寿司料理授業 Sushi Cooking Lessons

Instead Of todays Japanese lesson, we learned how to make 手綱寿司 Tadsuna Zushi and まんじゅう Manjuu.

For that we were lead to another building than usual, which hosted a big room, designed to teach cooking. 素晴らしい Wonderful!



Our group's teacher



Next to our teachers, we had high class Japanese cooks explain to us the recipe.

手綱寿司 Tadsuna Zushi

A little fact about the Japanese language. When a word is combined with another one, like above, the first sound often becomes soft. So the strong S in Sushi becomes the soft Z when combined with Tadsuna or other Sushi types like Maki Zushi.

材料 Ingredients

干し椎茸 dried Shiitake Japanese mushrooms
小松菜 Chinese cabbage
人参 carrot 1本
卵 egg ２ヶ

米 rice
酢 vinegar
醤油 soy sauce
しょうが ginger

作り方

米
Wash and cook some rice together with some 昆布 Konbu seaweed, if you can find some. Then put the rice in a large bowl and mix it with half a cup of vinegar. Stir the rice / vinegar for 2 minutes.

卵
Mix the two eggs with some sugar, some salt. Then make scrambled eggs.

干し椎茸
Put the musrooms in water and add some vegetable stock, sugar and soy sauce. Then when the mushrooms are dry and cold, cut them into stripes.

人参
Cut the carrot in thin stripes and put them into water. Add some sugar, salt vegetable stock and boil it for a short while.

小松菜
Put the Chinese cabbage into hot water and add some salt. Cook it until it gets a nice color then put it into cold water and out again. Then cut it into thin stripes.

Use a long wooden board and put your 巻きす (Makikisu the bamboo board for making Sushi, see picture) on top. Now put some with plastic wrap on top, which will make everything a bit easier.
Now make small lines of the prepared ingredients from left to right: 卵 egg, 人参 carrot, 椎茸 mushrooms , 小松菜 Chinese cabbage then start again with egg until you reached the end.
Now spread another plastic wrap and put some rice in. Warp and form the rice like a tube and make it as long as your line of ingredients on the 巻きす Makikisu. Open the wrap and put the rice on top of the ingredients.
Now wrap the combination with the plastic warp under the ingredients and use the 巻きす Makikisu to make it round and sticky. Be sure to give it a good consistency.
Finally use the sharpest knife you have, best is of course a Japanese 包丁 (kitchen knife), and cut the long tube into mouth fit pieces; then carefully remove the remaining wrap.



line them up



measure the rice tube's length



make the tube the right length



and use the 巻ききす to make it more stiff



Yatta! Your done. You can eat your 手綱寿司 Tadsuna Zushi with some ginger and 醤油 Shouyu soy sauce.

Note:
(Usually the line on the 巻きす board starts with 海老 Ebi Shrimps. So if you want, you can get some Ebi and add it before 卵 egg. And more traditional than vegetable stock is 出汁 Dashi fish stock).



My friend Noppon



Yay for vegetarian Sushi



Juan's Sushi turned out a bit ugly

Ho! but now we want a nice desert, don't we! So let's make some Manjuu!

利休 まんじゅう Rikyuu Manjuu

材料 Ingredients

黒糖 black sugar 100g
上白糖 first class sugar 35g
水飴 starch syrup 20g
水 water 65g
重曹 baking soda 4g
薄力粉 (ふるう) wheat flour (low viscosity) 200g
餡子 Anko sweet bean jam/paste 25g

道具 Tools

steam pot
frying pan

作り方

Prepare a frying pan and fry the black sugar a little. Now add the white sugar, the starch syrup and the water and fry it on a weak flame until you have a black solution.

Prepare a bowl and put the solution and the flour together with the soda inside (using a sieve if you have one) and mix it really well. Put in a tiny bit of water, if it doesn't work out.

Now form around 12 little balls out of the dough. Using flour on your hands makes it easier to form. Then take a ball and make it flat, put a round ball of 餡子 Anko inside and slow and carefully wrap the dough around until it encloses the 餡子 Anko completely.

Now you need a steam cook pot with two stages. Put water in the first stage and make it boil, then put the まんじゅう Manjuu with a tiny piece of paper into the second stage and put the second stage on top of the first stage and close the lid. Now let it steam/cook for 10 minutes and they are done.



Our two Colombian guys starting from the left Giovanni and Juan



Don't add soap!

Yatta! Oishii! (Delicious!)



Our self made dinner: Sushi and Manjuu (mine is the bottom left corner)

Tips:
If you don't have a steam cook pot, don't worry. You don't need to be Mac Gyver to create tools. E.g. try to use a normal pot with some water and put a sieve in it. If it doesn't fit, fix it with paper clips.



a two level steam cooking pot





super kawaii bonus pictures! (the child of one of the Japanese students)

日本語授業 Japanese Lessons

As you might know I am taking Japanese lessons to improve my Japanese. For that I am very lucky to live in Atsugi, since the rich city offers free Japanese lessons almost everyday.

