Day 81 in Japan - More cooking adventures

Today Sam stole my iPhone and left before I woke up. But I was quite happy about it, because it was for a job interview that he had in Osaka. He needed my phone with it's maps and data to be able to navigate his way to the place where the interview was on. He thinks he went pretty well, and his demonstration lesson went swimmingly (he taught elementary kids the terms "What is this?", "This is a ~."). I got to sleep longer than Sam for the first time in about 2 years, and it was AWESOME.

More 40 people lessons at Akashi kita today - it was a little more difficult to get the kids interested, but they mostly got there after a little while. I was marking some of the kids journals this afternoon, when I came across one from a boy who talked about his favourite food - nikujyaga. He told me that he didn't think I would like it, because it was meat and potatoes. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, KID. So I went to the supermarket after work and bought all of the necessary ingredients to try to make my own nikujyaga, a.k.a. Japanese beef casserole. It ended up being really brilliant, as evidenced in the photos below. It took a while to get all of that shopping and cooking (I had to ask ladies in the shops about ito konnyaku, and which kind of sake I should use, and then I forgot the mirin and so had to go back and get it again), so the only real achievement for the night was getting the food on the table. Nothing too exciting, but it was very satisfying to cook a proper Japanese feed in our Japanese kitchen.

Nikujyaga (肉じゃが) - Japanese meat and 2 veg (and konnyaku)

Food Highlight of the Day: Turns out that my poor little first ear student was TOTALLY wrong - nikujyaga was delicious, and I will definitely be adding this to the cooking roster fairly regularly.