Serve with Peanut Dipping Sauce

The bread is best when it is warm and comes out of the oven with a crisp crust and a tender interior. It is easy to taste the buttermilk in the loaf, but it is very plain bread. I like it with soup, where it can sop up broth, or cut into slices (I often simply pull pieces off the loaf) and topped with butter or jam. Irish butter is usually salted and will taste better with the bread than unsalted butter.

Serve a traditional tempura dinner with steamed rice, green beans with soy sauce and grated ginger, and miso soup.

Okonomiyaki is one of the great Japanese foods not yet widely known outside Japan. “Okonomi” literally translates “as you like,” reflecting the wide range of ingredients you can use in okonomiyaki.

There is a category of cooking in almost every cuisine, “mother’s cooking”. It means something that’s simple, homely, filling, and invokes strong feelings of nostaliga. In Japanese this is called ofukuro no aji (mother’s flavor). Nikujaga, or stewed potatoes with meat, is one of the mainstays of Japanese-style mother’s cooking.

This meat and potato dish only contains a small amount of meat, which is basically there for flavor rather than substance. This is quite typical of Japanese cooking. Traditionally, this is eaten with plain rice, but if the idea of potatoes and rice is sort of overwhelming to you, reduce the amount of soy sauce in the stewing liquid to make it less salty.