Nori

You know those little packs of roasted nori sheets? Along with a little touch of sugar, they make the perfect topping for popcorn.

Shichimi togarashi is a seven-spice blend that can season soups, noodles, grilled foods, rice, or salads.

These savory Japanese pancakes are stuffed with shredded cabbage, red pepper, and your choice of meat or seafood. Top with crumbled seaweed, bonito flakes, and mayo for the full experience.

Onigiri is a quintessential Japanese food: made by moms for breakfast, lunch boxes, and picnics. It is the ideal handheld food (the nori wrapper keeps the sticky rice from getting all over your hand).

Try this as a dip, on crackers with smoked fish, or over hard-boiled eggs.

Benefits: Heart + Metabolism My mother innovated constantly to satisfy her two sons' demanding palates, so she adapted quinoa with brown rice to make one of our all-time favorite foods: sushi. Once called "Inca Gold" due to its stamina-building properties, quinoa contains all the essential amino acids, rendering it a complete protein food. Its high manganese content supplies the body's production of superoxide dismutase, an enzyme that protects against free radical damage to your energy factory. Consider this an energizing longevity recipe!

You can easily adapt this recipe to vegetables you already have to make a quick, healthy dinner.

In these vegetarian rolls, shredded cabbage adds cancer-fighting betacarotene; nori—sheets of dried seaweed—supplies calcium, magnesium, and iron; and shiitakes boost the immune system, thanks to the active compound lentinan. Look for soba noodles and nori in the Asian foods section of your grocery store.

Nori, the familiar seaweed used for rolling sushi, is a popular snack in Korea, especially when treated this way. And if you use the pieces of nori to pick up clumps of rice—a common after-school snack—you may find yourself making this frequently.

You might scoff at rice balls, and their close cousins, rice sandwiches, but I know plenty of people (self included) who lust after them. Even at their simplest—plain boiled rice, brushed with a little soy sauce and wrapped in a piece of nori—there is something enormously appealing about them. When you try a few of the variations, you’ll find one you like as well. Although there are several different shapes into which the Japanese form rice balls, there is really only one important rule to remember: press the rice just firmly enough to have it hold together; you do not want a tough, packed ball but a loose association of individual clumps. Serve this as a side dish with Japanese food, or as an appetizer.

The only thing this has in common with the familiar European-style cucumber soups is the cucumber. Otherwise the ingredients—from the dashi to the soy sauce—are strictly Asian. This sublimely refreshing soup can be served hot or cold. When chilled, it’s especially good with a few pieces of shrimp added to each bowl.

It can be expensive to buy sushi, but it’s pretty cheap to make at home. And it’s nice because then you can use whatever vegetables you like, rather than settling for the standard vegetables that are in most rolls. You can use what we’ve listed here, or pick something completely different. It’s up to you. Nori (seaweed sheets), rice vinegar, sushi rice, and wasabi paste are the special ingredients to seek out for this dish. They may all be available in your supermarket or natural foods store, or (definitely) in an Asian food store. Bamboo sushi mats are cheap and handy to have if you are going to make maki sushi regularly; they can be found in most kitchenware stores these days.

Massaging kale (shown opposite) with olive oil and salt is a useful technique popular in raw cuisine. The greens get “cooked” by the salt and the squeezing action, becoming tender and more digestible. Nori seaweed, the kind used to wrap sushi, adds a rich, savory note to the salad. Find nori at natural food stores or Asian markets. In summer, add shaved radishes, fresh corn kernels, and mint leaves.

The key to making good maki rolls is to never refrigerate the rice. When rice has been refrigerated it becomes hard, and it completely changes the texture of the rolls. You can buy tied-together sheets of tiny bamboo strips, called “sushi mats,” for a few dollars. They make it easier to keep the rolls tight, but if you don’t have one, plastic wrap also works pretty well.

One of the common ways to enjoy Korean dumplings is in a fragrant beef stock. A hot bowl of mandu guk is extra satisfying on a cold winter’s day. It’s easy to assemble if you’ve got frozen mandu and stock on hand. Any dumpling filling will do, but meat dumplings are generally preferred. For fun, you could mix different kinds or even make them out of different colored doughs (see page 23). The shape of choice for Korean dumpling soup is the big hug, though you can shape your dumplings anyway you’d like. The stock imbues the wrapper with its flavors and also thickens a tiny bit from the starches in the dough. For Korean New Year celebrations, chewy slices of dense rice cakes called duk are added to the stock for bowls of duk mandu guk.

I‘m a big fan of vegetable sushi, so I thought it would be fun to concoct a soup that featured all of its flavors and textures, without all the work of rolling and cutting. The result is an offbeat, rice- and nori-filled broth topped with colorful raw veggies.

The flavors of the salmon, cucumber, and green tea salt are really fresh. The green tea salt will keep for months and is also terrific sprinkled on popcorn.

The Japanese man I buy my fish from gave me this recipe. One day I noticed that he was making hand rolls for lunch from the trimmings of a No. 1 grade A tuna loin. He let me have a roll since I’m such a good customer, and I have to say it was the best spicy tuna roll I’d ever had. You’ll get the hang of rolling these in no time—practice makes perfect.

Bibimbop A glorious combination of fresh stir-fried vegetables, each cooked separately to allow its flavors to stay true, is liberally seasoned with garlic and sesame oil. To gild the lily, every serving is topped off with a rich fried egg that gets added just before eating.

Nori, or sushi paper, can be found in Asian markets and health food stores.

Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Harumi's Japanese Cooking , by Harumi Kurihara. To read more about Harumi, click here. Mentaiko Spaghettini This is one of the most popular types of pasta in Japan and is a great example of how a foreign ingredient has been adapted to Japanese taste. I think you will find it quite an eye opener.