Naomi Moriyama

What a nice find straight from the clearance shelves of Half Price Books! I'm a sucker for Asian cooking and diet books, so of course I picked this one up. It was definitely worth the $2!

The cutesie title is misleading: it's an obvious reference to the bestselling [b:French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure|106882|French Women Don't Get Fat The Secret of Eating for Pleasure|Mireille Guiliano|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1171567893s/106882.jpg|1770059], a marketing scheme to sell more books. Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat is less of a diet book and more of an exploration of the ties between food, family, culture, and history, with many delicious recipes sprinkled between stories.… (mais)

While I'm not exactly fond of the name of this book, it definitely attracts attention because of it. This was a great book. Naomi Moriyama does a great job of speaking to her readers, sharing her own upbringing and experiences with traditional Japanese cooking, giving some very interesting insight into the history and reasons for certain Japanese foods and culinary customs, and provides delicious recipes throughout the book.

A smooth and smart read, Moriyama not only provides her personal insight on home-cooked Japanese cuisine, but defends the health merits of it all with statistics from various medical and culinary sources.… (mais)

This is an interesting book for someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere with little exposure to Japanese food. The author is great at explaining the health benefits of Japanese food and also at selling the Japanese lifestyle (not that I needed much convincing, hehe). I definitely will be trying out many of the recipes, though it was discouraging to see how many required egg as I am allergic. Also, it is difficult to find a lot of the ingredients for even the most basic foods in the book in my area, even at the wonderful Asian markets I frequent in a semi-nearby town. This is not a diet that impoverished people such as myself will be able to switch to and live off of due to the exotic (read: usually expensive!) nature of most of the ingredients, but I think that incorporating a lot of the principles from the book into my life will help me to be healthier, enjoy my food more, and maybe even lose weight. And every now and then I can splurge and buy ingredients to make miso soup. I'm even thinking of ordering seeds from the seed company mentioned near the end of the book so I can grow my own daikon.
As to the writing...it could be better. The last few chapters were pretty random and seemed to have been typed almost as a stream-of-consciousness exercise or something. I am very interested to learn more about the female samurai Tomoe, but feel that her story wasn't as relevant as a recipe actually using brown rice would have been.
So 3 of 5 stars. I would have given more stars for more recipes--there really aren't all that many in the book! I've been watching a lot of JapaneseCooking101 videos on youtube, though, and that has given me a much bigger base to work from.… (mais)