読者の皆様、明けましておめでとうごさいます！旧年読んでいただき、ありがとうございました。本年もよろしくお願いします。

Happy New Year, readers! (Again…) Here’s a look at my 2013 in Review from Jetpack and my food resolutions for 2014!

Top Posts of 2013

You all really like bamboo recipes.

Searchina hilariously (?) published my piece on gender and bento and mistranslated it as if I had written a piece on the superiority of the Japanese diet for their “foreign bloggers” (*eyeroll*) segment. Which isn’t to say that bento and the Japanese aren’t great, but Japan is sitting on a diabetes epidemic*, too, and bento isn’t a panacea for American obesity.

I started baking geeky cakes for my friends’ birthdays, beginning with a Minecraft cake. Time to get your cake requests in, Seattleites!

Okara: it’s dirt-cheap in Japan, full of fiber, and apparently no one else knew how to cook with it either! I miss it.

We learned how to navigate Japanese flours.

I also had a recipe featured in HuffPo, which is pretty cool since this is a very small blog, and I got two more Liebsters, one of which I still need to answer. (・_・;;

My personal favorite non-recipe post was about kyûshoku and the US media.

The full report is here.

In 2014, I’d like to

Keep baking geeky cakes!

Redo my “The Great Game Cake” to test my shifter theory.

Learn how to use American ingredients like kale and rhubarb. I never learned before I went to Japan, and here I am in the US again with no idea how to use vegetables all the food bloggers were obsessed with while I was gone…

Really explore Uwajimaya, International District, and the Japanese food scene in Seattle.

Be better about doing Kitchen Library posts. Even though they’re the least popular, I like to link to recipes I like and cool articles. Maybe monthly?

I started this blog in Japan, and now that I’m back in the US after 4 years, my kitchen is a lot different. I even have a stand mixer now! What do you want to see here?

Note

*The author is a friend of mine from language school, and I really admire her work. Find her on twitter for public health news and a wicked sense of humor: @MariInTokyo