Customer Reviews

Quick & Easy Japanese Cuisine for Everyone (Quick & Easy Cookbooks Series)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book from a Japanese bookstore in "Japan Town" in San Francisco on vacation. I am online now buying more for my friends. I compared this book with every other english language Japanese cookbooks in the store (and there were MANY). I found this one to be superior to the rest as it contained everything I would need to prepare meals. I should mention I have lived in Japan for 5 years and have a good feel for what is authentic. This book has allowed me to create some very nice meals at home approaching resturant quality of those found in Japan. I expecially like the pictures that show all the steps of the preparation including pictures of the ingredients. Also included is a section that shows how food is served (presentation on table).

Honestly, I don't see how you can go wrong buying this book. Its inexpensive and contains EVERY aspect you need to be sucessful: tools and utensils, knife skills, ingredients, recipies, and presentation.

Now I just wish I could find similar books for Greek, Italian, Thai, and so on...

-Steve Maercklein
Austin, Texas

After my wife and I left San Francisco and moved to the South, one of the greatest pleasures we miss is our izakaya (sake house) where they serve authentic, home-style Japanese food. Not to be outdone, I picked up a copy of this book which had recipes of many of the dishes to which we had grown fond.

The author really does walk the reader through the fundamentals of Japanese cooking, from making rice to preparing dashi, the basic stock in many recipes. In addition, the book is loaded with helpful photographs and illustrations.

My wife has been quite pleased with the results of my efforts, thanks to this book. I recommend it highly!

I have been living in Japan for 3 years and we are about to move back to the U.S. One of my Japanese friends pulled out her copy of this book to give me some recipes. She actually bought it when she lived in the U.S. so she would have English language versions of recipes to give her American friends. She found this book to be very close to her mother's and grandmothers' way of cooking. The recipes are easy to follow and the illustrations of preparation techniques are very helpful even for someone without any prior knowledge of Japanese food preparation.

This book was given to me over a decade ago by a Japanese exchange student Kay, who stayed with my family. She was a wonderful guest and she even cooked some of the things in the book for us. This was the book which sparked my interest in Japanese cooking. I still use it to this day. It's a great basic book for someone just getting started and a good reference book for anyone who is familiar with Japanese food. It has some good timeless photos, especially for being an older book. It also has several black and white pages with photos and drawings of cookware, utensils, table setting, the various meal courses and a guide to tea. Overall, it's worth owning, fair for a coffee table book and wonderful in the kitchen!

After being an exchange student in Japan, I found myself longing for the foods my host mom made, and decided to try cooking them myself! (Despite my absolute inability to cook previous to this.) This book provides recipies that taste exactly like the foods that could be found both at my host mom's table and at Japanese restaurants. They're easy to follow, include lots of photos to illustrate each step, and allow for improvisation for ingredients that are sometimes hard to find. I recommend Quick and Easy Japanese Cuisine highly for those looking to start (or continue) a cullinary adventure!

I found this book very good in terms of visualisation of cooking steps, appropriate explanation and selecting recipes. Onºy desert section could be alittle bit wider. I suggest this book to people who are willing to learn Jp cooking with basic recipes.

I wanted a cookbook to help me make something resembling what I've had in Japan, but this has turned out to be much more... I use it all the time. The recipes are quick and easy, the ingredients are inexpensive and many are used for multiple recipes, the pictures help me feel confident that I'm doing things the right way, and everything has turned out delicious! The cooking tips and ingredient descriptions at the back are helpful too. All the ingredients are easy to find in Seattle, but I'd think most of them would be available in smaller towns also. If you can get mirin and sake you're set. I tend to take a really long time to cook, at least twice as long as it should for recipes that state the prep and cook time, but with this book I'm actually able to cook in a reasonable amount of time. And its all really healthy to boot! I recommend it to anyone that'll listen.

I've looked through the whole book, read up, and even made one of the recipes so far. I'm the only child in the family, and I don't get to cook often, but my parents love when I cook Asian food, so this book made them happy when they saw it. Everyone loved what I made so far.

If you are looking for a beginners cookbook for Japanese cuisine, this is the one! Easy to follow recipes with ingredients you can find at your local grocery store. I did have to locate a Japanese market for some of the more traditional foods but what a fun excursion I had that day! The first meal attempted was shrimp tempura with soba noodles and it was fabulous. The back of the book is a goldmine of information with guides for food prep, cooking tips, and ingredients that include drawings and pictures. You cook like a pro starting with your very first recipe. So far my son and I have successfully made tonkatsu (pork cutlet), a slight variation of the Sukiyaki recipe, and the shrimp tempura with noodle. Learning how to make authentic Japanese sauce and soup bases are well worth the cost of the book. Tonight is chicken with udon noodle. Yum!

I can tell this will be an amazing cookbook. This is my first cookbook purchase as I usually just make up my own recipes or get them off the internet. The illustrations for the dishes and the ingredients is going to help a lot. I read thru some of the recipes and found them quite thorough and easy to follow. I will update if this book turns out not to be all I'm cracking it up to be.