Today’s Lunch

Today I thought I’d share a couple of foods I have a little trouble eating. Above is a nice soup with pork, sweet potato, radish, tofu, carrot, green onions and burdock. To the left is spinach with bean sprouts and bonito flakes. Also, to the left, however, are two small fish, whose bellies are filled with eggs, and are eaten whole. The taste is pretty strong and lingers in your mouth a bit too long for my liking. One child last year used to say that she loved it when I ate with them on this menu day because she knew she’d get an extra fish. Recently I’ve learned to eat them, but I wouldn’t say enjoy them.

Next is actually a child’s meal with a similar soup, rice, oranges, and natto, arguably the strangest of Japanese foods. You can smell that natto is on the menu before you can read about it, as it has a pungency that fills the room. I can manage the smell better than the texture, which is like slime (I think of Ghostbusters, which is perhaps where the difficulty in eating it lies). Everyone whisks their chopsticks around after picking up some natto to break the strings of goo before they eat it. It’s something I need to be in a really good mood to eat. People talk about it like it’s something that you grow up on, perhaps like Australians and vegemite, and people have turned their noses when I’ve told them about eating black eyed peas and grits, so I concede that everyone is entitled to their own tastes. While I’ve tried natto several times, I usually share generously with the children at my table.
On this day, however, the school director, who lives next door to the school, prepared an alternative lunch for me, a whole fish and bamboo shoots, freshly picked this month, pictured on the left plate. I wish I could have taken a nap with the kids after finishing this one. Oishii=delicious.

This recipe turned out to be successful, as children, by chopstick, ate all of it. Of course, the real fun was in the preparation. The children helped cut all of the vegetables, and consulted the recipe written in English on large chart paper. These kids really made our English lessons fun, always being inquisitive about books and activities during lesson. They were a joy to work with, and I’m glad we could end with sharing food.
Apologies for a hiatus in posting. In Japan, the new school year begins in April, so in the past few weeks I have said goodbye to my graduating 5-year-olds, who I have taught longer than any other group of kids here, and started new classes. I have less than three months with them before I go home, which makes every bit of time more and more precious. There is a ton I’d like to get written down, though, for memory sake.
I don’t think I can name everything we had to eat in our bento’s, but it included (from the top left going clockwise) a salad, orange, shrimp tempura, two types of cooked white fish, sashimi (I had fish and octopus on the right, and squid not pictured), broccoli and tomato, mame and strawberry, more octopus and wasabi, tamagoyaki (cooked egg), rice and an ume boshi (fermented plum).


Orange slices, and a pastry that I learned comes from Okinawa, but our new cook teacher made herself. Oishii (delicious)!
As it snowed for the first time this year, we had this for lunch:
The past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about food in English lesson. This week we made this chart of foods we liked and disliked. I did this last year and found their responses pretty interesting. I think the question is a little difficult to answer for some of them, as if they don’t often think often food in these terms. Often a trend grows out of the children’s responses, as if their answer is more related to the previous person’s response than their own true feeling (I mentioned that pineapple was a yum food for me and then it appeared three times on the chart).
Today’s lunch was nishime, vegetables boiled in water and soy sauce. At the bottom left is lotus root, carrots, french beans, and 















