Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen

Chapter 1 My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen The people assemble in joy; Food and drink is abundant. For all generations without end, Day by day ever more flourishing, Until myriads of years hence The pleasure will not cease. Ancient Japanese blessing My mother, Chizuko, sends me e-mails from Tokyo all the time. She sends them from her mobile phonewhen she's in the kitchen or the grocery store, when she's on line to buy tickets to a show, or when she's waiting for a train in a Tokyo subway station. She wants to know how my husband, Billy, and I are doing, when we're coming over to visitand what we're eating. To help us write this book, she's been sending us her recipes and food tips by e-mail and via fax, sometimes writing little diagrams of vegetables like mountain potatoes. She is a self-taught natural master of Japanese home cooking who never refers to a cookbook. "It's all in my brain," she explains. Like many mothers in Japan and around the world, my mother has always been devoted to giving her family the most healthy and delicious food she can find, as a way of showing her love for them. I see her cooking not just as a sign of love but also as the perfect symbol of why Japanese women are living longer and healthier than everyone else on Earth, and why they (and their husbands) have the lowest obesity rates in the developed world. My husband and I both have stories to tell that bring those statistics to life. I'll start with Billy's story, which began several years ago, when we stayed at my parents' apartment in Tokyo for a week and experiencedfor the first time, in Billy's casea total immersion in my mother's home cooking. I had been back to Tokyo many times over the years, both on business and to visit my family, but when I was there I usually stayed at hotels like the Park Hyatt (the setting of Sofia Coppola'sLost in Translation). This time, we chose not to stay in a hotel because my parents insisted on our being with them. For me, that week in My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen was a delicious reawakening to the tastes and aromas of my youth, of the years before I moved to New York at the age of twenty-seven. For Billy, it was a completely new experience. Billy had been to Tokyo with me once before, but on that trip we had separate business meetings in different parts of town, we stayed in a Western-style hotel, and I was too busy to introduce him to the pleasures of Tokyo food, which was completely foreign and intimidating to him. He wandered the streets of Tokyo in a state of hungry confusion. He looked in shop windows and stared at noodle bowls and bento boxesand he was clueless. He had no idea what or how to order. The food looked strange and the menus were incomprehensible. Food was everywherebut to him it all seemed out of reach. So he made a beeline for McDonald's, and chowed down on Big Macs, shakes, and fries almost every day, he confessed later. At the end of four days in Tokyo, he felt lousy and was five pounds fatter. But during his next trip to Tokyo, after a week of eating only the dishes that emerged from My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen, Billy had fallen madly in love with Japanese home-cooked food. When we went back to New York, he continued eating Japanese-style food almost exclusively. For both of us, that week in Tokyo ignited a new passion for the joys of Japanese home cooking. Before that trip, we relied heavily on takeout, frozen dinners, and eating out, just like other New York workaholics. To me, "cooking" meant buying prewashed salad mix from a supermarket, putting it in a prettMoriyama, Naomi is the author of 'Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385339971 and ISBN 0385339976.