Teriyaki Sauce—The Answer to All Life's Problems

I'd gotten a little bored with my own cooking lately. And the food I really longed for was an impossible, utopian combination of desirable qualities, or at least I thought it was. I wanted it all: food that's simultaneously delicious, low in calories, nutritious, quick, and inexpensive. I know this is a lot to ask for. So for a while, I gave up the search, and stewed in discontent.

But yesterday I got to idly wondering about teriyaki sauce. I've known about it since I was nine years old or so, but I'd never made it. I hauled a book on Asian cooking off the shelf, checked it out, and found it was absurdly easy to put together. Usually it's a one-to-one blend of soy sauce and mirin, a sweetened sake, with some sugar added. Ginger is added at times too. I made an ersatz teriyaki sauce out of soy and honey, fired up the grill and cooked some fish—heaven. The solution to my food boredom, the ingredient that would put that Holy Grail of cookery within reach, had been known to me all along.

Mirin isn't that hard to find around here, and you can mix sake and sugar as a mirin substitute, so now I'm going to be much happier grilling fin fish, shrimp, chicken, pork, vegetables, all kinds of stuff. This is the answer I've been looking for. It's the whole package, dinnerwise. I feel like Scarlett O'Hara—as God is my witness, I will never be hungry again if what I want is food that's delicious, low-cal, healthy and nutritious, and cheap, and quick.