OnigiriGirl: Day 16: Japanese Cooking

Here is another キャラ弁 my host mom made たっくん for lunch:

I really like まっくろくろすけ（makkuro kurosuke）(the black puffball creature), so this is probably my favorite one she's made so far.

Breakfast:
I think that was squid on the bottom left, but I really wasn't sure.

The weather was finally nice today!

Edamame onigiri during our long break:

(Onigiri #12)

Cafeteria udon for lunch:

Today I went to a Japanese cooking class. The school was near the tram stop where we got off for Kyudo after missing our actual stop. We had to wear aprons and bandanas, so most people borrowed them from their host mom's. I used the same apron/bandana that I used for the キャラ弁 class.

Friends from B Class:

We went into a room with a bunch of cooking stations set up and had four HIF students per station with one person from the school helping each group. First, we watched the teacher prepare the dishes we would be making, then we broke up into our groups and made them. One unique thing about Japanese cooking is that you always cut things with a motion that is down and away from you rather than down and towards you, or just straight downwards.

We made donburi and miso soup:

You cooked all of the stuff on top in a little pan with a handle that stuck straight up, then quickly slid everything out of the pan and onto the rice.
The student who was helping group mentioned that my eyes were blue and asked us where we were from.

The ingredients we used, and the dishes we made:

My finished meal:

While we were cooking our donburi and miso, some of the students made us egg custards and some sort of fish cooked with cinnamon. The cinnamon fish was really interesting. It was pretty good, but the flavor combination seemed very strange to me at first.
The egg custard wasn't sweet, and tasted a little like a dutch baby pancake. It had a chestnut at the bottom very similar to the one on the café dessert yesterday. It looked a lot prettier before I stuck my spoon in.

The class got out a little bit early, so I decided to rush to the bus stop to try and catch the next bus (that I originally thought I would miss) rather than waiting an hour for the one I had been planning to take. It turns out another HIF student was taking the same bus, so we ran to the bus stop together and chatted on the way home. She actually lives pretty close to where I do, so we might try to meet up sometime.

After getting off the bus, I walked a few minutes to the Tsutaya Bookstore to get some school supplies. I got two folders, some erasers, a pencil sharpener, some shiny pencil caps, a notebook of paper for practicing kanji, some origami paper, and a blank notebook and some crayons for part of a talent show performance. After a lot of deliberation, I signed up to be part of the talent show and figured I could just take my name off before the deadline if I changed my mind, but the next day several teachers mentioned that they saw I signed up (not many people did) so I couldn't really back out.