My kitchen here has one burner and about as much counter space as a laptop. Back home the kitchen was small too, but it was a different kind of small. It took me a while to work out how to cook properly in this space.
The pressure cooker was the first thing I sorted. I brought a small one over and it does most of the work. Without it, lentils take long enough that I would probably have given up and eaten convenience food every night.
The one burner problem I solved by cooking in stages and reheating, rather than trying to have everything ready at once. It is not how I would do it at home, but the result is close enough and it means I can actually cook on a weeknight.
On ingredients, most things are findable. There are shops that carry the spices, and some of the bigger supermarkets have started stocking more than they used to. The rice took the most adjusting. What is easy to buy here is not what I grew up with, and for a long time that bothered me more than I expected. I found something acceptable eventually, and honestly I have got used to the local kind for most meals.
A few practical notes:
Buy spices in bulk when you make the trip, they keep fine.
A rice cooker with a timer changed my weekday routine completely.
Ventilation matters more here than I realised. My first month I set the smoke alarm off twice and had to apologise to my neighbour.
What I did not expect is how much cooking would matter to me. I am not someone who cooked much before moving. Now it is the thing that makes a long day feel finished properly, and having friends over for a proper meal has become the main way I stay connected to people.
Anyone found good places to buy ingredients? Also open to suggestions for what to cook when I have twenty minutes and no energy, because that is most weeknights.
#nepal#cooking#livinginjapan
