Week Three: Japanese-Asian Fusion — Turns Out Expensive Matcha Gets Expensive-er.

The Week’s Dinners

• Teriyaki Sauce — honey, mirin, and soy. Make it once Sunday — one batch covers both teriyaki nights below.
• Teriyaki Salmon & Bok Choy — crisp-skin salmon, sesame rice, wilted bok choy. Pat the fish bone-dry; that’s the whole secret to the skin.
• Teriyaki Chicken Thighs — sheet-pan easy, charred broccoli, marinate the night before and it’s a 25-minute dinner.
• Honey Garlic Salmon — the week’s second salmon night. Oven-baked, broiled asparagus, lemon butter. Twelve minutes, don’t overbake.
• Miso Glazed Eggplant — meatless, five ingredients, our Friday recommendation. Do not leave the broiler unattended.
• Beef & Snap Pea Stir Fry — velveted flank steak, hot wok, ten minutes of actual cooking. Chili crisp at the table, always.

The Desserts

• Coconut Mango Sherbet — dairy-free, churned, and made better by planning ahead. Freeze your own mango a day or two out, or grab a bag of store-bought frozen chunks.
• 4-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies — one bowl, naturally gluten-free, twenty minutes. There is no excuse not to make these.
• Matcha Cheesecake — bake it a day or two ahead. The water bath and the slow cool are what keep it crack-free.

The Bonus — If You’re Feeling Ambitious

• Asian Noodle Bowl — seared flank steak, ajitsuke tamago (jammy marinated eggs), garlicky sesame broth, rice noodles. A weekend project, not a weeknight one.

Quick confession: we overspent this go-round. Matcha cheesecake — easy enough, right? The cream-cheese six-pack was doable, like twelve bucks. But the matcha? (And the learning curve on launching a recipe database and a newsletter from ground zero as a couple of Gen-X’ers? The good camera and microphone for fancy vlogging maybe next fiscal year?) STEEP. We made our standard Publix run, eyed the tea-aisle prices — again, doable. But we figured we could do a solid for the Asian market just as easily. I’m not dissing their prices — word up to the Thanh Hung peeps — but we walked out a tenner lighter with a few ounces of “culinary grade” matcha in a nice metal tin. Thought we were GTG. We were happy to drop six on some Jin ramen even.

Reader, if you like your matcha cheesecake the color of Shrek’s earwax, culinary grade is fine. We wished to upgrade to ceremonial grade — on the unanimous advice of every AI model we asked, no less. But here’s the thing: the cheesecake itself was spot on from the very first attempt. Velvety yet dense. Not heavy. The lemon lifts it just enough to answer the tea’s bitterness, and the mango alongside makes it the perfect finish in a week of lighter meals. (Summer in the South US.) Flavor, texture, everything was near A+. The only thing wrong with the cheaper version of matcha was that dull, muddy green. So, food nerds on a budget, we did what everyone seems to do now when reality doesn’t quite hit the mark: we let AI fix it. In the spirit of honesty, please note that this week’s matcha cheesecake photos are (gently) color-corrected. Do I have to cite my source here, prof?? Okay, it was Grok.

Which — bear with me — is roughly the move a Brown University economics class just got caught making. Their professor, in kindness and grace after a hard semester, let the students take a midterm home. So apparently about half ran it through ChatGPT, and the class average swelled up to a high of 96. So the prof made the final in-person, and it sank to 48. The first instinct of these kids was the same as ours: to reach for a machine fix the instant reality fell short of the expectation. The difference is only the stakes — we touched up the color of a cake that was genuinely delicious despite appearing less than; they cheated, knowing it was against the rules. Some confessed by not showing up for the final. Well, we instead showed up with our pictures as proof of work done and our admission of AI usage. I doctored a dessert photo this week, I used AI to do it, and I am not having existential Catholic guilt about it. It’s worth noting how fast AI has become our go-to for closing the gap between what is real and what we wish were real — like our number of subscribers, for instance. Or the challenges we are — in startlingly real numbers — facing in trying to use the machines as an aid rather than an absolute crutch.

All that aside, this is one of the easiest weeks of dinners yet. They keep things simple in Japan. All our meals hinge on a teriyaki glaze — equal parts honey, mirin, and low-sodium soy, finished with black pepper — that you can whisk together fast. (No whole afternoon mole-extravaganza.) The teriyaki carries both the salmon and the chicken thighs. Salmon is our bulk protein this week and shows up in two very different moods: teriyaki-glazed with bok choy and sesame rice one night, then oven-baked with a honey-garlic-ginger glaze and broiled asparagus the next. One trip to the fish counter, two completely different dinners.

If you want a meatless night, the miso glazed eggplant is a genuine main course, not a side dish pretending to be one — five ingredients, scored and roasted until it collapses, then blasted under the broiler until the glaze caramelizes into something you’ll want to eat with a spoon. Save it for Friday.

Now, the desserts. The matcha cheesecake is the one to bake ahead — it needs a water bath, a slow cool-down with the oven door cracked, and then a full night in the fridge before it’s ready to unmold. Do not rush this one; the patience is the whole recipe. The coconut mango sherbet is dairy-free and churned; freeze your own mango cubes a day or two ahead, or just grab a bag of store-bought frozen chunks — you want about four cups either way — so the actual dessert-making day moves fast. And the peanut butter cookies are exactly what the name promises: four ingredients, one bowl, twenty minutes, done. When someone at your table can’t do gluten, these are the ones to remember.

One more thing before the list: if you’re feeling ambitious, we tucked a bonus recipe into this week — an Asian noodle bowl with seared flank steak and jammy soy-marinated eggs. It is not a Tuesday-night recipe. It is a Saturday-afternoon-with-good-music recipe. Treat it accordingly, and use the dental floss trick for slicing the eggs — a knife will crush that jammy yolk every time.

We saved ourselves the extra $20–50 an ounce (per ounce!) that ceremonial matcha would’ve run us — then promptly got greedy and bought ribeyes on sale at Publix. See the fruits of our labor below: