An article about my favourite cooking recipes

This article was machine-translated from the Japanese version.

Hello everyone! I’m Unigiri. This article is the 12th day entry of the 卓ゲ箪笥 Advent Calendar 2025. Day 11 was dam14F’s About the Scenarios of Nuno’s Anonymous Box. I participated in this scenario too, and it was really fun!

This “talking” article series I write every year has now reached its third installment. ¹ I’m grateful to have a life where I have at least a few things I can talk about to some extent.

This year, as the title says, it’s an article about my favorite cooking recipes! Even those who don’t cook much, please give it a read. Some of these might make you think “Is this really even a recipe…?” Like kuzuyu where you just pour hot water.

Cooking and Me

This is just the opener! If you want to see the recipes, scroll past this.

My cooking history began when I started living alone in my first year of university. That means from age 19. ² At the time, due to various circumstances, I couldn’t really eat out anywhere other than the campus cafeteria and convenience stores, ³ so I inevitably had to start cooking for myself.

At home, I helped my mother with things like cooking rice, adding miso to miso soup and adjusting the taste, making boiled eggs, and wrapping gyoza, but I hadn’t done any proper cooking, so I subscribed to Today’s Cooking for Beginners to learn the basics of cooking. I really recommend this magazine!! It uses a lot of recipes without obscure ingredients, making it very practical. You can now read past recipes online.

What did I actually make back then…? I remember eating bread crusts I got from my part-time job for breakfast. Other than that, I stir-fried vegetables and made miso soup in a one-burner kitchen.

After that, I entered the workforce, but for much the same reasons as my university days, I continued cooking for myself. ⁴ I moved to a place with a two-burner stove, and my home cooking level skyrocketed. On days off, I’d make and eat okazu crepes. Maybe I got a bit too carried away. It was around this time that I started challenging myself with diverse recipes beyond rice bowls and one-soup-one-side combinations.

After that, I moved into a share house and started seeing how other people cooked, then lived with my mother and temporarily cooked less, then moved into another share house with an old-school, full-scale commercial kitchen where you light the fire with a match lighter, but one way or another, I’ve continued cooking my own meals to a reasonable extent.

This article is a collection of recipes that such a me loves and uses often.

Definition of Difficulty in Recipes

A nerd immediately starts with definitions. Well, just hear me out for a moment.

This article categorizes each recipe by difficulty level. But what you find difficult or tedious when cooking varies from person to person, right? So, here I present Unigiri’s definition of a high-difficulty recipe.

1. The recipe uses many types of ingredients
2. The process of heating ingredients is complex

For point 1, I think it’s easy to imagine. When making a shopping list while looking at a recipe, if there are many ingredients, considering the cost, time, effort, and everything else, you tend to think “Well, maybe I’ll just pretend I didn’t see this…” and close the recipe.

For point 2, it’s somewhat subjective, but as one example, I find it tedious when there’s a step where you have to temporarily remove ingredients from the frying pan or pot. You need a plate to place the evacuated ingredients on, which increases the washing up, and somehow… I get this feeling like “Once it’s heated, it should be done!” Examples include taking the egg out onto a separate plate first when making fried rice, or heating something in a frying pan and then baking it in the oven when making roast beef.

In this article, recipes that fall under these criteria are treated as difficult. ⁵ Basically, the difficulty categories here don’t apply universally, so just take them as a rough reference.

Easy-ish Recipes

Rice with Raw Egg, Mekabu, and Natto

The title says it all! Just crack an egg and dump mekabu and natto over cooked white rice. If you have small green onions, white sesame seeds, or shredded nori, scattering them on top as a finish makes it even better.

The key here is the mekabu — having a green ingredient in there makes you feel like you’re at least somewhat health-conscious. At minimum, you’re getting dietary fiber. Store-bought seasoned mekabu packs are the most convenient, but the seasoning combined with the natto sauce can make it a bit too salty, so personally I recommend the unseasoned kind. Either way, mekabu doesn’t keep for long, so it’s best to eat it soon after buying.

Note that despite its liquid-food-like ease of eating, it’s surprisingly filling. ⁶ If you think it’s too much, I recommend dropping either the natto or the egg.

