Back in the beginning of summer, I taught a cooking class at the local community center. I asked my mom for some of our favorite summer recipes (burgers, tomato basil salad, and cucumber salad). My goal was to give a sort of classic American summer meal like what I would eat growing up. We made up some posters and placed them around town (one of my students said he saw one in the convenience store), and pretty soon the organizer messaged me saying we have a problem: too many people signed up for the class! We ended up splitting the class into two classes, with a total of 20 people attending. Generally these cooking classes are held during the day, but because I work full time I requested an evening class and as a result a lot more people with jobs and even some of my students showed up!
The first class had quite a few members of the English club show up, which was really heartwarming. The English club leader helped translate what I was saying, as did the organizer, since they both speak English, but generally I was doing my best to explain on my own. My Japanese has gotten considerably better in the past year, but it still isn't lecture level by any means. In the US, we have a lot of immigrants who may not speak much English but make fantastic food, and in that moment that was me. My cooking skills may not be taco truck guy level good, but at least I got a good experience of being on the other end of things. Due to my lack of language, it was a lot of "like this,"sound effects, and showing what I was doing or how things should look. People were also entertained by my comments of "ah yes sea of Japan salt" and all my dishes being one bowl dishes because "I don't like washing dishes."
For the second class, some of my students showed up, which was fun (lots of "Juno sensei!" when they walked in). I ended up cooking their burgers for them since the oldest ones were 4th graders and I don't think they should be handling hot oil. The kids got very excited when they found out they could hand me any size of burger and I would cook it, everything from something the size of my hand to something the size of a 1 yen coin. Sure that isn't the size or shaping method I recommended, but you know what it is more fun this way. The little ones were even fine with me helping them put aprons on. I guess because they see me at school every week I'm a pretty comfortable person to have around. Generally I've found many adults in Japan to be a little afraid of foreigners, which I would also expect from children too. One of the goals of the JET program is bringing internationalization to even the most rural corners of Japan. By having foreigners even in small rural schools like mine it exposes the future Japanese population to foreigners at a young age and teaches them we can be a friend too. Clearly this is working.
One interesting note about the above picture is the guy standing by the door isn't actually taking the class, but did stick around to watch me explain the salads. He seemed so excited and proud of my wacky Japanese explanations of how to make these dishes. I suspect he speaks English to some extent. The people in my region seem very proud that their local English teacher can speak Japanese, even if it isn't very good. Apparently I'm the first ALT they have seen write their own address in full Japanese. Honestly I just put effort into learning it because I have to write my address a lot and it's embarrassing to have to look it up every time.
It is often said that food is one of the most important parts of the human experience. If you ask any expat what they miss most about their home country, pretty much every single one will say food. This Tuesday(November 15th) marks the one year anniversary of arriving in my new home and I can definitely feel the desire for home food. For some reason I've been craving sandwiches recently, which seems like a weird thing to crave. Used to eat them as lunches in elementary school as well as pretty often in college too. My mom used to always make me ham and cheese sandwiches, a preference which I carried into my college years. It can be a little difficult and expensive to get these ingredients in Japan (I have to drive over an hour to buy rice bread!), but the comfort is worth it.
Normally I'm not one to share food. Growing up with food allergies meant that my food was the only food I could eat so sharing it meant I couldn't have enough food. It took until college and watching my mostly Asian Bible study group share food with each other to start understanding the joy of sharing food. Now that I live in a foreign country, this feeling is becoming more amplified. Since I live in Asia, I mostly make Asian food (kimchi stew is bomb, I highly recommend making it) as it is hard to source the ingredients needed to make what I made back home, but with a little finessing it is possible. For example, my mom's burger recipe calls for chives but you can't find those here so I substituted Chinese chives (にら, what my neighbor pulled from the side of the road and gave me earlier this year) in the recipe.
My proudest achievement was making pumpkin bars, my childhood favorite and frequent birthday cake request (despite having a spring birthday lol) with nothing but a bowl, toaster oven, and a fork. One of my local friends gave me some squash from his garden and I wanted to share a piece of home for the Halloween lesson at English club. I used this recipe with some modifications (only half batch, couldn't find some spices or baking soda, using a fork and later a whisk for everything instead of a stand mixer, less sugar) and they turned out great. I ended up eating the whole first batch and made a second and third batch so I could give pieces to the English club, coworkers, and my supervisor. Everyone was really impressed and surprised by the flavor, as pumpkin/squash is considered a vegetable here so this sweet spiced dessert with tangy cream cheese frosting was a whole new flavor profile for them. Hopefully in the future I can make more American style dishes to share with those around me to give them a taste of my home...assuming I don't eat everything first XD
Comentarios