I couldn’t cook a single thing until I moved to Japan at age 25. I think the first (and only) time I lived alone in the US, I survived on cigarettes, coffee, bagels, cheese, and canned soup. I wasn’t even very good about the cheese bit, because I remember finding it molding after awhile. I think at the time I thought I could just opt out of cooking because I wasn’t good at it? But it’s OK not to be good at it. None of us are born good at it, we get better with practice, and we never need to be good enough to be on Top Chef or whatever. Whoever does not approve of the cooking can do it themselves or get launched out of the window.

Anyway! It helps very much to be a in a situation where no one is making you food, which is what happened to me when I moved to Japan. I believe then, and now, that cooking packets that say “just add cabbage and some stuff,” curry rouxs, and nabe soup mixes are the most amazing, because you just look at the packet and do what it says. Buy the shit it says. Go home and chop up the thing and put it in like the packet says. Bam, food that tastes good. It is hard to make a mistake under these circumstances, though I did still make mistakes. I was too hungry to look up what “tablespoon” in Japanese meant and assumed from the kanji that we were talking about a cup of water when it was actually a tablespoon of water. It was a little watery, but still not bad.

When you are comfortable with packets of stuff with ingredients with instructions on them, you can start adding other veg that happens to be in the refrigerator and begin to get a feel for substituting things. Maybe cabbage is super expensive but hakusai is cheap. They’re basically the same thing. I mean, strictly speaking, they’re not, but do we care? No.

Next you can find some recipes and collect them somehow. I have AnyList on my phone, the paid version of which grabs recipes from properly formatted recipe pages. This unfortunately doesn’t help do anything for paper recipes unless you feel like spending your time manually entering content, which I don’t.

In my current system, I write dinner ideas on a whiteboard on the refrigerator, erasing the idea when it gets made and replacing it with something else.

Here are some all-time classics that I turn to when I don’t know what to eat.

  • Soba noodles with stuff Make soba noodles according to directions on packet. Dump an obscene amount of chopped cabbage and other leafies in with the noodles. Rinse with cold water, drain, and add glugs of mentsuyu and mayonnaise until it tastes good. Add a little hot sauce or yuzupon or whatnot if you like. If you are a natto lover, add some natto.
  • Neba neba salad Note that you will need to enjoy slimy textures for this to work. Get together some of your favorite slimy vegetables. For example, chop up some nagaimo. (IMPORTANT NOTE THAT PEOPLE NEGLECT TO MENTION: Surprise, nagaimo is coated with a yellow powder that can make you itchy as fuck! See this page for details and how to deal with it.) Also add things like, boiled okra. Several packs of natto. Maybe toss in some cubed tofu. Who knows. Some of that fake crab stuff. Bits of umeboshi. Mix it all together. Add glugs of mentsuyu and mayonnaise until it tastes good (yes, I do this alot). You could put something dried and fishy on top of it, like bonito flakes, or sprinkle some crunchy tempura bits. You will end up eating 1/3 of it before it makes to the table “taste testing” but that’s OK.
  • Ground Turkey Stir Fry Despite the name, I have never actually made this recipe with ground turkey. It’s what I do if I have some kind of ground meat in the fridge and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how much 19 oz because I don’t speak nonsense units, but I’m sure it’s a lot, and if I don’t happen to have a lot of ground meat then I add in some chopped onions or crumble in some tofu or put in some chopped potatoes that I have pre-zapped in the microwave. Spinach can be substituted with anything leafy whatsoever. Peanuts are expensive and you can feel free to omit them. The sauce is tasty enough that I think you can just basically do whatever you want.
  • Crispy Potato, Onion and Mushroom Rosti This will never end up being the neat crispy disk shown in the picture, but even if it completely crumbles you’ll still have managed to make a decently tasty meal out of root vegetables that are always hanging out somewhere, salt, and thyme.
  • Classic Minestrone Soup Sometimes I get discouraged by the lack of celery or tomato paste in the house, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry if you don’t have beans. The perfect is the enemy of the good, etc. It will still taste pretty good, and have lots of vegetables. “2 cups chopped seasonal vegetables.” Music to my ears! Just chop something up and dump it in.
  • Curried cabbage Butter? Cabbage? Curry powder? All yes? Then dinner is a go! I totally forgot this recipe even contained cilantro. If you have cilantro, you should save it for peanut noodles. This recipe has never struck me as needing cilantro. Maybe people living in a cilantro paradise where every grocery store sells cilantro in voluminous bouquets can afford to put some cilantro in this dish, but I live in a country where you get a couple meager wisps if you’re lucky. Anyway, skip the cilantro! Also, frozen peas would be nice but if you don’t have that, then maybe a can of corn or some other frozen veg, or just skip that too.
  • Kimchi fried rice It’d be nice to make actually crispy fried rice, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. Probably because I am allergic to letting the frying pan actually get hot, and because our non-stick pan is no longer living up to its name. In any case, it will be kind of damp but it’ll still taste good and get rid of the refrigerator rice. I have another recipe that calls for mixing in 2 tablespoons of gochujang, so if you’ve got some of that, toss it in! Also, this is just my reminder to myself (and to you) that green onions actually enhance a dish and are not the same as regular raw onions (blech) so give them a chance.
  • Miso butter pasta with tuna and cabbage This recipe has absolutely no business being as delicious as it is with just these ingredients. I guess the only pain point is the canned tuna, because that’s not always cheap, but the recipe suggests adding deep fried tofu as a substitute. Also see butter shoyu pasta with mushrooms.
  • Best lentil soup I make this soup way too much. If there are lentils in the house, it gets made. My husband is probably absolutely sick of it. I will never get sick of it. I’m not sure why it’s good. The curry powder? All that olive oil? Sometimes I add sausage which completely defeats the purpose of trying to use vegetarian recipes. Neither kale nor collard greens are commonly found in grocery aisles here, so I sub with komatsuna or spinach or something. 28 oz of diced tomatoes is about 800 grams, so two 400 gram cans will do it. Don’t have to be diced tomatoes, you can use whole and smoosh the tomatoes around a bit in the beginning.
  • Colcannon Easy, satisfying, uses a bunch of cabbage and potatoes, depends on butter. Checks all my boxes, really. The recipe notes that you can sub with other leafy things that are cheap and in season.