Recipe: None (too simple to need one)

Natto Toast

Natto again. I love natto. It’s a protein source you can eat without processing. I always keep natto stocked in the fridge, but I’ve been living without really coming up with uses for it beyond putting it on rice. Sometimes I eat natto by itself to satisfy a small hunger, but when that feels a bit bland, I make natto toast.

The method is simply to put natto on top when toasting bread. If you feel like it, scattering white sesame seeds after it’s toasted adds to the feeling that you actually cooked. Just be careful not to spill the natto when eating. I spill it quite often though…

Recipe: None (too simple to need one)

Kuzuyu

It’s become the season for delicious kuzuyu. You just add hot water to store-bought kuzuyu mix and stir, but this is also a perfectly valid recipe. Probably. I drink it when I’m a little hungry but don’t feel like eating solid food.

There are many kinds of kuzuyu mix sold, but I especially like Imaoka Seika’s Matcha Kuzuyu.

Recipe: None (too simple to need one)

Cold-Brew Tea

I claim to be a tea lover, but even so, brewing from hot water is still a hassle. Boil water, take out two teapots and a teacup, pour boiling water into each vessel to warm them, measure the tea leaves, steep the tea in teapot 1, pour the finished steep into teapot 2 so it doesn’t get any stronger, pour the tea into the teacup, put a tea cozy over teapot 2… No matter how you think about it, I’m adding extra steps with unnecessary obsessiveness. I should just use tea bags.

Regardless, brewing tea from hot water takes a fair amount of effort. Also, in summer I don’t want to drink hot tea. What’s very convenient at times like that is cold-brew tea.

Whether it’s black tea, herbal tea, or Chinese/Taiwanese tea, just put 10g in a tea bag, place it in 1L of water, and leave it in the fridge. Tea bags are sold at 100-yen shops. If filling tea bags is too much effort, mugicha bags work too. The steeping time depends on your preference, but I typically leave mugicha for about 3 hours and everything else for about 8 hours.

Everyone, drink lots of tea and prevent dehydration! If you’re concerned about caffeine, rooibos is recommended! There’s nothing you can do about tooth staining, so give up and go to the dentist regularly.

Recipe: None (too simple to need one)

Hakase-chan’s Salt Ramen

This is a recipe introduced on the TV show Sandwichman & Ashida Mana’s Hakase-chan. As the name suggests, it’s salt ramen, but the big feature is that you can make ramen soup just by putting 5 types of seasonings in a bowl and pouring hot water. The only effort is procuring the seasonings the first time, but once you have them stocked, being able to make ramen soup anytime is psychologically wonderful. Note that the effort of preparing toppings is not included in the recipe difficulty. Please add your favorite ingredients.

It’s very delicious for how easy it is, but if you make the soup exactly as the recipe says, the salt content becomes very high. ⁷ If you’re concerned, you should reduce the salt. I definitely don’t recommend finishing the broth.

Recipe: Hakase-chan’s Direct Instruction! [Super Delicious Salt Ramen] We Tried Making It “Sandwichman Highly Praises” “Super Easy! Even Elementary Schoolers Can Do It” The Pinnacle of Home Ramen | Kufu Loco Sendai with Tohoku Electric Frontier

Spaghetti with Just Tomatoes

The ingredients are tomatoes, pasta, salt, olive oil, and that’s it! This is delicious for how simple it is, and for the past year whenever I have pasta it’s either this or peperoncino. The only downside is that you end up with two large items to wash — the pot for boiling pasta and the frying pan for making the sauce. Introducing a container for cooking pasta in the microwave would make it even easier.

In the recipe photo, dried parsley (not counted in the ingredients) is casually scattered, but it makes a huge difference in color, so I recommend using it if you have it.

Recipe: The “Spaghetti with Just Tomatoes” That Went Viral on X Is Incredibly Delicious! Easy to Make and Great Value - Togetter

Scrambled Eggs

This is a very highly recommended recipe!!!!!!! I want all of humanity to try it at least once. It’s faster for you to see it in photos than for me to explain in words, so first please take a look at the recipe.

This! This creamy, wobbly texture!! The moisture content is just right when you eat it with bread!!! The key points are using a pot instead of a frying pan and heating on low heat. You slowly heat it while aiming for the midpoint between liquid and solid. Sometimes I go too far pursuing the creamy texture and it becomes almost liquid, but that’s delicious too, so it works out.

