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jennifertijssen's review against another edition
3.0
Goede introductie in een Japans dieet, voor iedereen buiten Japan. Wel iets te Amerika-centraal. Simpele recepten, leuke tidbits van Japanse cultuur en geschiedenis. Onderbouwing van gezondheidsclaims voelden pseudo-wetenschappelijk en alsof ze de eerste 4 resultaten van Google Scholar geciteerd heeft per voedingsgroep. Handig dat ze lijsten geeft van kookwaar, ingrediënten en simpele opstart-menu's. Relatief weinig recepten zonder vlees.
bookishblond's review
4.0
What a nice find straight from the clearance shelves of Half Price Books! I'm a sucker for Asian cooking and diet books, so of course I picked this one up. It was definitely worth the $2!
The cutesie title is misleading: it's an obvious reference to the bestselling [b:French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure|106882|French Women Don't Get Fat The Secret of Eating for Pleasure|Mireille Guiliano|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1171567893s/106882.jpg|1770059], a marketing scheme to sell more books. Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat is less of a diet book and more of an exploration of the ties between food, family, culture, and history, with many delicious recipes sprinkled between stories.
The cutesie title is misleading: it's an obvious reference to the bestselling [b:French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure|106882|French Women Don't Get Fat The Secret of Eating for Pleasure|Mireille Guiliano|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1171567893s/106882.jpg|1770059], a marketing scheme to sell more books. Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat is less of a diet book and more of an exploration of the ties between food, family, culture, and history, with many delicious recipes sprinkled between stories.
marie_gg's review against another edition
4.0
Naomi Moriyama grew up in Tokyo with a typical Japanese mom provided attractive, nourishing food for her daughter.,.on the strict orders of Naomi's school!
(On the first day of school, a teacher made a speech: "We request that every mother make lunch for your daughter every day. Our main theme at this school is to help our students learn how to be giving and loving. One of the ways your daughter learns this is from your love-packed lunch box.") Can you imagine hearing this kind of a message in an American school???
Moriyama ended up moving to the U.S. to attend college and subsequently met and married her American husband. But she also came to miss and appreciate her mom's Japanese home cooking.
This book is a combination health book and cookbook. Moriyama includes statistics about how Japanese people live longer and have the lowest obesity rates in the world. They are also extremely active (few Japanese people use their cars every day, especially city residents)--instead they use mass transit, walk, or bicycle. I walked more during the three years I lived in Japan than I've ever walked in my life.
Moriyama also shares her own personal experiences--for example, when she arrived in the American Midwest to attend college, she gained a great deal of weight right away. When she moved back to Tokyo for awhile, she lost it all without dieting or exercising. The Japanese lifestyle, combined with fresh ingredients and home cooking, is the secret sauce!
As I was reading Moriyama's stories, I kept thinking of my wonderful stay in an old, traditional Japanese farmhouse on the western coast of Honshu (the most populated island in Japan), where we picked fresh persimmons, mountain potatoes, and mandarin oranges. My friend Debbie and I learned how to make gyoza (potstickers) and sushi, and the family had a brazier-fired kotatsu where they ate dinner each day. (A kotatsu is a wonderful table with a heater underneath it--we had one in our apartment with an electric heater, and the heat was kept under the table with a blanket...I loved that kotatsu as we didn't have central heating!) That weekend was the most traditional Japanese of any time I spent in Japan--it was fantastic. View my blog at http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2014/09/japanese-women-dont-get-old-or-fat.html for some photos of that weekend.
Japanese home cooking is so much more than sushi and sashimi...you can find more of it at American Japanese restaurants than when we first returned from Japan. I loved delicacies such as spinach soaked in ground sesame seeds, okonomiyaki (Japanese-style pizza), takoyaki (octopus balls), yaki soba (fried noodles), ramen (noodle soup), gyoza, zaru soba (cold soba noodles with a dipping sauce), oyakodonburi (chicken and egg over rice), clams in sake broth, anything cooked with miso, rice balls with pickled plum seasoning, mochi with red bean paste, broiled mackerel or salmon, nabe (a soup that consists of each person dipping his or her own meat and veggies into a broth), traditional Japanese breakfasts, and edamame (steamed soybeans, now readily available in the U.S.).
Moriyama also enfolds some priceless Japanese history in her pages, including the stories of some kick-ass Japanese women in ancient times: Queen Himiko and Tomoe Gozen. (I need to learn more about these two!)
This book made me miss Japan and Japanese food so much! I love the way Moriyama gives tribute to her mom's own Tokyo kitchen...and I definitely want to incorporate more Japanese cooking into our own kitchen. But the truth is that cooking Japanese does take a great deal more time, and we don't all have Japanese housewives in our families!
I made one of the recipes in the book the other night--Eggplant Sauteed with Miso--and it was oishii (delicious)! This book inspired me to do more Japanese cooking and think more about what I'm eating--is it fresh? Is it processed? Has it been made with love? And I'm longing for Japan!
(On the first day of school, a teacher made a speech: "We request that every mother make lunch for your daughter every day. Our main theme at this school is to help our students learn how to be giving and loving. One of the ways your daughter learns this is from your love-packed lunch box.") Can you imagine hearing this kind of a message in an American school???
Moriyama ended up moving to the U.S. to attend college and subsequently met and married her American husband. But she also came to miss and appreciate her mom's Japanese home cooking.
This book is a combination health book and cookbook. Moriyama includes statistics about how Japanese people live longer and have the lowest obesity rates in the world. They are also extremely active (few Japanese people use their cars every day, especially city residents)--instead they use mass transit, walk, or bicycle. I walked more during the three years I lived in Japan than I've ever walked in my life.
