Hi — I’m Tabiiku. I work full time and I am raising a child, and of all the household jobs the one I am worst at is cooking.
In fairness to myself, it is less that I am bad at it and more that I do not enjoy it — something I only discovered once I was running a household. When I lived alone and cooked whatever I fancied whenever I fancied it, ignoring nutritional balance entirely, I rather liked cooking. The moment it became a daily obligation it became miserable.
So I have tried a great many things. Here is what actually works. Note that these are all Japanese services, so this is most useful if you live in Japan.
Baby food
For weaning, the overwhelming winner is a frozen kit, and my favourite is bebemeshi.
The only work involved is warming the pouch in hot water and tipping it onto a plate. Early on you can test one ingredient at a time; once your baby is eating more, you get proper little meals of rice porridge with something on top.
It avoids the seven major allergens and uses no additives, of course — but the thing that sold me is that it is seasoned only with dashi and still tastes good enough that an adult would happily eat it. That is what happens when a former chef starts the company.
I liked it so much that at one point I rented a freezer to stock up. Co-op also sells frozen purees, and the taste is not remotely comparable. Try it once.
Once they eat what you eat
Maximum shortcut: do not cook
The fastest route is not cooking at all. In our case my daughter eats dinner at her after-school programme. Rather than my cooking badly and getting the balance wrong, leaving it to professionals is safer, and my fussy daughter tries all sorts of things there that she would not at home. Everyone wins.
Even at the more expensive programmes the dinner option is between 500 and 1,000 yen, which is remarkable value.
Almost maximum: eat at home, but do not cook it
Option 1: a housekeeping service that batch-cooks for you. I used CaSy. Under 10,000 yen for roughly a week of meals, which works out at under 800 yen a meal — cheaper than buying ready-made dishes. The food is decent. The fatal flaw is that you get bored. Thoroughly bored. Give it a year and you will absolutely be bored of it. Almost every dual-income family I know has tried it at some point, and I have never seen anyone last beyond a year. If you have not tried it, using it to get through a year is a perfectly reasonable plan.
Option 2: Tsukurioki.jp.
Option 3: Matilda, which is daily-changing home-style cooking collected as a takeaway. You get a main, a side and a soup, at a price close to Tsukurioki.jp — around 700 to 800 yen a meal. Its big problem is that the collection points are limited, so whether you can use it at all depends on where you live. If you happen to have one within walking distance, try it.
Option 4: frozen bento boxes. I have tried a number of these, starting with nosh, and could not get past the quality of the food, so I have no recommendation here.
Do the cooking, skip everything else: meal kits
This is what I do at weekends.
The hard part of cooking is the number of steps: decide the menu, buy the ingredients, prepare the ingredients, cook. The parts I dislike most are deciding the menu, going shopping, and the prep. (Which is, admittedly, almost all of it.)
A meal kit leaves you only the cooking. It is the ultimate way to cut corners while still feeling that you cooked.
Meal kit 1: Kit Oisix. This is probably the best one available. Even if you normally cook from scratch, I would use it for a few meals a week.
Why: it tastes good, the vegetables come partly prepared, and the sauces are pre-mixed (no measuring out soy sauce and sugar and mirin), so all you do is fry or simmer at the end. A main and two sides genuinely come together in about fifteen minutes.
The one drawback is cost, at roughly 800 to 1,200 yen a meal depending on the menu, so it works out more expensive than cooking from scratch. It was considerably cheaper about five years ago. On the plus side there are dozens of different menus every week, so you can pick around your family’s tastes.
Meal kit 2: Yoshikei. If Oisix feels too expensive, try Yoshikei. It runs around 500 to 800 yen a meal, roughly 30% cheaper. The drawback, compared with Oisix, is that less of the preparation is done for you.
That is the full set of what I use. If you have a trick of your own, or a service you want an opinion on, I would love to hear it in the comments.
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