It requires some skill with the heating, so it’s on the harder side among the easy-ish category, but it’s worth making. Seta-san, thank you so much for including this recipe in Today’s Cooking for Beginners.

Recipe: Basic Scrambled Eggs Recipe by Kaneyuki Seta｜Everyone’s Today’s Cooking

Medium Recipes

Boiled Vegetables

Boiled vegetables are surprisingly tedious to make. You just boil them, but somehow it feels like a heavy lift. Or maybe it’s that you don’t need them right this moment so it feels like a chore. That’s why I’ve placed this at medium difficulty here.

However, once you muster the motivation to boil them, they become a truly reliable ally. If you boil broccoli, you can easily add vegetables to a meal, and if you boil spinach, you can eat a pseudo-ohitashi anytime by combining it with soy sauce. I’d like to always have a few types on hand to increase my vegetable intake.

Also, not just for boiled vegetables, Nichirei Foods’ Hohoemi Gohan is very helpful for food storage methods. I can’t say enough good things about Nichirei Foods. Thank you always!

Recipe: How to Boil Vegetables | Hohoemi Gohan - Enriching Meals Through Freezing - | Nichirei Foods Freezing Food | Hohoemi Gohan - Enriching Meals Through Freezing - | Nichirei Foods

Boiled Chicken

After vegetables, it’s time to boil chicken. I seem to have a belief that boiling anything extends its shelf life. Once boiled, you just cut the amount you want to eat and put it in your mouth for a nice protein source, which I love. ⁸ Also, I’ve been living without knowing what to do with the green parts of long green onions, so being able to use those up at the same time is another point I like.

It only keeps for a few days in the fridge, so freezing is recommended when making a larger batch. The recipe describes both a method of shredding into small pieces and a method of slicing thin, but slicing is overwhelmingly easier in terms of effort.

Also, the boiling broth is delicious if you add small-cut rounds of long green onion and boiled vegetables or other ingredients, season with salt and pepper, and finish with beaten egg. If you have Sichuan peppercorn on hand, adding that is good too. ⁹

Recipe: How to Boil Chicken Breast - How to Make It Juicy and Storage Methods - Kurashi Try

Peperoncino

A delicious peperoncino with a strong garlic aroma. The effort itself isn’t that different from the spaghetti with just tomatoes, but since you need to remove the garlic chips and use two types of olive oil separately, I’ve classified it as medium difficulty.

Personally, I feel like fresh Italian parsley is optional. It adds nice fragrance, but I can’t really think of many other uses for fresh Italian parsley, and it seems hard to store… As a compromise, using dried Italian parsley is a good option. Regular dried parsley works too of course, but I feel Italian parsley has better color and less of parsley’s distinctive bitterness.

Recipe: Explaining the Secret of Emulsification - Authentic Peperoncino Recipe with Garlic Aroma. Full of Umami with Pro Techniques! | Mitsukoshi Isetan’s Food Media | FOODIE

Carrot Stir-fry with Tarako

This is truly delicious!! ¹⁰ Even when I lived at my family’s home, I would devour it and empty the batch-prepared stash in an instant. The step of julienning the carrots is much easier with a slicer. With a knife, the tediousness goes up by about 40%.

Also, this recipe has a lot of vague expressions like “when it becomes soft” and “when it breaks apart,” but it somehow works out even if you make it roughly. As long as you don’t burn it, you’ll be fine.

Recipe: Carrot Tarako Stir-fry Recipe by Eiko Oba｜Everyone’s Today’s Cooking

Golden Mapo Tofu

Try this once thinking you’ve been tricked — mapo tofu turns out great seasoned with Ebara’s Golden Sauce. Really. I made it as a desperate measure when I had leftover Golden Sauce, and was surprised that it was genuinely delicious.

When you try to make mapo tofu properly, it tends to require Chinese-style seasonings with limited uses, but this recipe only needs doubanjiang, so it’s truly easy.

