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Nikujaga is one of the home cooking dishes in Japan.

Every food store in Japan sells them and mums in every kitchen turn them out in their millions every week.

This is a vegan rice bowl as well as for mushroom lavers' dish.

This Stir Fried Sweetcorn, Sugar snaps and shiitake dish is deceptively simple.

Easy and tasty Miso soup with Oyster mushroom and sugar snap.

Potato Mochi is an unique modern Japanese food.

Sweet Potato Mochi with Mozzarella You've probably heard of Japanese mochi - you know, the rice that has been pounded and pounded until it turns into a thick, white gooey paste. Mochi is a big part of Japanese food culture. It is traditionally eaten on New year's day - typically in a soup called Ozoni - to bring people strength and good health through the months of winter. But mochi doesn't have to be just about rice. This recipe shows you how to make mochi with sweet pota

Sweet Soy Aubergine Donburi If you read my recipe blog regularly, you probably know that I love aubergine. I think it is a much under rated vegetable here in the UK, unlike in Japan where it is one of the most popular vegetables in the kitchen. Aubergine is good for you, it contains high amounts of anti-oxidants as well as plenty of trace minerals and elemtns such as folate, copper, magnesium and iron. Aubergine is also very good at soaking up different flavours. In this r

You will love the texture of this stir fried lotus root dish.

Easy to make Ma Po's Aubergine recipe blog.

Vegetable Gyoza I am sure I am not alone in being very, very partial to Gyoza. (AKA Chinese dumplings, AKA Potstickers.) I probably eat gyoza at least once a fortnight and if I am in the mood to be nice and offer my family a choice of evening meal, gyoza are usually somewhere near the top of the list when the hands go up. If you've read any of my restaurant reviews, you'll also know that I regard gyoza as one of my "acid tests" for restaurant quality. I have to admit that I f

Miso soup with Tofu Miso soup must be the most popular dish in Japan. At least half the Japanese population drink miso soup three times or more every week. That's a smart thing to do because miso soup is high in protein and low in fat. There are lots of health claims made about miso that I shan't go into here but if you are looking for a non-animal source of protein you cannot do much better than this recipe. The two key ingredients in a classic miso soup are Japanese dashi

Here's my latest vegetable Japanese curry recipe. I used the hot version of "Golden" vegetable curry cubes for this dish.

This is a classic tempura recipe.

This is a quick side dish that's tasty and nutricious.

Japanese easy stir fry vegetables.

Curried Okra This is the final dish in my "Japanese feast" feature which I started last week. You might recall that the other dishes were grilled & salted mackerel and stir fried lotus root. I must admit this dish sounds a little creepy in English, (old lady's fingers) but in Japan, it's simply known as "okra". It isn't indigenous to Japan but it is certainly popular and very easy to grow there. It's also a cinch to make this Curried Okra dish. Together with the mackerel and

Shiso miso The Japanese love to have a selection of fermented and pickled foods to eat with their rice at dinner and today, I'm looking at one of the best - shiso-miso. It's a great way to give your miso a sweeter flavour. Shisomiso hails from Tohoku prefecture in northern Japan. The original version (where miso is mixed with sugar, sesame and/or crushed walnuts and wrapped in a shiso leaf, then fried) is quite salty but as it has become more popular in Japan, the flavours ha

Simmered Hijiki Here's a very traditional Japanese side dish that uses a seaweed common in East Asia but (as far as I know) nowhere else - it's called hijiki. You can buy hijiki in most Japanese and Chinese food stores, as well as health food shops, in its dried form. As with other seaweeds, there's a lot to like about hijiki nutritionally - it's high in magnesium, iron, calcium and iodine and is full of dietary fibre. I should point out that it does also contain traces of ar

Kombu Tsukudani OK, first things first. What is tsukudani? Answer: Tsukudani is a cooking technique that involves simmering ingredients in a soy & mirin solution until the liquor has almost evaporated. Tskudani is a great way of creating a very concentrated umami flavour. But originally, tsukudani was used as a method of preserving foods in the days before refridgeration. Nowadays, kombu is the most common form of tsukudani but you can also use the technique with other ingred