Muriel Miura Kaminaka was my lunch buddy, my cookbook partner, my inspiration in matters of common sense, which pretty much boiled down to this: If it doesn’t taste good, it’s not good food.

Muriel died Nov. 7 at her daughter’s home in Baltimore, after a couple of years of failing health. She was 85.

Since then I’ve been hunting for the words to memorialize someone who loomed so large throughout Hawaii’s community of home cooks.

Muriel’s career was spent teaching others to produce tasty, no-nonsense food, and that career was not over at the time of her death. Another cookbook, “Smart Cooking Hawai‘i Style,” is with her publisher, to be released next year, and she was wrapping up a dim sum cookbook to be published after that.

Her daughter, Shari Ling, said when her mother’s health took a turn this summer, she called Mutual Publishing Co. from the hospital: “She was very clear that her upcoming book will be published.”

The books were always more than a collection of recipes, Ling said. “It was about the culture that came with the food. … The recipe was just the start.”

MURIEL’S LIFE of teaching can be viewed in two parts, the first beginning with cooking classes she taught for the Gas Co. in the 1960s. Her “Wiki-Wiki Kau Kau” lunchtime classes evolved into two of the first local cooking shows, “Cook Japanese” and “The New World of Cooking with Muriel,” both in the 1970s.

The second part was her publishing career, which began with “Cook Japanese: Hawaiian Style” in 1974, and continued through more than 20 books that are standards on many a local kitchen shelf.

“Cook Japanese” was self-published in the truest sense of the word. She used a printer who made pamphlets for the Gas Co. (it was his first book project) and did most of the sales and book delivery herself.

“I guess I had more guts than brains in those days,” she once told me.

The little paperback retailed for $3.95, and it sold out several printings. It was followed by several more self-published books that helped cover her daughter’s private-school tuition, then college.

Leap ahead, 32 years after the publication of “Cook Japanese,” Muriel entered a partnership with Mutual Publishing. Beginning in 2006 with “Japanese Cooking Hawai‘i Style,” a slick repackaging of her modest first book, she wrote or edited more than a dozen cookbooks. She also volunteered as editor of benefit cookbooks for the Moiliili Community Center and the Japanese Women’s Society, two organizations close to her heart.

Muriel was born in 1935 in Honolulu to Rose and Minoru Kamada. In 2017’s “A Japanese Kitchen,” she recalled that her mother introduced her to basic Japanese cooking, and her father built on that when she worked beside him at a teahouse he took over in 1945.

She graduated with a degree in home economics from the University of Hawaii, then earned a master’s degree in clothing and textile design from Columbia University in New York. She married Walter Miura in the late 1950s; they had one child, Shari. Muriel worked with her husband on nights and weekends, running his various concession stands, including at the Honolulu Zoo, even after she started work at the Gas Co.

The couple divorced in 1968, and earnings from her early cookbooks became essential to making it as a single mom, Ling said.

She married Yoshio Kaminaka in the early ’80s, the two of them exploring Hawaii’s restaurant scene as she cooked less and they ate out nearly every day. Muriel cared for her husband as his health failed until his death last year, as she had her parents years before.

I WORKED with Muriel on eight cookbooks, beginning with 2007’s “What Hawai‘i Likes to Eat,” and continuing through the six-book series “Hawaii Cooks,” which focused on ethnic cuisines as they have evolved in island kitchens. She insisted that all our recipes be practical for the home cook. She hated anything fussy or unnecessarily complicated.

Our partnership involved lengthy planning sessions over lunch — she was fond of Alan Wong’s Pineapple Room and Mariposa at Neiman Marcus (she liked Ala Moana Center because there was lots of parking). I’d normally show up with notes scratched into a calendar, and she’d show up with formal printed outlines. I’d say we got through those books largely on her force of will.

Her daughter said her mom’s determination was a defining characteristic.

“It’s pretty typical for her: You put your mind to something, you just get it done.”

In the end, she said, that spirit got her from Honolulu through the long flight to Baltimore when it was clear she couldn’t live at home by herself. Ling and her daughter Alissa, a graduate student at Stanford University, accompanied her on what turned out to be a “fun adventure.”

For the three of them to have shared that last journey, she said, “That was really a gift.”

Muriel is survived by a brother, Roy Kamada; children Shari Ling, and Edwin and Wayne Kaminaka; son-in-law Geoffrey Ling; daughter-in-law Laurie-Ann Kaminaka; grandchildren Alissa and Stephen Ling and Kurt Kaminaka, and two great-grandchildren. Services are pending.

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Mutual Publishing Co. is offering discounts on Muriel’s cookbooks, with a portion of proceeds in December going to the Hawaii Foodbank. Order through mutualpublishing.com or call 732-1709.

IN MEMORY

We are collecting personal stories about Muriel Miura’s TV shows, books and charity work, to be published when her next cookbook is released.

If you have a story about how she influenced you, or a personal tale of friendship, email crave@staradvertiser.com or write Crave, Honolulu- Star-Advertiser, 7 Waterfront Plaza, Suite 210, Honolulu, HI 96813.