Recipe: When in Doubt, This! Golden Mapo Tofu Recipe | Ebara Foods

Tsukudani of Kelp

I often make cold-brew dashi using kelp and iriko (dried baby sardines), which leaves me with a large amount of used dashi ingredients. It seemed wasteful to throw them away, so I was looking for ways to use them, and recently found this tsukudani of kelp. It’s not exactly flashy in appearance, but once you put it in your mouth, the umami of the kelp explodes and it’s very delicious.

Since you make a large amount at once, sometimes you can’t consume it all within 2 weeks, so I recommend refrigerating half and freezing the other half after making it. Also, I still haven’t found a way to use the leftover iriko. I’m looking for good recipes!

Recipe: Tsukudani of Kelp Recipe/How to Make: Shirogohan.com

Meat Soboro

A precious type of meat that’s easy to handle without much effort. Just how much of a complex do I have about protein. Mix it into stir-fried rice — great, put it on bread with pizza cheese and bake — great, mix it into stir-fried vegetables — great, the uses are infinite.

I use simple meat soboro and the sticky, richly flavored garlic meat miso soboro depending on my mood. The former is easy to use without overpowering the flavors of other ingredients, but doesn’t keep as well, while the latter has a rich flavor and keeps for a long time, but the calories and salt content are concerning.

Recipe: Meat Soboro Recipe by Hiroko Horie｜Everyone’s Today’s Cooking Garlic Meat Miso Soboro Recipe by Tadako Matsumoto｜Everyone’s Today’s Cooking

Hard-ish Recipes

Onion Soup

An onion soup for combating high blood pressure. Cooking for yourself ≠ being healthy; rather, I’m aware I’m destroying my body through food while living. ¹¹

This recipe has simple ingredients and the process is just simmering, but it’s high difficulty solely because it uses a ridiculous 1kg of onions. A food processor makes it easy as the recipe says, but I don’t have one at home, so I slice 1kg very diligently. However, once made, you get about 7 servings, and the shelf life is a long 1 week, so it’s very handy.

The recipe uses a pressure cooker, but if you only have a regular pot at home, simmering for about 45 minutes works well.

Recipe: ［Recipe］A Must-See for Those Concerned About High Blood Pressure and Blood Sugar! French Chef’s Devised “Onion Soup” Made Even More Easily - Food Writer Yoko Asano’s Gastronomy Diary

Pizza Sauce

I always use this as the sauce for pizza toast. The things I put on toast are mostly butter, pizza cheese, natto, and meat miso — all high in fat or low in vegetables — but this sauce makes me feel like I’m eating vegetables and gives me a vaguely absolved atmosphere.

The cooking process itself is only as tedious as mincing onions, but since it’s a sauce, storage is somewhat difficult. In the fridge it only lasts 5-6 days, meaning you’d eat pizza toast every day, and freezing requires the slight hassle of portioning into single servings. ¹² In that sense, when making it, you need to have sandwich bread ready and make it with determination.

Recipe: Homemade Pizza Sauce / More Delicious Than Store-bought! Also Handy as an Easy Tomato Sauce.: Shirogohan.com Pizza Toast Recipe / Make Delicious Pizza Toast at Home Like a Coffee Shop!: Shirogohan.com

Chen Jianyi’s Mapo Tofu

Mapo tofu for the second time. This version uses the Chinese-style seasonings with limited uses. I think quite a few people have heard the name Chen Jianyi. He’s a famous Chinese chef.

The characteristic of this recipe is that much of the moisture needed for mapo tofu is provided by the tofu itself. When you add the tofu, it looks like you might be making tofu stir-fry rather than mapo tofu, but somehow it ends up at the right moisture level in the end. I’m not sure if this point is the key, but it’s top-class delicious among mapo tofu recipes on the internet.

Also, if you make it exactly as the recipe, it turns out quite spicy. If you’re not good with spicy food, you should adjust the amount of doubanjiang.

Recipe: Mapo Tofu Recipe by Chen Jianyi｜Everyone’s Today’s Cooking

Guacamole

A food made by mixing avocado, diced vegetables, and cilantro (= pak chi) with seasoning. You eat it as a dip sauce on tortilla chips. You can easily enjoy a party atmosphere at home, so I make it when I’m in an upbeat mood like “Let’s really go for it today!”

