Okaeri : Japanese Comfort Food for the Weeknight, Cooked the Way My Grandmother Cooked It

Okaeri (おかえり) means “welcome home.” My grandmother said it to me every evening when I walked through the door, and she said it with food: a small bowl of rice, miso soup with whatever vegetables were soft enough to use that day, and one main dish. Nothing was photogenic. Everything was right. I left Tokyo at twenty-three and spent fifteen years away from her kitchen. When I started cooking Japanese food in my own apartment, I had to learn to do it without the Tsukiji fish she lined up at five-thirty AM to buy. So this book is the home-cook version: a hundred and thirty Japanese recipes built around what you can actually find at an American grocery store (or a small Asian market thirty minutes away), with notes on what to substitute and what is worth the drive. Karaage that uses thigh meat from any supermarket. Niku-jaga in the slow cooker. Onigiri filled with canned tuna because that is what my grandmother used in 1978. The food of a real Japanese home, written in English, organized by season.