The main dish for this ALL girls class was our all-time favorite Gyoza, plus a few side dishes of auberges with caramel-like white Miso sauce, Kaki (persimmon) salad with Tofu cream, Miso soup with Enoki mushroom, and Takikomi Gohan instead of our regular rice.

‘Takikomi ‘ is a method of cooking rice with seasonings such as soy sauce, Sake etc. and putting a few kinds of vegetables and chicken.  Sounds complicated?  Well, all you need to do is just chop your ingredients and put them into your rice cooker, put seasonings and turn on the button.

This is a typically popular menu in autumn here in Japan, so we cut out some thinly sliced carrot into a maple leaf shapes to decorate our Takikomi Gohan.

My guest ladies were from everywhere, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Honolulu and Tel Aviv, Wow!

It was a lot of fun and we were a great team in the Tokyo kitchen. The result was a gorgeous home made Japanese lunch of course! Some of my guests even had a second serve of our Takikomi, making me super happy.

Many thanks for coming!

Akiko

 

 

Rugby World Cup was still continuing in Tokyo and here I had a solo gentleman guest from UK.  I was not very familiar with this sport until we had this game as a hosting country and luckily, I was learning a lot about its rules etc. from my guest those days!

Between the games, my guest thought it would be a good experience to try cooking his favorite Japanese dish, Tonkotsu Raman with thick milky broth. This thickness of the soup mainly comes from pork leg bones’ marrow. Maybe unusual in European cooking as beef bones are much more common as  ingredients.

After enjoying Ramen and Gyoza cooking, my foodie guest was off to Kappa Bashi, famous kitchenware street for some more culinary adventure.

I hope my guest enjoyed his Ramen as much as watching Rugby games!

Many thanks for coming!

Akiko