Meg Tanaka is the co-founder of Cibi, the lifestyle brand she established with her husband Zenta Tanaka in Collingwood in 2008. With a café-restaurant, grocer and design store under one roof, Cibi brings together food, design and people as part of everyday life. Cibi now has two stores in Tokyo and recently opened in Meg’s hometown of Okayama. Meg’s approach to food is rooted in the everyday home cooking she grew up with and now cooks for her own family. Cibi’s new book, Osozai – Everyday Japanese Home Cooking, brings together more than 80 recipes from this way of cooking, eating and living.
I wrote Osozai because I wanted to share what Japanese people really cook and eat at home every day. These are the dishes I grew up eating from my mum and grandmother’s kitchens in Japan, and many of them are now part of what I cook for my own family in Melbourne. They are simple, familiar dishes that come together to make a meal – sometimes just one or two, sometimes many more when family and friends gather around the table.
The main thing I learned writing it was how much memory lives in everyday food. So much of the way I cook comes from watching my mum and grandmother and being around food growing up. You learn by seeing, tasting and doing. My grandmother cooked with whatever was ready in our family garden, preparing what was in season for dinner.
Writing the book made me realise how much knowledge gets passed from one generation to another through everyday cooking.
Osozai is a Japanese word for the everyday dishes we eat at home. What that looks like in the kitchen and on the table is having a variety of dishes on the table and sharing them together, taking a little of this and a little of that. There might be rice and miso soup, something grilled or simmered, a vegetable dish and some pickles.
It changes with the season, what you have at home and how much time you have. Each dish brings another flavour, nourishment and colour, and together they bring joy to the table. That is the way I love to eat osozai.
If you take one thing from this book, it should be that you don’t need to change the way you already cook. “Just one more dish can change everything” is at the heart of the book. Start with one recipe and add it to the way you already eat. It could be a simple vegetable dish or some sesame-dressed greens alongside something you already cook.
Little by little, these dishes can become part of your own everyday cooking.
But I’d also love it if you tried my mum’s Japanese potato salad. I grew up eating it, and whenever I go home to Japan with my family, Mum still makes it alongside all the other dishes she prepares for us. Now it has become one of my kids’ favourites too.
And try the grilled yellowtail collar. Everyone in my family loves it, and our friends do, too. It’s such an underrated cut of fish, relatively inexpensive and incredibly delicious. Go to your local seafood market and ask for yellowtail or kingfish collar. All you need to do is rub it with good salt and grill it, then serve with grated daikon, soy sauce and a squeeze of citrus. So simple and so good.
If you’re a relatively new cook, give the tonkatsu a try. If you’re happy to do a little frying, tonkatsu is surprisingly simple to make and makes a great weekend meal for the whole family. Add plenty of finely shredded cabbage, rice and one or two simple sides, and you have a very Japanese home-style meal.
If you’re looking to extend yourself a bit more, meanwhile, try the chawanmushi. It’s a savoury steamed egg custard that might be something you haven’t tried making at home before, but it’s actually very simple – and so delicious. Once you discover how easy it is, I think you’ll make it again and again.
When you’ve finished reading Osozai I hope you’ll cook from it. Not just once, but enough that eventually you stop thinking of these as recipes from my book. I would love them to become part of your own kitchen – dishes you know by heart, change according to what you have, cook for your family and friends, and eventually call your own.
I hope Osozai travels far beyond our kitchen and Cibi, finding its way onto family tables and into everyday life around the world.
Happy Osozai!
Osozai (HarperCollins, RRP $39.99) by Meg Tanaka is out now and available at excellent independent Victorian bookstores such as Readings, Books for Cooks and Hill of Content.