2015年5月29日金曜日

2015年5月29日金曜日 -

Anna: Cooking in Japan



I got a new hobby recently! These days, I'm really into cooking.
Before I came to Japan, I couldn't really cook at all. I could make really easy food like pasta, but I didn't know any recipes or have any skills.

So, the first six months I lived here I ate a lot of instant food and meals from convenience stores.
But after a while I started to get bored of eating the same food every day, so I decided to try making my own food when I had some free time.

I'm still not very good, but my cooking ability has improved a lot in a short time!

Now I can make some Japanese food like gyudon and tonkatsu.
I also learned how to make really good carbonara from one of my friends!
There are a lot of ingredients in Japan that we don't have in America so for a long time I didn't know what I could make or how to use them. Now I have learned a lot of ways to use Japanese ingredients to make really delicious things.

I use ingredients like dashi all the time now.

But even though I can make a lot of tasty food, I learned that I am best at making sweets.

Even though I had no experience, I was able to make really delicious chocolates! So now I want to try making more difficult things like pie and cake.

I think baking is a popular hobby in Japan, so I can easily find a lot of the tools and ingredients I need.
Although I don't have time to cook every day, I try to make my own food as often as I can.
Of course, there have been some challenges too. 
The most difficult thing about trying to cook in Japan is finding exactly the right ingredients to make what I want.

It's very easy to make Japanese or Korean food because the ingredients are easy to find and are very good quality, but making American food is often difficult because the ingredients are rare or expensive, and not sold in many stores.
There were many times when I tried to substitute ingredients I needed with different ingredients, and the result didn't taste good or the dish was ruined.

The best example I can think of is cheese. In Japan, it's very easy to find mozzarella cheese for pizza or toast, but other types of cheese are uncommon. Since we can't use mozzarella cheese for every recipe, making the foods I eat in America is sometimes difficult.
Overall, I'm glad I'm learning how to cook for myself and gaining new skills. Friends who have eaten my food have really liked it, so I want to continue making delicious things for everyone!


I'm really into：～に夢中だ
Ingredients：材料
all the time：いつも
baking：お菓子作り
substitute：代わりのものを使う
ruined：台なしになった