Rice Bowl with Three-Coloured Topping

A month ago, when La Fuji Mama announced her Washoku Warriors challenge, I knew immediately it was something I wanted to do. I thought it would get me cooking more (something I love but don't do enough of). Once the gorgeous cookbook arrived, however, I got to thinking about what I had gotten myself into...

I was rather apprehensive about agreeing to cook alongside la Fuji Mama, and my initial reaction upon receiving Elizabeth Andoh's gorgeous cookbook from Amazon didn't do anything to relieve that anxiety. Not wanting to judge the book by its cover or weight, however, I opened it up and thumbed through to find the chosen recipe. As I read through it and made my shopping list I though - "Okay, maybe I can do this!"

Getting the ingredients proved the easy part - finding a free evening between classes and talks and general busy-ness was much more difficult. Happily once I did find the time, however, the actual cooking proved really easy. The hardest thing was doing the math to translate between the ounces called for in the recipe and the grams listed on the package I bought!

Given my penchant for not following recipes, I added more ginger juice to the chicken and also used a special sugar instead of regular white sugar. A friend of a friend of mine is married to a traditional Japanese sweet-maker and I was given a large bag of wasanbon sugar. It comes from sugarcane and is finer than regular white sugar, with a light golden-brown colour. It has a distinctive almost maple-y flavour and I thought it would go nicely with the ginger. I'm not sure it made a huge difference, however, and I'm probably going to save the wasanbon sugar for things where its flavour shines through - like my morning coffee.

All in all this was a delicious and super easy dish.



Since making it the first time for the challenge I've already followed Andoh's suggestion by making up a big batch of the chicken and putting it in the freezer for quick and easy reheat dinners. It is so nice to set my rice cooker before I leave in the morning, and then to come home and throw a packet of the chicken into the fry pan with the veggies to heat up. 10 minutes after walking in the door I've got a good meal on the table for dinner.


(Be sure to check out La Fuji Mama's blog with the round up of all of the warriors and their take on our first battle.)

Oreo yumminess

A few more pictures of Oreo and chocolate yumminess...

I decided that since I love Oreo cookie crumb crusts on pies, I'd dip the chocolates in crumbled cookies before the chocolate coating had hardened...


Mmm mmmm! They turned out even yummier than I had imagined... I think... let me see, must try juuust one more for quality control...


Mmmm... yummy... I think, but more quality control needs to be done...!

This was the last one - I had run out of cookie crumbles and had to be speedy with my improvisation.



That's the last batch for the season though - for the sake of the wasitlines of myself and my friends!

A new sort of education Thursday

After the undergrad Intro to Education course I took on Thursday mornings in spring term of last year, I had a break from education in the fall term. This school year, however, (the Japanese school year starts in April and runs to March, with breaks in both summer and late winter/early spring) I've got another ed class, this time at the grad level, but still on Thursdays.

This term I'm taking a grad course on the history of Japanese education. It doesn't have much bearing on my thesis, but I knew as soon as I read the syllabus that I had to take it because of the assigned text. We are reading the Japanese translation of Andrew Gordon's A Modern History of Japan. Why would I want to read the Japanese translation of an overview of Japanese history written by a well-known American scholar of Japanese history? Well, Gordon was my advisor for my first thesis. He wrote a message and signed my copy of the English original, which I used when I was one of the TAs for the intro-level overview of Japanese history course that he co-taught. The book was written out of his lecture notes for that class, and the year I TAed was the first one after the book had been published and was being used as a text.

It has been a truly odd experience to read the book for a grad-level Japanese course. (I'll admit that most weeks I cheat and read the English original and only glance through the Japanese translation) I'll find myself suddenly remembering discussing a certain section with my students, or listening to Gordon's lecture on a different section, or marking the exam questions, or climbing the rickety little stairway to my discussion section's classroom - overlooking Annenberg Hall , high in the eaves of the historic and stunning Memorial Hall . But really I'm sitting in a windowless classroom in the upper floors of a modern skyscraper in downtown Tokyo.

