Japanese Cooking Quotes

First, make sure
the ocean is rolled
by an older woman
whose quick fingers
have been rolling the ocean
for as long as you've been alive –
She'll fatten the rice in hot,
sugared water spiked
with rice vinegar
then make a soft bed of it to wrap
a slip of fish muscle,
squeezing the bamboo rolling mat
until the ocean's circumference
is compacted in seaweed's
brittle corsetry.
It takes her just moments
to dress the ocean,
its nudity a pink tongue
poking
from iridescent green nori wrap ~ Jalina Mhyana

I love big shrimp, like Japanese botan shrimp and the meaty ones from Santa Barbara, Calif. In classic Japanese cooking, shrimp like these would be dropped into a broth or boiled as served with sushi. But I think boiling dilutes their great flavor, and they are better when stir-fried. ~ Nobu Matsuhisa

Shigureni is a variety of stewed meat where ginger has been added to the traditional soy sauce-and-sugar simmering sauce.
Thick, sweet and accented with ginger's uniquely spicy tang, there are layers of flavor to please the tongue!
Light yet thick, tangy yet sweet... all the various flavors patter across the tongue like a short afternoon drizzle- thus its name, shigure, which means "fall shower."
"It's a dish renowned for its exceptionally deep and compelling flavors."
"Ooh, you just know it's gonna be good. That's Takumi-chi for ya! He's a master of both Italian and Japanese cooking!" ~ Yuto Tsukuda

When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full.
Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two.
The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful. ~ Matthew Amster-Burton

The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Food is an implement of magic, and only the most coldhearted rationalist could squeeze the juices of life out of it and make it bland. In a true sense, a cookbook is the best source of psychological advice and the kitchen the first choice of room for a therapy of the world. ~ Thomas More

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, 'a physiological delight' he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves. ~ Junichiro Tanizaki

Japanese had reported sinking her so many times that she had acquired an additional sobriquet, "the Galloping Ghost of the Oahu Coast. ~ William F. Halsey

At the moment of victory, tighten the straps of your helmet. ~ Tokugawa Ieyasu

Those who get in the way of love's path will be kicked by horses.
~Kyoya ~ Bisco Hatori

Since the 1970s, Japanese quality has become a byword, and many a book and article has been penned on the subject of Kaizen, 'improvement,' a form of corporate culture in which employers encourage their workers to submit ideas that will polish and improve efficiency. The writers on Kaizen, however, overlooked one weakness in this approach, which seemed minor at the time but has seriously impacted Japan's technology. Kaizen's emphasis is entirely on positive recommendations; there is no mechanism to deal with negative criticism, no way to disclose faults or mistakes - and this leads to a fundamental problem of information. People keep silent about embarrassing errors, with the result that problems are never solved. ~ Alex Kerr

We don't talk about that. We don't talk about the fact that we can never hang out at Elody's house after five o'clock because her mother will be home, and drunk. We don't talk about the fact that Ally never eats more than a quarter of what's on her plate, even though she's obsessed with cooking and watches the Food Network for hours on end. ~ Lauren Oliver

I started cooking from watching my mom. My mother was a really, really great cook. ~ Coolio

I am more of an herb guy than a spice guy. It comes back to a certain conservatism I have regarding food. The French are not big on spices; they use more herbs. I know the spices used in European cooking and use them in moderation. I am not going to serve a dish that is wildly nutmegged!" David Waltuck, Chanterelle NYC ~ Karen Page

I liked to screw around in the kitchen when I was a kid. But I started cooking when I was 15. ~ Michael Mina

I like being at home and cooking. ~ Shania Twain

The Encounter"

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin. ~ Ezra Pound

Cooking well doesn't mean cooking fancy. ~ Julia Child

All movement stops and I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality's face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window - at dusk -
where I have no desire -
for bonbons - or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection - ~ Allen Ginsberg

I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American. ~ Barry Eisler

In terms of the Japanese royal family, they were considered the direct descendants of a god. They are regarded as all-powerful and possessors of unimaginable wealth, and yet they are, more often than not, literally prisoners of tradition. ~ Kathryn Lasky

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It's the single most important thing you can do for your health. ~ Michael Pollan

I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered about that. ~ Phil Donahue

I've made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark. ~ H.L. Mencken

I recognize the fact that I don't have one single drop of Japanese blood in my body. But I've always felt half-Japanese at heart. ~ Scott Fujita

