Cooking in Japanese

My decision to start a habit as this year's challenge (not resolution), was to cook in Japanese.

I need to give myself reasonable goals, so I thought I could manage 52 recipes this year. Once a week, I will use the new pressure cooker cookbook or an online recipe, in Japanese, and cook something simple and healthy.

Ideally this is a Japanese recipe with 2-10 ingredients, and if it is two, water can't be one of them. (Boiled eggs, although easy in the pressure cooker, didn't count.)

I will also write the recipes into a notebook (all in Japanese) including notes about anything I changed. (I'm a frequent adapter of ingredients and amounts.)

Since I found myself at home a lot more, I thought it would make sense to learn how to cook. I know some people love it but I just want to eat.

I'm not going to try anything fancy that involves multiple steps and bizarre ingredients. I know how I am. I do enough of the experimental cooking, exploring my Armenian American heritage, and embracing my Los Angeles roots. But those Japanese basics... I have learned some, others I sometimes make up as I go.

This challenge isn't to force myself to measure correctly or always use the ingredients listed. It's to improve Japanese.

I can read fairly well at this point, plus I can look up what I don't know. This exercise is to improve reading and cooking vocabulary, grammar, and writing in Japanese. In the process, I'll learn how to cook some things that aren't actually difficult.

I literally feel like I'm in an elementary school home economics class while I'm working on this challenge.

I'm working ahead lately. I also have a list of ideas.

My list of commonly used basics to keep in stock helps, but this will give me a little direction and interest in eating proper Japanese meals at home.