://www.cotogoto.jp/blog/2017/04/kihon_ichizyuusannsai.html)
That said this is quite an ask for a day-to-day meal, 3 times a day so it’s not as frequent/common in modern times.
food last night just because
https://preview.redd.it/qylhzdr1nnfb1.jpeg?width=3659&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11d484e5b12d600430a0f7cd4b78ec450ec280f7
Nikujaga, gyudon and karaage is on a rotation for me when I do something remotely washoku.
Find wagyu slices at 40% off in an evening shopping run? The salmon in the fridge can wait a day, its gyudon night baby. (Don’t use American or Oz beef for this its tough and unpleasant).
Edit:
Nitsuke ANYTHING during winter.
Kinki, Mebaru, Karei, Madara w/milt are my faves.
Oyakodon
Katsudon
Tonjiru
Niku jaga
Ginger pork (shougayaki)
Yakiniku don (forgot the proper name)
Kinpira gobou (side dish)
All super easy, mostly using the same base condiments
TKG with natto! Yum!
Miso soup (can add potatoes or Nappa cabbage or spinach for variety.
Kimono Mom on YouTube!
I liked to watch the cooking show of the seiyuu rie takahashi that I had they are very happy with that I learned some Japanese and their dishes