Lucy’s love affair with Japan started when she was 15, when she ended up visiting Japan for the summer. She studied Japanese in Hiroshima, stayed in Tokyo’s Olympic village and lived with a Japanese family in Okayama. Returning to the States, she told her family that she wanted to go back to Japan and it would be her major in college. No one believed her! And yet, that’s exactly what happened. She spent her junior year abroad in Tokyo, attending Waseda University and living with the Mitsui family. She was their 21st foreign daughter. She got her degree from USC in Japanese and Japanese culture. Eventually, she married a Japanese national and ended up living in both Tokyo and Nagoya. In total, she has lived over 13 years in Japan. It remains her second home.
Her culinary life in Japan included being a restaurant critic, a food historian and writer, the editor of Gochiso-sama!—her culinary newsletter on Japanese cuisine, and the owner of her own cooking school, Lucy’s Kitchen.
She continues to love Japanese food, and now cooks for her daughter, who is equally obsessed with Japanese food, especially street foods like Yakisoba, Okonomiyaki and so on.
Lucy just published her first cookbook, “The Wonderful World of Osechi: Japanese New Year’s Recipes.”
Why Thanks for the Meal?
Lucy created this website as a way to share her love of Japanese food by introducing, teaching, and promoting Japanese recipes, ingredients, and food history. As for choosing “Thanks for the Meal” as the blog’s name, well that has special meaning too. Read about it here >>
Thanks for the Meal is a Japanese food blog filled with recipes, dinner ideas, cultural background stories, and all things Japan!