The class itself has its moments. I've had a number of frustrating weeks, sitting through seemingly endless comments of "wow - for a foreigner he really knows a lot about Japanese history! It's so impressive!!" The fact that this is a typical Japanese response to any knowledge of Japan by a foreigner is annoying. Given that the professor of the course I'm currently taking and the other two students have freely admitted they are education/sociology majors and NOT history majors and thus the only (one-time) Japanese history major in the room is the one with the white skin and big nose, makes it somewhat more annoying. But given that the comments are about a scholar who is both very well-known and extremely highly regarded in the field (both in the US AND in Japan), the condescension is particularly annoying.

In class this evening, however, we got off topic waiting for one student who never actually showed up. We got into discussing and comparing higher education in Japan and the US/Canada. The prof, who's area is Education and who is involved in the teaching certification program at my university, was blunt and direct in his criticism of many Japanese practices. In particular he blasted the Japanese system of double standards for athletes, the lack of expectation that students actually study, the practice of students working part-time jobs til the early hours of the morning, and a host of other issues. My beef is the glaring lack of feedback given to students. They submit papers and write tests and all they get out of it is a grade on their report card. 99% of professors provide absolutely no feedback to students, giving them no idea of WHAT was good or bad about what they did and where/how they could improve. The only time many students get any type of response from professors is on their graduation thesis, in their final year. In addition, the vast majority of undergrads, and some grad students even, have a difficulty in expressing their own opinion or engaging in critical thought. With issues like grade inflation and babying of students, however, the US/Canadian system is far from perfect...

It was a lively and interesting discussion, but I'm still looking forward to next week (the last for this term) and then another term of a new sort of education Thursdays...

Green with...

On Grey's Anatomy, Izzy Stevens goes into a baking frenzy when she is stressed or upset about something. I'm not nearly that bad, but I do find that baking calms me down. I like baking muffins on a regular basis, and love making cookies or other treats to share with friends. Making up a batch of something I know a certain person will like is my way of saying I'm thinking about them. Not having access to an oven (the Japanese concept of "kitchen," especially in small apartments, does not much resemble that which I grew up baking and cooking in), my ability to bake is severely limited.

A number of years ago, when I lived out in the boonies of Chiba and had a fairly big one-room apartment I had a toaster oven. I decided to try using my toaster (which was a oven-type toaster, not one of those ones with two bread slits in the top) to bake cookies, and made up a double batch of chocolate chip cookies. I discovered the cookies had to be quite small to bake properly in the oven, and I could only bake two or three at a time... it ended up taking me about three days straight to bake the darn things, jumping up every 20 minutes to take out three cookies and spoon three more onto the pan... The sad thing was that I took the cookies to work and they were inhaled immediately - disappearing in under 30 minutes!

With all of that in mind, when a good friend of mine finally admitted (after about 20 minutes of beating around the bush) that she and her boyfriend of 2 years were in a very rocky patch and it seemed like they'd be breaking up, I immediately wanted to make her something. I settled first for taking her out for a couple of drinks and listening to her (I'm guessing she hasn't actually told anybody else, so this in itself was important). But when I got home I wanted to make her something, to cheer her up or at least make her feel cared for. I settled on Bakerella's Oreo truffles, and whipped up a batch that very night. They turned out really really really yummy, but it has been years since I made chocolates and I hadn't figured out how to make do with the limited supplies I had, so the end result didn't look all that impressive. They were yummy though, and my friends (including the intended recipient) gobbled them down happily.

I went out with the friend in question again this weekend and she's still in a pretty tough place - things are dragging out and both parties are getting hurt. So after I listened and offered some advice I got to thinking about making another batch of chocolates, this time incorporating one of my friend's favourites, matcha (green tea). I had a few problems with the centres of these ones - trying to balance matcha and chocolate flavours. They looked better than last week's bunch though and disappeared just as quickly.





The only trouble is, after taking in goodies two weeks in a row, one friend innocently asked me today "so what is next week's flavour?"