Banquet food and Seaweed

Last week I went to a dinner party/banquet at a local restaurant 竜巳や (Tatsumiya - a family name) with the teachers from Hashi Middle School.  A guest lecturer had visited during the day and so the teachers were taking her out afterward.  They kindly invited me even though I wasn't working at Hashi that day.  So, for the modest price of ¥2500 (about $27 today) I was able to sample a variety of specialty foods from my area (in other words a lot of seafood).

The first course consisted of a dish of seafood (top), a pickled vegetable salad topped with crab meat (left), and a fresh veggie salad with a citrus dressing (bottom right).

The seafood in the first course included (from left to right) - a large shrimp, white tuna sashimi (uncooked), a small piece of regular 真蛸 (madako - octopus), and a piece of a rarer white octopus wrapped in green 若布 (wakame - a type of seaweed).

The second course was all about fried food - to the right of the basket (next to the lemon slice) was a vegetable 春巻き (harumaki - spring roll) sliced diagonally in half, a long piece of tempura (fried) shrimp, and two pieces of fried chicken (behind the shrimp and to the left).

There's not much else to say about the second course except to point out that in general Japanese people eat more fried food than you'd expect.  Then again if someone had asked me a few years ago what I thought people ate in Japan I would have said sushi (as in maki rolls, not real sushi) and rice.  But in reality sushi in Japan is similar to a fancy steak dinner in America - you have it but usually not very often.  I was right about the rice though.

The final course consisted of a bowl of miso soup and a plate of real sushi (with the rice located below the seafood).

Let me try to identify the fish for you (clockwise from the top): the reddish one is 鮪 (maguro - tuna), the white one is probably squid, next is crab meat, then a clump of pickled ginger, the dijon mustard-colored one is 海胆 (uni - sea urchin), at 8 o'clock is sea bass, next looks like shrimp, and in the middle... I have no idea - it was good though!  My favorite was probably the sea urchin though, it has an interesting flavor and a smooth texture.

As for drinks, we all started out with green tea as we were waiting for the food and I also ordered a cola (since it had been a while) and later on a Calpis (a sweet Japanese soft-drink).

For the rest of this post I'd like to show you my adventure cooking some seaweed that the teachers from Michiue Elementary School gave me.  The teachers attempted to give me about four times more than they actually did but I finally ended up with a five foot long wakame plant and some clumps of a kind of brown curly seaweed that I still haven't been able to find the name of.

 Here I'm attempting to show the length of the wakame.

 Here I'm cutting off the wilted pieces of the wakame (to the right) and cutting the rest into strips (upper left).

 After washing the cut seaweed, here it is up close before going into the pot.

 In this picture I'm about to drop it in the boiling water.

 A few seconds later it all turned きれいな緑 "beautiful green" just as the teachers had promised it would!

 

 I sprinkled on some ginger and also garlic powder (the latter is decidedly un-Japanese of me) and it was delicious on top of some rice.

In conclusion, give seaweed a chance!  It's delicious and also very good for you.  I used to be afraid to try new foods (I didn't even try cream cheese until I was in the 6th grade since I thought it looked weird) but I can honestly say that I like most of the new foods I try.

Cat's Cradle and a Nuclear Test

So yeah, there was an earthquake around noon today which in itself is no big deal.  It was a bit different from the usual one in that it was very short and abrupt and you couldn't hear it coming at all.  That's one thing I've noticed about earthquakes in the movies; the characters seem to notice furniture shaking or liquids moving in glasses first when really most of the time you notice the sound first - it's similar to the sound of a truck going by your house.  It's much rarer for things to start shaking without warning and it usually means that the earthquake's epicenter is very close...  Or apparently it could also mean that a nearby country has performed an underground nuclear test...  Yikes, I can't believe that we felt it even though we're so far away from North Korea!  Though luckily the tremor lasted less than a second.  The teachers at my school thought it seemed like a strange earthquake and so they turned on the TV to check the information about it (usually they only turn on the TV to check the magnitude and to see if there are any warnings and whatnot if it's a pretty big or long-lasting one).  On TV we saw a map of North Korea with a red X marking the calculated epicenter and at first I was like, "Wow, an earthquake in North Korea is pretty rare!" - hey, I never said that I was smart - but I saw the story on BBC news a short time after that.

But anyway, what I really wanted to talk about for this post is Cat's Cradle (well I guess technically "string figures") though I always call those kinds of string figures "Cat's Cradle" even if I'm not playing the actual game with someone else.  I've noticed that in Japan Cat's Cradle seems to be played equally amongst girls and boys (while back in the US it's considered more of a girl activity - though technically my dad's the one who taught me how to play - he grew up with three sisters).

The fifth graders at my various elementary schools are wrapping up the "What's this?" chapter in their textbooks so I thought I should give them some practice with that and also teach them the very important phrase, "I don't know."  So I decided to bring in a string and show them some Cat's Cradle patterns; basically I would show them a pattern and say, "What's this in English?" and they would try to answer with, "It's a ~." or "I don't know."

I started with the cup and saucer and at first the students answered, "杯 (sakazuki)" which means "sake cup" but when I asked for the word in English a bunch of them did say "cup" since they learned that word recently.  The cup-and-saucer can be transformed into the Eiffel Tower by holding an end of the string with your teeth.  When I asked the class about that they said, "Tokyo Tower!"  I told them that in the US we call it the Eiffel Tower and also had them guess which country that structure is in.

Next I showed them the witches' broom but none of the students knew how to say "broom" in English so I had them practice, "I don't know!"  In Japanese it's called "箒 (houki)".  When I was little my dad showed me that if you carefully remove your fingers from the bristle-end of the witches' broom you're left with four loops.  Next you tell a friend to "Pick a banana," and when your friend pulls one of the loops the whole thing comes apart so you say, "You ate them all!"  The elementary kids had never heard of this trick so I had a fun time showing it to them and saying the punchline in both English and Japanese, "全部食べましたよ！(zenbu tabemashita yo)." 

Finally I showed the kids the most complicated pattern that I know.  First I did the cat's whiskers (which I found out later is called "蝶 (chou)" or "butterfly" in Japanese).  The kids know the word for cat though so most of them figured out the US-Cat's Cradle equivalent word for it when I put the "whiskers" up to my face.  Next I showed them Jacob's Ladder which many students though was a bridge (they even said it in English).  It's called" 橋 (hashi)" or "bridge" in Japanese.  Though it is also another version of the Tokyo Tower if you hold it vertically and pinch your top index finger and thumb together.  I had to draw a picture of a ladder to explain what it was in English and the Japanese word for "ladder" is "梯 (hashigo)" which makes me think that maybe it was a pattern that came from Japan and got mistranslated in English (I mean, I always thought that it looked more like a bridge than a ladder anyway).

After my classes were over for the day I was sitting in the teacher's room studying some Japanese.  A first grader was sitting near me even though class was in session since she had said earlier that she wasn't feeling well (though I think she just wanted to sit in the warmth for a while).  She seemed a bit bored so I took out my Cat's Cradle string and showed her some moves.  She didn't know how to do any of the patterns so I taught her the cup-and-saucer.  One of the other teachers saw us playing and gave me a real Cat's Cradle string (a seamless one which makes it much easier).  Then the secretary came over and showed us some really awesome moves - it was like she could do the Cat's Cradle game all by herself!  In the end I think the first grader had a fun time though I found out later that I had taught her the non-Japanese way of setting up her string (using her index fingers) - apparently most Japanese people use their middle fingers instead - whoops!
That's all for now, hopefully I'll post again soon!