cooking with the obachans

Thursday night I was at a barbeque with some friends and got an invite from one of the local old ladies to come to a cooking class on Friday. Not being one to turn down free food, I went along.

Cooking with Japanese old ladies certainly is a different beast from cooking with other old ladies I know. I'm used to reading recipes from my grandmother's cookbooks where the instructions can literally be: Add flour until right. Bake.

These ladies are much more precise in their cooking. Especially when if comes to chopping vegetables. I got in trouble for cutting my carrots slightly longer than the prescribed 1.5 centimeters. They were a little too close to 2 centimeters. Seriously.

The other challenge came with the language. My cooking Japanese being pretty crap and little old ladies not being much for bilingualism. But we muddled along, mostly by them demonstrating and me following along. I felt better because there were some Junior High school students there as well who looked just as lost as I did.

Thankfully, my lack of skills didn't hurt the finished product. Delicious pork and beans, spinach and egg salad, and daikon rice. Yum, yum and yum.