By the way, it’s absurdly hard to tell when an avocado is ripe. You can’t tell anything from the appearance. When I think it must be about ripe and cut it open, the inside is often too brown. This ruins the party mood you were building up. How do people judge ripeness? You can’t really tell by feeling the softness with your hands, and touching it seems like it might make it go bad from that spot, which is a bit scary, and I’m not very confident I can do the method of checking the stem that recipes describe.

Also, mincing vegetables is subtly tedious and time-consuming. The finer you chop, the better it looks and the more your mood goes up though. Overall, it’s a recipe that embodies the principle that parties come with the labor of preparation.

Recipe: Mexican Drinking Is Hot Right Now! A Local Chef Taught Us Mexican Recipes [Part 4: Guacamole] | Ienomi Style - Information Site for People Who Enjoy Drinking at Home

Bonus 1: Favorite Cooking Recipe Book

When I get into a new field, I pick one book and treat it as my parent, believing everything it says for the time being. For cooking, “Cooking Basics Practice Book: Easy! Restaurant Flavor Edition” is my parent.

Cooking Basics Practice Book: Easy! Restaurant Flavor Edition - Studio Nuts | Cooking Researcher Makiko Oda

The great thing about this book is that it tells you what the key point is for making that dish delicious, and why doing that makes it delicious. Being taught this means that even when you make a dish with slightly different ingredients, as long as you keep the key points in mind, the probability of failure decreases, and you can also think about what ingredients might allow you to apply those key points. It helps you become able to cook flexible, adaptable dishes, so it’s a book I really love and recommend!

I can’t explain the book’s contents in detail, so I’ll list the names of my favorite recipes from among those published in it.

• Omurice
  • Not the creamy, runny type but the traditional firmer kind. The chicken rice alone is delicious. If you make white sauce, you can repurpose it into a doria.
• Green Salad
  • It describes how to make salad without using store-bought dressing. It’s flexible and I like it.
• European-style Curry
  • A curry made with curry powder etc. rather than curry roux. Curry roux always ends up leftover for me, so this recipe is a lifesaver.
• Salmon Saikyo-yaki
  • Works with fish other than salmon too. It extends the shelf life of fish fillets, so it’s very handy.
• Juicy Meat Gyoza
  • I make a large batch and freeze them, and whenever I feel like it, I put them in Chinese soup for easy gyoza soup. Making them is effort, but they’re convenient.
• Caponata
  • I make this every summer. Black olives provide a nice depth of flavor and it’s delicious.
• Swordfish Herb Breadcrumb Bake
  • For when you want to bake fish in a Western style. The herb breadcrumbs can be frozen, so making them in advance means you can use them anytime, which is very convenient.
• Chicken Cream Stew
  • This is also a roux-free recipe like the curry. As long as you have butter, flour, and milk, it’s surprisingly easy.
• Soy Milk Hot Pot
  • My favorite hot pot recipe in this world. The combination of soy milk and ponzu-style vinegar creates a creamy texture that’s sublime.
• Tomato Bruschetta
  • A bit hard to eat but delicious. In my mind it’s categorized as a party menu along with guacamole.
• Cucumber Pickles
  • A god-tier recipe that makes cucumbers — which spoil relatively quickly — last for a week. I love it so much I’ve made it dozens of times.
• Mushroom Sauté
  • A recipe where mushrooms are the main ingredient. This also keeps for a week, making it perfect for always-ready side dishes.
• Minestrone
  • An excellent recipe where just dicing all the ingredients and simmering them in water makes it delicious. Full of tomato umami.

There are many other recipes besides the above. Actually, this book is the second in a series, and the first installment is apparently also selling quite well, so I’d like to buy it someday.

Bonus 2: Favorite Original Recipe

Mala-tang became popular this year, didn’t it? Did everyone eat it? Mala-tang is a Chinese dish, written as 麻辣燙 in its home region. It’s a mala-flavored — meaning spicy and numbing — soup with various ingredients simmered in it, like a single-serving hot pot. Many shops appeared with the boom, but I like Shippo Mala-tang. It’s easy to eat because they’ve adjusted the flavor to suit Japanese preferences.

Now, this mala-tang — many shops use a somewhat unusual pricing structure. There’s a base soup price, and the more ingredients you add, the more the price increases. For details, please refer to Shippo Mala-tang’s page.

