Tokyo American Kitchen

From this month, Women’s Group member Kelly Crow will welcome students to her Tokyo home for all-American cooking lessons.

Kelly Crow intently flips through the yellowed pages of a 1986 edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook, which her mother gave her as a parting gift before college. She lands on a page with a slight tear down the middle.

“Waffles,” she declares. “That’s my favorite.”

Crow, who regularly uses the waffle recipe to cook breakfast for her four teenagers, welcomes Members to her spacious kitchen this month for an American home cooking class. Students will learn everything from how to properly measure ingredients to making a hearty stew.

“The important thing is people should feel comfortable in their kitchen. You don’t have to be a Michelin-star chef to bring friends together,” says Crow, who has taken classes at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and Tokyo and began teaching 15 years ago.

The Los Angeles native says she started cooking when she graduated from UCLA and realized she couldn’t afford to eat out as much.
Later, when she hosted international families as part of her husband’s job, she wanted to introduce them to American food. Conscious of her guests’ native diets, she expanded her recipe repertoire and discovered a passion.

“Everybody has a personal experience with food,” she says. “It is a great way to get together, sit around and have a conversation.”
Crow, 47, creates a notecard for every recipe. With the ingredients and measurements on one side, she details each occasion when she made that dish on the other side. She baked cornbread muffins (the secret spice is cayenne pepper), for example, for her church group and her son’s first birthday party.

Explaining the importance of versatility in preparing family meals, Crow teaches “cascading cooking,” or using leftovers for multiple meals. “You want to make it easier so you are not spending all of your time in the kitchen,” she says. “I’m not sharing anything that is a secret. It’s just looking at things a little differently.”

Since moving to Japan last year, Crow has enjoyed experimenting with new flavors. During mushroom season, she discovered inexpensive shiitake and other mushrooms for a dynamic wild mushroom soup.

She also loves sampling Tsukiji market’s bounty of fish. “You need to have a sense of adventure,” she says. “People are always looking for ways to expand their recipes. On average, people have seven or eight recipes they cycle through. I want to give them something that fits in their repertoire, but they can also spice it up a bit.”

Women’s Group Welcome Back and Meet the Sensei

Words: Nick Narigon
Image: Kayo Yamawaki