Momotaro, a website which aims to demystify Japanese cooking and its ingredients, it the new baby of a Japanese woman who has made her family home in Richmond, North Yorkshire.

DON'T know your soy from your sushi? Your mirin from your misu? Japanese food is amazingly healthy and interesting, but it is still a bit of mystery to most of us.

Relax. Help is at hand.

Nana Otsu Galloway is Japanese, married to a Durham lad and living with him and their two children near Richmond. She has launched a new website, Momotaro, that could soon have us all eating Japanese.

"I know that English people are interested in Japanese food but find it difficult to know how to cook it or find easy recipes or the ingredients. I thought I would help them."

Her great idea was to put them both together - more than 50 recipes, ranging from easy peasy to "a little more effort" and including vegetarian, soups and sushi, plus the ingredients and even the specialist cooking equipment for when you really know what you're doing.

Best of all, the website is wonderfully easy to follow and very user friendly, as are all the recipes. "I used my husband as a guinea pig," says Nana, "If he could understand it and follow the instructions, then I knew anyone could."

Nana worked for an airline, a publisher and a travel agency and met husband Graham in Hong Kong in 1988. They lived in Britain in the early 90s and then in Singapore and Malaysia before returning to England five years ago. At home the family eats a mixture of English and Japanese food.

'There is a sizeable Japanese community in the North-East and a food supplier used to make regular deliveries from London. But those stopped, leaving us a bit lost. The Chinese supermarket in Newcastle and a few other shops stock some ingredients, but they are not specialists.

"So last September I tried to fill the gap and started getting supplies up here. I would take this to the Saturday Japanese school at Washington. But then English people started asking me if I could get them Japanese food too, so that's when I thought I would launch the English version of the website, not just an English translation of the Japanese, but really aim it towards the English with the recipes and the step-by-step instructions. Very easy."

The time, she thinks, is right.

"The last time we lived in England, 15 years ago, there was very little exotic food in supermarkets. Not much choice at all. But now it's all changed. You can get amazing stuff and people are so much more adventurous in what they eat and what they cook, but it's still quite hard to find Japanese ingredients, and then, for the English, it is difficult to know just what to do with them."

Recipes on the website include wakame and cucumber salad, rice with sukiyaki beef, braised hijiki seaweed, fish in ginger sauce, temaki sushi. Ingredients include wasabi paste, miso soup, pickled ginger and a wide range of seaweed, noodles and sauces. And the recipes really do look easy to follow.

"It's still early, but so far everyone seems very enthusiastic. English people really seem to like Japanese food and, of course, it's so healthy and quick."

The name Momotaro comes from a Japanese fairy tale, the story of a little boy who was found inside a peach and grew up to be big and strong and fight ogres. There's a statue of him in Okayama, where the best peaches in Japan grow and where there's a festival each year at the time of the peach harvest.

If not quite a fairy tale, then Nana Otsu Galloway's Momotaro website might well turn out to be a modern success story.

* Momotaro , The Japanese Food Network. Tel: 0871-208-1538. www.momotarofoods.co.uk