Atsugi is a rich city, because it gets a lot money/rent from the American military base on its territory. Therefore the city has a good 福利厚生 (well fare system) and a lot of things you can do for free or very cheap. Every citizen in the city is aware of the government having much money and therefore exert a certain pressure through expectation to the city government. :)

Anyway I wanted to talk about the Japanese lessons I am attending. While being financed by the city, the teachers themselves are ボランティア (borantia, volunteers).

All of them are therefore really nice, friendly and motivated. You have already seen/read Rumi-sensei in one of my previous posts. She often joins us on occasions and accompanied me to the Megadeth concert in Shibuya (see previous posts). Yet another sensei, Kaneko-sensei, offered to take my friend Manu to Kamakura, while he was here and while I had to work.

Currently I am attending two lessons a week on Wednesday and Thursday. The first class is a little secret, since it does not appear on the city information sheet about Japanese classes. The reason for that is, that both the room and the number of teacher is smaller than on the rest of the lessons. But this secret has been passed on from intern generation to intern generation, so that most lesson taking interns go on that day. But me and others also told friends, intending of to learn the language of this class, so that apart from interns, there are also a lot of other foreigners :)

Since this class is as said a bit smaller, the teachers surprised us last time with a Christmas party. They bought a lot of handicraft resources which allowed us to make Christmas Wreathes together. Of course we also had cookies tea and juice :) It was a wonderful idea, I loved to create my own Christmas Wreath and the kindness of our teachers really touched my heart. Here are some pictures from that day.



our kind teachers, which had the Christmas Wreath handcrafting idea



from left to right: rumi-sensei, Ryan (Texas, USA), Hong Lun (Singapore)



Noppoi from Thailand



and me. I named my wreath: "Santa lost in the woods"

When we proceed one day we are at Thursday's class. It is in a bigger room and a lot more students attend. While Wednesday's class is fit for what the students want to learn, Thursday's class has a fixed program and groups sorted by skill level. Having had a top Japanese education in my University in Germany (Univeristy of Erlangen-Nuernberg), I am in the top class. However even the top class' level is still a little bit easy. Yet we cannot raise the level too much, since nice people like guitar hero Giovanni from Colombia couldn't follow the lesson like that. So the teachers thought of a nice compromise and let the top level group focus on conversation. Like that everybody can talk up to his own knowledge. And expressing oneself in a way that everyone in the group can understand you, is quite a challenging task. Also conversation is my biggest weakness in Japanese up to day :)

While other students and I were preparing for the JLPT, Wednesday class' teachers gave us special JLPT lessons, being able to adapt to students desires, on Thursdays however, having a fixed schedule, they couldn't. So one of Thursday's class teachers, 野村先生 Nomura-sensei offered me free private lessons at her home in the outskirts of Atsugi one day. I was really lucky!

Nomura-sensei is a retired teacher and married to a wonderful husband for a long time. However they are not able to get children, which is why they don't have any. So after retiring, they decided to teach young people for free in their home to get in touch with the young generations and teach them a bit of their knowledge :).
Apart from that Nomura-sensei's husband, Akira-sensei, has breast cancer and cannot leave the house. They are not able to heal the cancer and they can't tell him, how long he has left to live.
This is why Nomura-sensei decided to bring students to their home. It is the only way for Akira-sensei to see other people and have some conversation.
It was a bit hard for me at first, but soon I realized that it is just the best we can do, giving Akira-sensei a nice time, conversing about interesting topics and giving him the chancer to put his knowledge and intelligence to use. And both of them are so incredible warm and friendly! They really touched my heart, every time I visited them. Nomura-senei would usually cook for the three of us, always being careful to not include animals on my behalf =D We would have some tea and cookies, cake, Japanese sweets in the afternoon and thus spend a lot of days studying hard, but also in merry conversation.
I am really grateful that they gave me this wonderful time, and I hope they enjoyed our time as much as I did.
Now that the JLPT is over, we decided to give it a break until January having met once or even twice a week before the test. In January we will continue the lessons, but in exchange I promised to try and teach them a little bit of English. Their English is already very good and they have a huge vocabulary, which is quite impressive for their age! So I will see what I can do :)



Nomura-sensei and Akiko-sensei in fron of Mt. Fuji

Now you know a bit about "out of school" Japanese lessons in Japan, and culture, knowledge and kindness exchange between Japanese people and foreigners =)

mika

P.S. Hong Lun and I decided to traditionally hang our Christmas Wreaths outside our apartment doors. Here's how they look like ^^



Hong Lun's Santa looking around searching his sleigh



and my scared and lost one