Squid rings cooked in butter with a splash of soy sauce and mirin, with maitake mushrooms and spring onion. It takes about fifteen minutes, and roughly two of those are the squid actually cooking — which is the entire difficulty of this dish. Squid is tender for about a minute, and then it’s rubber. Butter…

This is ground pork and potato cooked down in a thick, glossy soy sauce with strips of green pepper through it. In Japanese it’s a soboro ankake — soboro being crumbled seasoned meat, ankake being a sauce thickened with potato starch so it clings to everything instead of running to the bottom of the pan….

Japanese sweet potatoes are the ones with purple skin and pale yellow flesh — drier, starchier, and noticeably sweeter than the orange American kind. Sliced paper-thin and cooked in an air fryer with a little honey and butter, they turn into crisp, faintly caramelized chips that taste like a cross between a potato chip and…

These are chicken wings with three ingredients: chicken, salt, and pepper. There’s no batter, no marinade, no sauce, and no flour — just seasoned wings in an air fryer until the skin goes thin and crackly and the fat underneath renders out. In Japan this plain version is called shio tebasaki (塩手羽先), salt wings, and…

Kiriboshi daikon (切り干し大根) is daikon radish that’s been shredded and dried in the winter sun until it’s brittle and amber-colored. Drying concentrates it — the sweetness, the minerals, and a faint smokiness that fresh daikon doesn’t have at all. Simmered with carrot and fried tofu in a soy-dashi broth, it becomes one of the most…

Yaki onigiri (焼きおにぎり) is a rice ball that’s been grilled until the outside turns crisp and golden and the soy sauce caramelizes into a savory crust. It’s sold frozen in every Japanese supermarket, it’s a standard izakaya order, and it exists for a very practical reason: it’s what you do with leftover rice. Traditionally you…

Lotus root is one of those vegetables that looks far more intimidating than it is. It’s a pale, heavy, slightly muddy-looking root, and when you slice it you get those famous wheel-shaped rounds full of holes. In Japan it’s called renkon (れんこん) and it turns up constantly in autumn and winter cooking — and the…

Buta kimchi (豚キムチ) is pork and kimchi stir-fried together in one pan, and it is the dish I make when it’s late, I’m hungry, and I want something on the table in ten minutes. It’s not a fancy dish. It’s a weeknight dish — the kind of thing that gets made in Japanese homes constantly,…

Goma ae (ごま和え) is the Japanese side dish that fills the small empty corner of the dinner tray. Blanched vegetables tossed in ground sesame with a little sugar and soy sauce — that’s it. It takes about eight minutes, uses three pantry ingredients, and it’s the dish I make when I look at the table…

Yaki nasu (焼きなす) is grilled eggplant, and that’s genuinely the whole recipe. You char a whole eggplant until the skin blisters and the inside collapses into something silky, peel the skin off, cut it up, and top it with bonito flakes and a splash of sauce. No oil, no seasoning while it cooks, nothing added….