Nov 4, 2025
Your food culture, adapted well or?
My family's food culture is a mashup, a mix of Ukrainian, Near Eastern, Scottish, and Irish cuisine with a sprinkling of South American ingredients due to migration. It's pretty wild even before I adapt my dishes to ingredients I can source in Japan. Do you find you keep your recipes strictly orthodox, or do you mix it up? What combos of cuisines and dishes appeal to you and your family?
Best Answer
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on Nov 6
I grew up eating a lot of Armenian/middle eastern food (Armenian-American) and Mexican food because I'm from Los Angeles. It's hard to find some ingredients here but I make a simplified pilaf rice in the rice cooker and we eat it with yakitori instead of (shish kabob) the traditional skewers. I also make fancy nachos and tacos on a regular basis. We eat a lot of Japanese-European foods and traditional Japanese food too.
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on Nov 5
I'm Australian, but my background is half Irish and half Italian. I wrote in a recent blog about how some of the pasta toppings here are still a bit out of my comfort zone, but one thing I do adapt since living in Japan is adding soy sauce to my Bolognese! I think it does a really good job of upping that umami flavor, and while I don't know what my Nonna would've said in terms of it adhering to a traditional recipe, I think it's delicious!
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on Nov 5
To answer the second part of your question, I think my family and I eat a bit of a mix of things. My husband, although American by passport, is part Japanese via his grandmother, and spent a significant chunk of time here in Japan as a kid owing to his father's employment. He has to have rice with every meal or he feels like something is missing. Both my kids were born here, and I would say their palates lean more towards Japanese food, too. They have no issue with eating foods that I am not all that comfortable with, but they're not big fans of things that are probably regarded as quite Western, like cheese. Our common foods at home are a bit of a hybrid drawn from a lot of things. Foods that all of us enjoy without any complaints are Japanese curry, taco rice, tonkatsu, yakisoba...lots more, too, I'm sure, but those are some that come to mind right away. Oh, and nabe, because it's pretty customizable to just do what you want with it!
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on Nov 5
@genkidesu I admit I splash my Italian-inspired tomato sauces with soy sauce. It adds some umami to Scots-Irish grandmother's colcannon, too.
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on Nov 7
The ingredients available in Japan are nowhere near the taste from home so I rarely attempt to cook Irish food in Japan. For example, lamb is hard to come by (plus its ridiculously expensive in Japan) and the cuts they do are totally different and just don't taste the same. The biggest issue is dairy products - dairy, particularly milk and butter, is awful in Japan. And a lot of Irish dishes use both so it is hard to replicate the Irish taste of anything without them. And now that I am in Ireland, I have the reverse problem. I am making Japanese food often, but its just not quite the same!
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on Nov 7
@BigfamJapan lamb is also big in Australia/NZ but I don't think I've had it at all during my time here. I don't even see it stocked at my local supermarket but maybe I just haven't been looking properly.
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on Nov 13
@BigfamJapan I agree about the lamb so I haven't cooked any myself here, but there is a local restaurant that has had great fusion style lamb dishes and there's always the Hokkaido style "Genghis Khan." We sometimes splurge on grass fed butter from New Zealand or Yotsuba brand from Hokkaido. I don't have any experience with Irish dairy to compare it with.
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on Nov 13
@helloalissa Like you, I have no experience with Irish dairy products. Hokkaido-sourced butter is adequate for cooking. Lamb and mutton are hard to come by here. The few times I've had mutton were at Chinese restaurants run by Mongolians. But sadly, the one Mongolian-run restaurant in my city changed hands. Some halal restaurants in my area do lamb in curries.
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on Nov 14
@genkidesu my local supermarket also doesn't have lamb. I saw it in "Lopia" because a friend told me that Lopia do all sorts of meats, which they do, but when I saw the price I didn't buy it! The branch was in a neighboring city, but it has since closed down so now I don't know where I could get it relatively locally if I felt the urge! I'll continue to live without it.
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on Nov 14
@helloalissa thanks for the tips on the butter, I will have to try them when I get back to Japan. If I really crave lamb (or my son who loves it too) we go to Saizeriya for lamb skewers and lamb rack. It's the only place I know of where its reasonably priced. It's great that you have a local restaurant with lamb dishes.
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on Nov 14
@BigfamJapan Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a meat that I can't live without. It's so easily accessible in supermarkets in Australia though. In saying that, supermarkets there also stock kangaroo meat routinely, so I guess that would cause some people to do a double take!
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on Nov 14
@genkidesu you know, I think Lopia also had kangaroo meat! It was a while ago now, so I could be making it up! But they had a wide range of meat that you don't normally see in Japan.
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on Nov 14
@genkidesu oh and seen as we are talking about Ibaraki on another Q&A - there is an Australian pub "Drunken Duck" in Mito that serves Kangaroo burgers!
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on Nov 19
@BigfamJapan I haven't been to Saizeriya in years and didn't know they had lamb on the menu - that's worth checking out! The local place we went to switched owners and I think the menu has changed too.
14 Answers