Cooking Japanese Tonjiru pork soup with the Ichiju Issai concept.

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Ichiju Issai 一汁一菜 is a revised concept of Japanese cooking to have a simpler and healthier diet thought out by Yoshiharu Doi in his book, Ichiju Issai de yoi toiu teian (Suggestion that it is ok with 1 soup, 1 dish) 

A Youtube channel Watashigoto used the Ichiju Issai concept and had them logged in. It was very interesting and something I want to adopt when I live back in Japan again.

It's in Japanese, but I think the video gives a very good idea of how to cook in ichiju issai. 

*If you have anything you want to know from the video, you can always comment or DM me and I'm happy to help!

Cooking Tonjiru is probably the easiest ichiju issai

Video from Watashigoto

Watashigoto is cooking Tonjiru, which is a very good dish to easily take in a balance of nutrients you need!

"Ton" means pork, and "jiru" is soup, so it means pork soup = 豚汁. 

My favorite thing about tonjiru is you can make it in a big pot for you to eat for several days. You can chop the ingredients left in your kitchen, then you would add miso to season, another great source of protein.

The pork gives a rich meat flavor to the dish, while you can use fish for pescatarians, eggs for vegetarians, and tofu for vegans.

Add any kind of ingredient to the Tonjiru

Watashigoto was adding other vegetables she bought in the next few days.

You can simply add ingredients on top of the Tonjiru already cooked. Add water and miso if you need the soup. Boil it, then it can be kept quite long if you keep it in the fridge.

You can cook curry and other dishes from the tonjiru!

In the video, Watashigoto took a small pot to put the Tonjiru and then mixed curry powder to make it into a curry. 

You can also add dairy for cream soup, canned tomato for tomato soup, etc.

Tonjiru is a very convenient soup to have cooked so you can easily convert it to another dish!

It saves so much time and effort to cook...!

The video had more than issai=1 dish but 2 or 3 but this is ok. In Japan, our original teaching is to cook ichiju sansai 一汁三菜 which means 1 soup 3 dishes. 

But this was beginning to be too overwhelming for Japanese households to make every day.

After Yoshiharu Doi made a suggestion that it is ok to cook just ichiju issai, Japanese moms were so relieved that it is ok to just have 1 dish instead of 3, or 0 dishes if you have 1 soup with lots of ingredients.

But when you have spare time during the week to cook more, of course, it is ok to cook more dishes, too. The best case scenario is to eat a variety of food for a healthier diet.

It is economical too...!

In the video, Watashigoto wrote that she used 4,102 JPY in a week.

This is less than half of what I would use for my cooking, and much more variety of ingredients, and healthier. 

I should learn from her and revise my cooking towards ichiju issai!

Follow Ryu Aomi for more to come :) 

In this blog, I post my food trips worldwide, as insights into Japanese food in comparison to all the different cuisines I encounter through my journey. 

I also try to share information from Japan that fills our hearts or might help us think about how to better the world!

Here are the SNS channels I have, but I mainly focus on Twitter at the moment. I share my past car trip around mainly Hokkaido, and how it was living there!










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