A Curated List of DelishKitchen.tv Recipes

Delish Kitchen is a Japanese website full of easy-to-make recipes. All recipes have exact measurements, step-by-step instructions, and videos for you to follow along. Though the website is in Japanese, Google Translate will suffice for most translation, and any confusion can usually be resolved by watching the videos for each recipe. Those with limited knowledge of Japanese will have a fun time surfing through the site searching whatever food terms they know.

I recommend this website to anyone who loves to cook, but especially people who enjoy cooking with a limited amount of ingredients. If you search for one ingredient, you can find a ton of recipes to use it in, many of which are simplified enough to throw together in a pinch. This is especially useful if you have something in your fridge that’s about to go bad, or if you have a Japanese market nearby, and want to learn how to prepare things you find there.

I find that, when using search engines for Japanese recipes in English, a lot of sources tend to be inauthentic, or too focused on recreating some generalized taste of restaurant food. If I want good udon or ramen, I can get it from a good udon or ramen place, dammit! If I’m cooking something at home, it means I’m broke, tired, and need to stuff something in my face. I find that a lot of Delish Kitchen recipes are either focused on ease of preparation or ingredient combinations interesting enough to keep my attention span, and that is something I like a lot.

Here are my favorite Delish Kitchen recipes.

• 3 ingredient, 5 minute milk pudding. Add a bit of vanilla extract if you like, and top with way too much jam for your own good (It’s fiber, it’s good for you.) Recipe calls for potato starch, but I prefer to substitute tapioca. Throw some hot chocolate in there, see what happens.

• "Fat Fuck" Egg Sandwich

• This cake cooks perfectly in a Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker. If your rice cooker is of a similar size and build, it should work for you too. I never make this exactly as directed, and like using it more as a base cake recipe. Spice cakes are cute and all, but I like to omit or replace the tea, use strawberries instead of apples, and top with whipped cream for a lovely “strawberry shortcake.” I never get tired of the fact that I can make a perfect little dome cake in my rice cooker whenever I want. I would like to note, though, that at least for my size rice cooker, this is the only rice cooker cake recipe that hasn’t come out underbaked, so if other recipes on Delish Kitchen for rice cooker cakes haven’t worked out for you, give this one a try.

• The classic fruit cream sando. Anyone who’s been to Japan has had one of these, especially if you stayed in a hotel that serves breakfast. I have eaten too many of these sandwiches to count, and every time I do, I am reminded that life is worth living. It’s so simple, but for some reason, so many people have had trouble replicating these sandwiches. The key is to use Shokupan, which you can get at a local Japanese bakery or market, and make the whipped cream yourself with the easy recipe. It really takes much shorter than you’d think, if you’ve never made whipped cream before. Try replacing the fruits with grapes, it’s really good.

• 4 ingredient cherry desserts you can make in an ice tray. I learned how to make these after I tried a similar dessert from a gourmet Japanese sweets shop. If you know someone who loves cherries, you can totally individually wrap these and put them in a fancy box for them as a gift. The “cider” the recipe calls for is Mitsuya cider, which isn’t a cider as much as it is a soda. You can substitute it with ginger ale, 7-Up, Sprite, ramune, or my favorite, Fentimann’s Rose Lemonade. This isn’t the type of thing I make to eat alone in my room, so I usually go for a fancier carbonated drink. The possibilities are endless, and the outcome looks really fancy if you sell it well enough.

• A beautiful sweet bread recipe. One of my most cherished memories is making this with my friends before I moved away. We added matcha, and covered them with black sesame seeds and condensed milk. It was so good. I haven’t made this bread in a while, though, so I don’t know if it’s actually that good, or if I just miss the friends I made it with so terribly.

• These tofu egg meat vegetable cube things. Something inside me stirs with delight when I see dishes like this, because you get like, ALL your food groups in one neat little cube that tastes really good. The idea of making main and side dishes exhausts me so much that I've overcome so much of the textural issues that come with autism and food because it’s simply easier to make dishes where I throw everything in one big vat and cook. I love you, delicious and savory food cubes that give me protein and fiber.

• Stained glass flower sugar cookies. I make these EVERY SPRING. Get your favorite hard candies, and go to a park where there’s cherry blossom trees and johnny jump-ups. Or, maybe, you have edible flowers in your garden. Have a goddamn tea party. Just looking at these cookies makes me want to clean my house, shave my face, put on a lacy blouse, walk outside, and breathe deeply.

• Orange-milk kanten. I make these for tea parties. Every so often, I long for the sweet taste of an orange creamsicle, which is honestly one of the most accessible ice creams out there, but I never end up going out and buying a box. It’s probably because I went through a period of my life as a teenager where I was eating 2 of them a day, and I couldn’t stop until I got sick of them. This feels like an orange creamsicle, upscaled. When I eat it, I feel like I’m reconnecting with a lover who I lost in a war.

• Good old fashioned teriyaki age-tofu. She’s simple, she’s tender, she’s soft, she’s savory. This is such an easy way to prepare tofu, a lovely source of protein and fiber. Some days, my acid reflux is acting up, or I’m just too exhausted to eat much, and those are the days when I find myself eating an entire block of tofu at 4pm. Thank you, tofu, for your gentle nutritiousness.

• A delicious, portable teriyaki chicken pastry you can take to work for lunch. This is a recipe with such endless possibilities. At first, it seems… pretty alright. Chicken, corn, and mayo on bread. It’s nice to look at, and a little more exciting than a sandwich, as it resembles a pastry from somewhere like Paris Baguette. But once you make it a few times, and really consider the variations you can make… You will be unstoppable..

  I don’t actually make these according to the exact recipe anymore. I made these things once and thought they were so good that I immediately started looking for ways to make the recipe easier and faster to make, so I could stock my freezer with them. I used Orsara Recipes’ homemade Italian bread recipe for the bread formula, because it is tattooed on the inside of my brain and will be etched on my gravestone when I die. This gives it a really nice pretzel-bread type of texture. For the filling on top, I use shrimp a lot more than I use chicken. I like to make the filling from this Delish Kitchen shrimp toast recipe. Instead of onions, I throw in spinach and corn, and I drizzle the whole pastry with ketchup and kewpie mayo before baking it. My husband affectionately calls this “The Shrimpy Bread.”