Traditional Japanese Cooking Class

Savory egg/miso custard

I asked for one of the recipe "booklets".
Each girl had to translate the Japanese instructions
into English.

Hokusei Gakuen Girls High School 

On Saturday, Anna and I went to a Protestant Girls high school for a cooking class.  There are Christian schools (elementary through university) sprinkled throughout Japan.  Many of these schools were started by missionaries over 100 years ago and have become sought-after private schools.  We arrived at 9:30 a.m. with 10 other English-speaking foreigners ready to be taught in English how to cook Japanese foods.  We were each given 1000 yen (about $10.00) to reimburse us for our travel expenses. Anna had already met some of the other foreigners (because there are so few of them in Sapporo).  The English teacher separated us into groups with one foreigner to five 4th grade (high school freshman) girls.  My group included Miyu--who attempted lots of conversation with me, Yuu--who took charge of the cooking, Miki--who tried to duck out of all the pictures, Yumeri--the best English speaker whom they all looked to when they didn't understand me, and Ayaka--who was TINY but seemed to know a lot about cooking.

The Menu

The menu consisted of onigiri (rice ball), miso soup with potatoes and string peas, Chawanmushi (savory egg custard), mackerel with miso and ginger sauce, dango (rice dumpling sweet)--pretty challenging stuff, I'd say!

The girls had to figure out what took the longest to cook (the custard) and start with that.  They worked amazingly well as a team and I think my girls were pretty good cooks.  So we started by mixing miso paste with egg.  Into custard cups we put pieces of shiitake mushroom, a chestnut, boiled fish paste (which looks like a roll of white with pink around it--hard to explain!), a little piece of chicken breast (which the girls meticulously stripped of the little white sinews) and an herb. These were covered with foil and placed in a big steamer (see pot with towel and lid covering) to cook.

Then Juu took over the Mackerel recipe, deboning the piece of fish, cutting up the ginger, and adding the miso paste to the pan as the fish was cooking.  She covered the fish loosely with foil while it cooked.

The saucepan has dango cooking in it.  This is one of my favorite Japanese sweets.  I loved the description of how to make it.  You add water a little at a time to the rice flour and knead it till it has the touch of an earlobe :)  Then you form it into balls and cook it in boiling water, being careful not to let the little balls touch each other.  When the balls rise to the top, you take them out and put them in cold water.

For the miso soup, we had to cut off the little heads and de-gut the dried sardines.  They were added to the soup to flavor it for a couple minutes and then removed. 

Miki carefully adding fresh ginger as artfully on the finished mackerel.

I had tried made some onigiri (rice balls) at Anna's but it was fun to learn some tricks to making them correctly. You start with sticky rice.  They sprinkled some white crystals (flavoring) on the plates.  We wet and salted our hands then formed the rice around a pickled plum.  After we smushed the rice real good, we took 1/4 of the seaweed sheet and wrapped it around.  Ayaka showed us a little trick of taking a couple grains of the sticky rice to use as "glue" to make the seaweed stick to itself.  Awesome!  I love these!  They are great with tuna and mayo inside, also!  

Our finished meal--so oishii! ("delicious")

We sat down and had great conversation together.  Miki had me write down my name so she could ask me to be her friend on Facebook.  I asked the girls how far they lived from their school.  Ayaka and Juu live in the dorm and their home are 3 or more hours away.  Miki travels 2 hours to and from school.  Miyu and Yumeri live within 1 hour of the school.  I asked them what they were going to do for the rest of the day.  Yumeri and Ayaka were going shopping to buy things for Valentine's Day. (On Valentine's day, girls give candy to guys.  Then later in March, there is a holiday in Japan where guys give candy to girls.)  Miyu was going to drama club.  I talked to Miyu about what it was like going to a Christian school.  She said that at school they pray every day, have Bible classes, and chapel.  I asked if she prayed at home--she said, "No".  Anna asked her group and they said there was only one Christian in their class.

This was one of my top favorite experiences in Japan on this trip.  I really loved learning how to cook some of their foods.  Getting the ingredients might be a bit tricky. . . but I just will give it a try.  I also loved the small group interaction with the girls.