Moriyama also shares her own personal experiences--for example, when she arrived in the American Midwest to attend college, she gained a great deal of weight right away. When she moved back to Tokyo for awhile, she lost it all without dieting or exercising. The Japanese lifestyle, combined with fresh ingredients and home cooking, is the secret sauce!
As I was reading Moriyama's stories, I kept thinking of my wonderful stay in an old, traditional Japanese farmhouse on the western coast of Honshu (the most populated island in Japan), where we picked fresh persimmons, mountain potatoes, and mandarin oranges. My friend Debbie and I learned how to make gyoza (potstickers) and sushi, and the family had a brazier-fired kotatsu where they ate dinner each day. (A kotatsu is a wonderful table with a heater underneath it--we had one in our apartment with an electric heater, and the heat was kept under the table with a blanket...I loved that kotatsu as we didn't have central heating!) That weekend was the most traditional Japanese of any time I spent in Japan--it was fantastic. View my blog at http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2014/09/japanese-women-dont-get-old-or-fat.html for some photos of that weekend.
Japanese home cooking is so much more than sushi and sashimi...you can find more of it at American Japanese restaurants than when we first returned from Japan. I loved delicacies such as spinach soaked in ground sesame seeds, okonomiyaki (Japanese-style pizza), takoyaki (octopus balls), yaki soba (fried noodles), ramen (noodle soup), gyoza, zaru soba (cold soba noodles with a dipping sauce), oyakodonburi (chicken and egg over rice), clams in sake broth, anything cooked with miso, rice balls with pickled plum seasoning, mochi with red bean paste, broiled mackerel or salmon, nabe (a soup that consists of each person dipping his or her own meat and veggies into a broth), traditional Japanese breakfasts, and edamame (steamed soybeans, now readily available in the U.S.).
Moriyama also enfolds some priceless Japanese history in her pages, including the stories of some kick-ass Japanese women in ancient times: Queen Himiko and Tomoe Gozen. (I need to learn more about these two!)
This book made me miss Japan and Japanese food so much! I love the way Moriyama gives tribute to her mom's own Tokyo kitchen...and I definitely want to incorporate more Japanese cooking into our own kitchen. But the truth is that cooking Japanese does take a great deal more time, and we don't all have Japanese housewives in our families!
I made one of the recipes in the book the other night--Eggplant Sauteed with Miso--and it was oishii (delicious)! This book inspired me to do more Japanese cooking and think more about what I'm eating--is it fresh? Is it processed? Has it been made with love? And I'm longing for Japan!
hoperu's review
3.0
Sort of a spin of on the French Women don't get fat fad. An interesting look into the food culture of Japan, but a lot of the advice about cooking the Japanese way will be pretty difficult for anyone not raised in the culture or really dedicated to it.
shajila's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed this and would reccomend to anyone who enjoys japanese culture. This is so well written, it is part health part travel book! With health books I do find that they can be quite biased but I was happy to see that the writer included facts that also show the negative effects of a typical japanese diet and mentioned some studies that might make you a bit more cautious to try certain things - this is a good quality book I would say for that reason. I do have a sneaky suspicion that the original name for this book was something like 'tokyo kitchen' or 'my mother's tokyo kitchen'. If I recall correctly this book came out around the same time as 'french women don't get fat' so maybe this was a last minute marketing choice? Either way I will definitely read this again in the future for pleasure but I dont think this cuisine is exactly for me, although I definitely agree with lots of points in the book. I also loved that she included some deep fried recipes. Nowadays that would never be included in a diet book.
izzatiidrus's review against another edition
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.5
An easy-to-read book about typical Japanese home-cooked meals which the author claimed to be nutritious for our body. So much so that Japanese women tend to be able to keep being slim and looking younger than their peers in Western countries.
As a fellow Asian and as someone who has become familiar with Japanese cooking, most of the contents in the book are nothing new to me. The book was first published back in 2005 after all. Still, it's refreshing to read the author's anecdotes and some stories about mythical/lengendary/mythical samurai figures and the food they consumed.
The book also provides a lot of simple Japanese everyday meals and plans for breakfast, lunch and dinner which I fully intend to incorporate in my life going forward.
As a fellow Asian and as someone who has become familiar with Japanese cooking, most of the contents in the book are nothing new to me. The book was first published back in 2005 after all. Still, it's refreshing to read the author's anecdotes and some stories about mythical/lengendary/mythical samurai figures and the food they consumed.
The book also provides a lot of simple Japanese everyday meals and plans for breakfast, lunch and dinner which I fully intend to incorporate in my life going forward.
geistership's review against another edition
3.0
I really liked the home-diet recipes and the little autobiographic tidbits here and there. On the other hand it really bothered me how repetitive some parts were, so some better editing would do this book good.
jayishino's review against another edition
5.0
I love it! This book put me back in the kitchen after being sick and not wanting to cook for a while. The recipes in here are great and the tips Moriyama suggests aren't too difficult to follow. Been cooking out of this book since I got it.
lainecid's review against another edition
2.0
Really simple solid Japanese recipes, but also really odd to take a look back at the role of the internet in 2005. Now it seems really weird to get step by step instructions for how to order items on the internet from Japan, but then it was much harder and less easy to get these products. Funny to see how fast the internet changed in just 13 years.
jazin95's review against another edition
5.0
I love Japanese food, combined with the March reading prompt from the #readingwithmuffy 2021 reading challenge; I knew I had to pick up this book. Naomi Moriyama's writing style is delightfully informal and easy to read. I love the handy hints on what kitchen tools to use and essential ingredients to buy. I had no idea that a wok could do so much.