Here, everyone must think at least once. How wonderful it would be to add as many of your favorite ingredients as you want without worrying about the price. I thought so too. And I searched. For a way to easily make mala-tang at home. Here I present the Unigiri original ¹³ mala-tang recipe.

Ingredients (1 serving)

• Sesame oil
  • 1 tablespoon
• Garlic
  • 1 clove (minced)
• Ginger
  • 1 slice (minced)
• Doubanjiang
  • 1/2 teaspoon
• Weiper ¹⁴
  • 1 teaspoon
• Cooking sake or mirin
  • 50ml
• Long green onion
  • 1/2 stalk (cut into small rounds)
• Your favorite ingredients
  • As much as you like. Recommended ingredients listed below
• Glass noodles
  • 10~20g ¹⁵
• Vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon
• Your favorite condiments
  • To taste (white sesame seeds, nori, etc.)
• A
  • Black pepper
    • 1 teaspoon
  • Ichimi chili pepper ¹⁶
    • 1 teaspoon
  • Sichuan peppercorn ¹⁷
    • 1 teaspoon
  • Five-spice powder ¹⁸
    • 1/3 teaspoon
  • Soy sauce
    • 1 teaspoon
  • Chili oil ¹⁹
    • 3/2 teaspoon

Cooking Steps

1. Put sesame oil in a pot and heat on low
2. Add garlic, ginger, and doubanjiang to the pot and mix
3. Continue heating step 2 on low heat while cutting the long green onion and ingredients. At this time, stir occasionally so step 2 doesn’t burn to the bottom of the pot
4. If using meat as an ingredient, add it to the pot here, turn to medium heat, and stir-fry until the surface color changes
5. Dissolve Weiper in 500ml of hot water
6. Add step 5, cooking sake or mirin, and long green onion to the pot and turn to high heat
7. When it comes to a boil, reduce to low heat and add A
8. Add the ingredients to the pot, turn to medium heat, and simmer for about 5~8 minutes ²⁰
9. Add glass noodles and simmer further. Simmering time follows the glass noodle package instructions
10. Add vinegar and simmer again until it comes to a boil
11. Top with condiments if you have them and it’s done

Recommended Ingredients

Basically, put in whatever ingredients you like, cut however you like! That’s what homemade mala-tang is for. Here I introduce my recommended ingredients that I often add.

• Pork belly
  • Probably the protein that goes best with mala-tang. If you’re concerned about calories, other cuts of pork work too.
• Mushrooms
  • For guanylic acid replenishment. Adding them seems to balance the umami. Probably.
• Onion
  • The sweetness of the onion seems to nicely mellow the spiciness of the soup. But I often think I’ve got too much onion with both long green onion and regular onion.
• Cabbage
  • I often add it since there tend to be leftovers after using it in other dishes. Excellent as a dietary fiber contributor.
• Potato
  • I tend to add it when I want to increase volume. It dissolves and clouds the soup, but it’s home cooking so I don’t worry about it.
• Eggplant
  • It absorbs the soup and becomes soft and squishy, which is delicious.
• Chinese chives
  • Adding this instantly improves the overall color. It cooks in a flash, so add it at the same timing as the vinegar.
• Wood ear mushroom
  • The unique crunchy texture makes for a nice accent. If using dried wood ear mushroom, reconstitute it with water or hot water first, then add it at the same timing as the vinegar.
• Tomato
  • Adding it suddenly increases the hot-and-sour soup vibe, but it’s recommended as a variation when you’re tired of the usual flavor.
• Raw egg
  • It makes the flavor mellow, so I highly recommend it. I like to beat it, keep it on a separate plate, and add it partway through eating as a flavor change.

Closing

This is cucumber pickles and peperoncino w/ boiled komatsuna spinach and dried parsley w/o Italian parsley that I hastily made after receiving a self-inflicted food terrorism while writing this. The garlic was a bit burnt, so it had a toasty flavor. And I forgot to remove the garlic cores.

Tomorrow is Kaino-san’s Tasting! Heroes’ Feast. Coincidentally, it’s connected by being a food article! It’s full of very delicious-looking dishes.

Since I referenced several recipes online, I can’t proudly call it original… If you see a similar recipe, consider it the source I referenced.