About Me

My name is Nona and I love to cook!  I've lived in California most of my mid adult years but certainly lived in many places when I was younger from being a brat ;-)..a military brat and once a brat, always a brat. 

My first cookbook purchase was in 1970 on Okinawa called Recipes on Parade - Foreign Foods purchased at military PX store.  That cookbook opened the world for me.  Although I made taco sauce, tacos, salads, and potato salad, that was the extent of my cooking until I moved out on my own after finishing school.  Now I have more than 600 English language and over 500 Japanese language cookbooks LOL.  Besides those, I've been collecting recipes since mid 1960's and still have all of them.  The collection includes articles I copied from various books and cooking magazines at the school library and base libaries; the complete collection of Gourmet magazines from their beginning to their end; Bon Appetit and Food and Wine since about 1978; Saveur since about 1985, etc.   I wake up thinking about food and what to cook and right after eating dinner, I start planning what to to make next day.  This love of food is relentless

Besides working my regular job during the day which was totally unrelated to food, I was a  chef assistant during evening hours at a culinary school here in San Francisco Bay Area assisting many well-known chefs from throughout the US and elsewhere along with cookbook authors  I learned a lot from working with them. But I must confess, it was much easier working with chefs than cookbook authors.  Chefs were used to working with other people whereas cookbook authors were not.  And I found most chefs to be very organized ie prepping and removing items once used.  Because of that training, I wash dishes and pans when I have time in between cooking/prepping and never let dirty dishes or pans clutter my mind.    Working together with these chefs and cookbook authors was made even more enjoyable after the class.  We always made enough for the staff working in the classroom to share and dine after the students were gone.  Since classes were always paired with wine, we did the same after the class. Made for great comradrie.

Being a food obsessed person that I am, I check out all good places to eat before traveling.  By the time I'm there, I usually have pretty good idea what I will be ordering and do my best to leave reviews on yelp, tripadvisor, Japanese web sites, tabelog, etc.   I enjoy recreating recipes I've had on my travelels or recreate recipes requested by my family members on their travels.  Most people travel for sights, but I travel for tastes first then sights. 

I am also passsionate about wines and belong to two, strike that it's now 4 local wine clubs.  And when I return to Japan, I head to many sake breweries as I can to taste and purchase.  For me, it's wine, sake, then beer.  And non-alcoholic beverage of my choice is coffee and green tea.  Coffee in the morning and green tea in the evening. 

I'm originally from Tokyo Japan and Japanese is my first language.  I now call California my home, but return to Japan about twice a year to check out the food scene and see my relatives and old friends.

If you try one of my posted recipes especially those which are my original recipes, thank you very much.  Happy cooking to you all!