The best meals are those prepared by loving hands. ~ Ken Poirot

I placed my hands on the edge of the table and leaned into her, extremely annoyed. "I've been cooking since I was a kid. I've been cooking this dish for three years straight through culinary school. I could make this food in my goddamn sleep and it would taste like something I'd feed to the president. My food isn't bland. My food is flavorful, and delicious. And you are just nuts!" I hollered. "Why are you yelling?" she whispered. "I don't know!" She laughed, making me want to kiss her. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation. ~ Pharrell Williams

The Berlin Wall fell because the East Germans saw the West had more. The Koreans don't like the Japanese and try to prove to them that they are worth more in the industrial arena. ~ Stef Wertheimer

As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life. ~ Japan Foundation

One thing that really interests me is-and it comes out of Chinese and Japanese painting-where you have a number of different kinds of space in the same painting. You have a kind of deep space, and then you have something like right up on the surface. ~ Mary Heilmann

In the middle distance, sails were gliding like butterflies, and farther away, ships dotted the mouth of the bay between Awa and Sagami as if brushed in ink in a single flowing stroke. ~ Haruo Shirane

Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect! ~ Thomas Carlyle

This lingering hint of savagery isn't necessarily a strike against fire cooking, however. To the contrary, some believe a bloody slab of beefsteak augments the power of the eater. "Whoever partakes of it," Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, "assimilates a bull-like strength." By comparison, the braise or stew - and particularly the braise or stew of meat that's been cut into geometric cubes and rendered tender by long hours in the pot - represents a deeper sublimation, or forgetting, of the brutal reality of this particular transaction among species. Certainly ~ Michael Pollan

What does kiciciyapi mitawa mean?"
He kept his head on her breasts. "What?"
"You called me kicicyapi mitawa. It sounded so beautiful. It wasn't Japanese. What was it?"
"It's the voice of the Lakota. It would sound silly in English." He cupped her breast, his fingers moving lightly over her skin. His breath warm on her heart.
"I want to know. It didn't sound silly when you said it. It sounded ... beautiful. It made me feel beautiful. And loved."
He kissed her breast. "I called you my heart. And you are. ~ Christine Feehan

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

The bible of cooking. The all-time argument ender. Early in my cooking career, I wielded my Larousse like a weapon and it never let me down. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free. ~ Carl Honore

Why is our (US) government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable? ~ Donella Meadows

Here's my impression of you when we met the other day: you HAVE changed completely--but I wish you hadn't. I think I understand why you're on your best behavior at school, and I suppose I ought to praise you for showing such an improvement, but please don't force yourself to change too much. Please, at least when you're with me, be the same bright Naomi who chats about everything under the sun. You and I have grown up in different environments, we have different lives, and we also think differently--yet in spite of all these differences I'm sure we can be the best of friends. One day we may come to share the same ideas, but I'd like to believe that it's a natural growing together. ~ Shizuko Gō

Looks delicious," he lied. "A mite crispy along the edges - but then, I like it that way."
Incredulous eyes met his own. "You like your potatoes burned?"
Ah, so he'd been right about that. If he could still recognize what it was she'd cooked, then surely he could eat it. ~ Tracy Anne Warren

I think people are more savvy about cooking, food and dining. I notice they are looking for more value for their money - not in larger portions but more in terms of healthier, fresh, farm-to-table dishes with a nice presentation. ~ Cat Cora

I'm not a purist. Coffee drinking minus cream and sugar is an acquired taste. I'm still not sure it isn't like telling chefs to dispense with spices in cooking. ~ Kevin Sinnott

The presence of otaku culture is a grotesque reflection of the fragility of Japanese identity. This is because the "Japanese" themes and modes of expression created by otaku are in fact all imitations and distortions of U.S.-made material. On the other hand, the presence of this culture is connected to the narcissism of the 1980s and is also a fetish that can feed the illusion of Japan being at the cutting edge of the world. ~ Hiroki Azuma

I do not believe that God has given us this trial to not purpose. I know that the day will come when we will clearly understand why this persecution with all it's sufferings has been bestowed upon us -- for everything that Our Lord does is for our good. And yet, even as I write these words I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of those last stammering words of Kichijiro in the morning of his departure: "Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering on us?" and then the resentment in those eyes that he turned upon me. "Father", he had said "what evil have we done?"

I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with tall the pain of a sharp needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God. Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent. ~ Shusaku Endo

My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking, and to enjoy consuming good food and wine. ~ Danny Meyer

There are many, many difficult times, god knows. If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something. It could be children, or it could be house plants, you know? By doing that you come to understand your own limitations. That's where it starts. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes ~ T. S. Eliot