Thank you for visiting my website.
I’m Ayumi (歩）.
１.Childhood
I’was born in Yokohama and raised in Osaka.
I’ve started my cooking experience since I was 3 years old.
I’ve loved to eat since I was a baby, and I’ve been interested in cooking for as long as I can remember(I was a kid who loved to watch cooking shows since I was a baby).
The first dish I cooked was a chopped salad.
In hindsight, it’s a pretty primitive salad, which I just sliced up cucumbers and tomatoes roughly with a steak knife and poured mayonnaise over them.
Still, my mother was happy to eat it, saying it was delicious and delicious.
Seeing this, as a little girl I loved to cook more and more.
For me, cooking has always been a joyful and happy process, in the process of coming up with ideas, in the process of cooking, in the moment of eating the product and in the moment of seeing my family happy, all the way through.
But above all, I think this experience is the original experience that made me love cooking.
I have never banned by my parents about how to cook, such as the use of kitchen knives and fire (I think their policy was a pretty brave choice as I became a parent).
When I was in elementary school and my mother started working full time, I started to cook dinner for my brother and myself.
I never learned to cook directly from my mother, but I expanded my repertoire by recreating my mother’s and grandmother’s dishes and watching her cookbooks and TV cooking shows.
2.Addicted to eating and cooking foreign foods
As a university student, I was awakened to the deliciousness of ethnic food（Thai food, Vietnamese food, Indian food, Mexican food, Lebanese food, Russian food, Ukrainian food, etc.）
In Kyoto, where my university was, there are restaurants in many countries, and I was able to eat at a reasonable price for students.
While eating a lot of ethnic foods, I noticed that some of them are localized and some of them were traditional and authentic with original tastes.
Both have their own merits, but as a food lover, I’ve come to want to cook more authentic food at home.
At that time, the Internet was still in its infancy, there was not as much information as it is now, and the ingredients available were limited, so I remember having a hard time through trial and error.
However, I feel that the experience I had at that time was very useful in communicating how to cook Japanese food. In addition to authentic Japanese home-cooked dishes, I also make recipes with original arrangements, but I feel that the range of recipes has expanded further by incorporating foreign seasonings into my ideas.
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3.Marriage and the birth of my daughter
I got married and had a daughter in 2016. She was allergic to wheat, eggs and dairy products (she is much better now, but at the time it was a very severe allergy).
At the time, gluten-free was in its infancy in Japan, so I made my own breads, pastas, udon noodles, cookies, cakes, and all kinds of wheat, egg, and dairy-filled foods using rice flour, tapioca flour, soy milk, and other substitute ingredients.
It was a difficult time for me because I didn’t know what the future held, but I became interested in dishes that were easy to make, even for people with limited availability of ingredients. I also became more conscious of healthier ingredients.
During the first few years after my daughter was born, her allergies made it difficult for me to work outside the home, so I studied and became certified as a miso sommelier, something I had always been interested in.
4.Life in the U.S.
Since 2019, we are living on the East Coast of the United States. The diversity of the American people and culture was very interesting to me, and I was always encouraged by the kindness and positivity of the people, even though it was my first time living in a foreign country and I was apprehensive.
When I came to the United States, I was surprised to find that people loved Japanese food much more than I had imagined.
If you go to a food court in an outlet or shopping mall, there is always a long line of people waiting in line for fast food, such as Japanese rice bowls.
In Grubhub’s category, sushi exists as a separate category, and in fact, there was a never-ending stream of customers at a nearby sushi restaurant.
As a Japanese person, I was genuinely happy about this fact.
On the other hand, some of the Japanese food served seemed unorthodox to the Japanese sensibilities, or far removed from the original method of preparation (not so much as a result of localization, but rather the lack of proper substitution of hard-to-reach ingredients, which I felt was often the case). (There was). It’s true that if so many people are interested in Japanese food, I would like to see them eat better and more authentic food.
Also, one time I went to a Japanese food supermarket and saw a Japan-loving American in the seasoning section who was puzzled by the various seasoning labels.
I wasn’t confident in my language skills and couldn’t talk to him, but it reminded me of a time when I myself went to a seasoning corner in a foreign country as a foreigner.
I wanted to share the small but detailed differences that Japanese who love cooking know and share that knowledge with those who need it.
What I’ve found in cooking Japanese home cooking in the United States is that proper substitution of ingredients is very important.
With the development of logistics and the Internet, Japanese ingredients are now easier to find than in the past, but there are many ingredients that are hard to find due to the difficulty of keeping them fresh, hard to use in practice due to high prices, or impossible to use due to religion or beliefs.
In such an environment, substitution and ingenuity are essential, but I often felt that the recipes currently available on the Internet did not provide adequate substitutions from the point of view of a Japanese food lover.
As a food lover, I want people to be able to eat a wide range of authentic Japanese food with ease and with appropriate substitutions, given the limitations of the ingredients. That’s what I thought.
It was with these thoughts that I started shooting with my iPhone camera and started this blog.
I’d like to share useful information with you, so please feel free to comment on anything you have questions about or are having trouble understanding, or your thoughts.